FOCUS ON THE FUTURE

Creating better futures is one of the most exciting, important, challenging, and fraught of all human endeavours.

While the past we can't change and the present is often a blur, the future we can shape and influence. By thinking ahead, we can play out the consequences of our actions, and thus improve the quality of our decisions in the present.

But foresight isn't just an individual activity. A longer view expands our sense of "I" into "we".
The future is thus a powerful framework for engendering shared action and understanding.
By seeing how the future is linked to the present and past, we see how our choices and actions are connected to a much broader and dynamic context. Longer term investments -- in ourselves, our organizations, our institutions, and our people and planet -- start looking like important priorities amongst the many competing imperatives in the present; and conflicting interests in the short term get reframed as opportunities for cooperation. Take economics and the environment, which are often pitted against each other.

From a bigger perspective they are highly interdependent; for without a sustainable and stable ecological infrastructure, economic growth is simply not possible. Many civilizations have collapsed for failing to make this connection. So it's the learning challenge of this generation to make sure we don't repeat this pattern.

A longer view also creates hope, which is a very powerful ally of change and action. Hope energizes and empowers. Hope makes people behave differently, more responsibly, and more strategically because they now see a stake in their future, the future of their children and friends, and the future of the places in which they live and work. With hope, we do better things as a result. And we feel better about our actions, because we feel like active participants in a much bigger story that makes meaning out of our lives.

So the future is a high leverage place to focus. For good foresight provides a grounded sense of hope and greater confidence and conviction in the choices we make today. The question is can we do this effectively and wisely? With this great potential comes great risk and responsibility, for along with the many visionaries who have improved our lives with their innovations and ideas, the most powerful future-makers in human history have also created much destruction and despair in the name of their grand projects. Indeed, almost every culture has myths and sayings warning us of the dilemmas of foresight and messing with the future, whether it be Homer's Cassandra, Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss, or the Chinese saying, "he who lives by the crystal ball also dies of broken shards of glass."