Almost every day we are exposed to events that are difficult to understand or something seemingly unimaginable becoming reality – conflicts in various parts of the world, the highest documented temperatures in human history, artificial intelligence ‘taking’ people’s jobs, a realignment of global alliances and ideologies, etc. As someone jokingly said – ” If dragons started descending, no one would be surprised “.
As challenging as these events appear, most of today’s realities were yesterday’s forecasts that organizations failed to address or mitigate. What prevents organizations from preparing for change ?
- BIASES – The biases of today limit our views of what is possible in the future. It’s human nature to see current arrangements as inevitable, even preordained. It is hard to imagine, for example, how we could sustain livelihoods in ways other than wage work. If we look at the totality of human experience, however, it is only in the last 100 years that wage work has been the dominant mode of making a living. Yet we find it nearly impossible to imagine a different system – one that could support daily life while also providing purpose, social connections, and well-being.
- THE FORBIDDEN FUTURES PHENOMENON (FFP) – Dealing with change is often difficult because of what we call the forbidden futures phenomenon – the reluctance of people or organizations to seriously consider possibilities they don’t like. It may seem that by articulating a different or an undesirable scenario, we are wishing it into being or endorsing it. But we don’t live in a Harry Potter universe where we can conjure up reality. By avoiding deeply unsettling possibilities, we undermine, rather than strengthen, organizational resilience. How many governments and organizations carefully played out a major pandemic scenario (ie: the Spanish flu in the early 1900s or Covid / the Asian flu a hundred years later) that shut down offices and social activities, upended supply chains, etc. Sadly, experts warned about the high likelihood of such an event years earlier ! Extending on this, why are many organizations still not meaningfully adapting or preparing for these scenarios going forward ? And given the same treatments (ie: masks and people distancing) were used for these world impacting flus, why didn’t greater advances in medicine occur in the century between outbreaks ? From this, it’s easy to see FFP is a major inhibitor of change and progress !
- VESTED INTERESTS IN THE STATUS QUO – Behind the reluctance to confront meaningful change lies another impediment – legacy structures and vested interests in the status quo. It is natural for people to protect their interests, budgets, theories, or departments from obsolescence or restructuring. But it needs to be recognized that doing this frequently blocks change and is an impediment to building robust future-facing strategies, creating new value, and achieving better outcomes.
In times of major change or a paradigm shift in the making, organizations are forced to confront and overcome these three challenges while operating in two distinct modes simultaneously – short-term crisis response and long-term building. Doing so successfully requires mastering two critical skills – improvisation and imagination. Improvisation enables immediate survival by helping organizations adapt quickly to unexpected events or crises, but it’s reactive and short-term. For sustainable success in a post-chaos world and to see the opportunities that arise during periods of volatility – organizations also need imagination to envision creating new opportunities and competencies as well as the foresight to build a different future.
To develop the mindset needed to get past the challenges and effect meaningful change –
- Look to the past for patterns and signals of change – Writer L.P. Hartley once said that “The past is a foreign country – they do things differently there “. That’s why effective futurists and innovators look backward as well as forward since the past provides many clues about the present as well as new opportunities and innovative solutions to problems and new needs. Good look ahead begins with examining history and understanding what decisions have led us to where we are today ? What patterns tend to repeat over time ? What values and policies shaped people’s lives ? What will have value ? What’s needed to make things better ? As Dr. Maisha Winnof Stanford’s Futuring for Equity Lab says, ” I think about history as an opportunity to learn about the actions and activities of people that we may want to tap into ” for insights on how to look at situations, how to think about them, and do what’s needed to improve things. Further, analyses of the past, along with scanning for signals of the future, expand the repertoire of possibilities we can imagine. With expanded vision and better look ahead, we can build more robust long-term strategies and more agile short-term event responses – to benefit from change, versus being a victim of it.
- Identify, then challenge your assumptions – One of our favourite strategic tools for challenging core assumptions comes from the Institute for the Future colleague Jane McGonigal’s book, Imaginable: How to Create a Hopeful Future. The process is simple – Take any fact about the present, imagine its opposite 10 years from now, then tell a story about how we got there. For example, today’s non-profit organizations are funded primarily by philanthropies. Imagine a future in which philanthropies are funded by non-profit organizations, then work backwards to create a plausible narrative about how we arrived at that world. Then, do this at least 10 more times. The more you practice, the easier it will get to move beyond forbidden futures and imagine different paths to new possibilities – and come to realize that some of those possibilities are not as impossible as they seem !
- Overcome today’s turf battles through a shared vision of the future – Improvisation and imagination take courage, and courage requires knowledge and trust. We often say that the future can make tough conversations easier because it brings diverse stakeholders into a conversation of goals, imagination and prioritization. More often than we’d like to admit, true organizational change is hampered by commitments to legacy infrastructure and an unwillingness to let go of the status quo. Structured, facilitated foresight processes take a group – which may include members who can’t agree on current priorities – on a collective journey of envisioning possible futures, then aligning on the one they want to build together. Done well, they create a permission structure for talking about the values behind difficult strategic choices. Start with a shared future and use it to evaluate your opportunities, values, strategies, and actions.
- Engender agency – Foresight works best when it includes the whole team. The best look ahead is built from the ground up, drawing from observations, experiences, aspirations, and insights of people across the organization and other stakeholders. ‘ Signals swarms ‘ invite many people to contribute their perspectives and expert views on events and key changes happening around them. Further, ethnographic foresight brings in voices from different perspectives and the front lines of the future today – to be better at handling difficult customers, addressing new needs and opportunities, people ‘ vibecoding ‘ genAI tools to manage their health, teenagers crafting their identities on social media platforms, etc. This participatory approach helps people focus on doing what’s needed to improve outcomes and mitigates bias, engages those resistant to change and creates a welcome space to voice forbidden futures. Further, it helps develop better look ahead ability and to better position the organization to respond with agility and effectiveness during challenging times.
In closing
With different terms to describe what we are living through – a paradigm shift / political realignment / digital transformation / an apocalypse / etc. – we are witnessing profound change in society and business. In these challenging times, we need to take the long view to improve things as a part of strategy to move forward – or doom ourselves to endless improvised responses to a world that seems out of our control. Put simply, we need to marry improvisation and imagination to be better at innovation and transformation. This is essential to getting past the uncertainties with enlightened thinking as well as to leverage shared objectives and values – with better insights, being good at anticipating change and adapting, making the reasonable accommodations, etc. – to be more strategic in enabling people to realize their potential and achieve better outcomes for organizations.
June 2, 2026 By The Institute of the Future / CAIL CAIL Innovation commentary
info@cail.com www.cail.com 905-940-9000