“Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Future” by Nick Foster is an excellent book. As a fellow futurist, I made copious notes. The brass tacks of the book is that the way we see the future is determined by our framing. And our framing lack nuance, detail and colour. Focus on the mundane.
We need to take the future seriously
The future isn’t a noun, it’s a verb. The future isn’t a destination or a single figure on a chart. It’s a process. The future isn’t a single thing, it’s accretive. Because we desperately need a longer-term, future-oriented mindset, one packed with imagination, creativity, responsibility, and considerations. Futures work is almost universally seen as frivolous, superficial, and flimsy. How can it be that we’re surrounded by such momentous change, such technological evolution, such societal upheaval, and such existential complexity, yet our collective ability to generate rational, balanced, detailed ideas about where we’re headed remains so utterly underpowered and underprioritised? We need to take the future more seriously.
Think about it
Close your eyes for a moment and think about the future. When you peer into that vast, uncharted expanse of the future, what do you see? Where did those ideas, questions, and images come from? How do you think they got into your brain?
Framing the future
It is in the interest of government and industry to control the framing of the future. The big technology companies, in 2022, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google collectively spent $177 billion – the equivalent of the GDP of Kuwait – on research and development. Much of this kind of work is hidden from view, but a significant amount finds its way into the public sphere, either as declarative visions of the future or more often embedded within new products, corporate strategies, or acquisitions.
Topics in the book
The book covers different ways to frame the future. Using data, statistics, think tanks, scenario planning, strategic foresight, consultants, predictions (Nostradamus), perception of time (many Latin American, African, and Middle Eastern cultures view time differently), language and use of words, design thinking, full impact analysis, short-termism of our politicians and science fiction.
Science fiction
Science fiction is a very powerful frame in that context. So much so that since fiction is now influencing science and R and D. Think Blade Runner, Star Trek, Total Recall, Neuromancer, HAL 9000, Black Mirror, Asimov, and my favourite science fiction author, Neal Asher.
Four types of futurists
The book describes 4 archetypes of futurists. Could, should, might and do not:
- Could futurism is, above all things, overwhelmingly technocratic. Could futurism focusses squarely on the positive, transformative nature of our emerging world?
- Should futurism clearly defines a future state of the world and then nudge us towards it. What should we do in the future? Should we clean up our oceans? Free our seas from rotting plastic, poisonous chemicals, and industrial waste? Should futurism is immensely powerful and resilient, and is by far the most self-assured form of futurism we have.
- The might futurists are in between could and should. We cannot know exactly what the future will be, so it’s essential to consider multiple possible outcomes. It is impossible to forecast the future, and it is foolish to try to do so. Might futurism engages with probability.
- Don’t futurists. There’s a long and distinguished history of looking to the future and exploring negative outcomes, disaster scenarios, or uncomfortable side effects, and of describing the future through subtraction rather than addition. This is where the don’t futurists play.
The problem with most futurologists is that they are too absolute in their predictions and perspectives. All are dogmatic in their approach. What most never take into account is the messiness of human life. The mundane. Not the whoohoo!
Our world is ordinary
Our world is filled with – indeed is dominated by – ordinary, everyday, middle-of-the-road things. Toyota’s revenue is four times as large as Ferrari’s, Kimberly-Clark has become a more valuable company through selling diapers and toilet paper than Prada has by selling high-end fashion, and in 2024, the global market for socks reached over $49 billion – more than double the value of the VR market.
Things never exist in isolation
Your VR headset plugs into a games console that is two years old. It sits on a table that you inherited from your sister when she left for university. The table leg was fixed a couple of years ago with screws you found in the garage. It stands on a rug you bought from Ikea in 2004, in a house that was built in 1948. It is connected to a Wi-Fi router in the upstairs bedroom, that connects via ethernet to the telecommunications network.
Everything connects
This immense web of interconnected systems and artefacts – and we should probably stop here – but all contemporary life works in this way. Seemingly simple devices, services, or ideas are infinitely tethered to one another in vast, interdependent networks whose edges are almost impossible to define. In a fleeting moment of interaction, complex arrangements of systems are invoked, building off one another in a tightly interlinked series of relationships, all working at different speeds, with different motivations, hierarchies, and priorities. We’re all surrounded by countless layers of paint, plaster, brick, metal, plastic, and wood held together in something we call ‘the present’, which meshes with third-party systems, which is managed by layers, government oversight and legal policies, and is threaded through a complex web of societal, cultural, and behavioural norms.
Pitch perfect
There’s an attitudinal problem at the heart of innovation and future storytelling that fails to acknowledge the complexities in all human behaviour and the systems within which we operate – or, worse still, a culture that actively tries to conceal them. For example, in product pitches, everything works perfectly. It’s best-case scenarios all round. Logins are seamless, friends pick up the call, the products are in stock, and everything unfurls like a finely choreographed ballet.
The future is a little bit broken
The future is a little bit broken. Breakage, decay, misuse, errors, workarounds, consequences, and implications are an important part of everyday life. Credit cards expire, the Wi-Fi in the kitchen isn’t strong enough to stream the movie, your husband used the iPad yesterday and closed all the tabs, there’s tape holding the bathroom door together, the dog keeps scratching the wooden floor, the takeout place messed up your order, and damn it, the charger is in your other bag.
We are not good at it
The truth is, you’re not very good at thinking about the future. None of us is, really. It’s not something we’ve found a way to prioritise, nor have we trained ourselves to do effectively. However, when visualising the future, we need to acknowledge that the stories we’re telling are happening to the characters as normal, ordinary, everyday occurrences. Future storytelling succeeds when new ideas feel normalised, embedded, and enmeshed.
The future mundane
Daily life can be all-consuming. Everything starts again on Monday. Before we know it, it’s winter again. Before we know it, we’re turning fifty. Before we know it, we’re retired, and the cycle of life moves on. The mundane is ordinary, everyday, boring, humdrum, middling, and basic. It’s banal, prosaic, commonplace, grounded, and bland, but here’s where it finds its power, especially when we are thinking about the future. Unremarkable, ordinary, and normal, but as much as we’d like to think otherwise, it’s where the overwhelming majority of us will live. Whenever new future narratives come along, rip them from their Silicon Valley stages, strategic foresight decks, terrifying TV shows, or political launch parties and imagine them in this kind of context.
Next time you think about the future
- When thinking about the future, think less about what you saw in a sci-fi movie and more about where you buy your chewing gum.
- Get into the weeds. Get beyond the headlines, flashy images, jaw-dropping statistics, and provocative think pieces, and truly engage with the meat of the issue.
- Add details. The more detail we add, the more time we spend contemplating the full shape of our stories and rendering the future in excruciating, exacting, precise, and exhausting detail, the more it will feel relevant and relatable to those viewing it.
- Think about compatibility, usability, security, disposal, packaging, legislation, charging, assembly, disassembly, ethics, safety, marketing, advertising, branding, retailing, pricing, distribution, competition, standards, legal requirements, sourcing, testing, and a million other annoying yet essential details.
- When futures work crops up in your life, resist the urge to swoon, nod along, or recoil in horror. Instead, have a think about what it might actually feel like, and how your family, friends, colleagues, and neighbours might experience it.
- Find ways to get lost in thought about where things might be heading, what you’d like to see, and what it might feel like. Start to build a more rounded idea of the future. Really think about it. Concentrate on developing your own personal perspectives rather than photocopies of something you’ve been sold, told, or encouraged to believe.
- Train yourself to see the future as an evolution of the present rather than somewhere far off in the distance, and try to figure out how we might get there.
- When someone is presenting their idea of the future, try asking ‘And then what?’ or ‘Why?’ over and over again, just to see how deep the thinking goes.
Let’s raise the quality of the stories we tell ourselves about the future, and perhaps then we might improve the things we leave behind for those who will follow.
PS Also read “Primal thinking”.
