An Introduction to Futures

Actually, everyone does futures.

We look at the sky and wonder whether it might rain while we're out. If we're able to, we think about the illnesses we might get one day and weigh up insurance plans. We put money in long-term funds for a retirement that's still decades away. We're already imagining possible futures and turning over what-ifs.

The field of futures is, at heart, an attempt to be a little more systematic about something we already do.

Back to the weather

Take the umbrella question. There's a focal question: what will the weather be like in the next few hours? There's an immediate sense of scope — a few hours, the route you'll walk. There's a recognition that the weather isn't something you control, only something you adapt to and mitigate. And there's a quiet sense of scenarios: in one version of the next hour it's sunny and life carries on; in another it rains and you're caught; in a third it rains but you brought an umbrella.

Then you assess the costs and benefits — bring the umbrella, the raincoat, or risk it.

Most futures work is, at its core, not so far from this. The questions are larger and the time horizons longer; the assumptions being tested are weightier. "It will always be sunny" is, in its own way, a cousin of "people will always be economically rational" or "energy will always be cheap." But the shape of the thinking is similar: notice what you're assuming, imagine the worlds in which that assumption bends or breaks, and decide what to do now in light of those possibilities.

The basic move stays simple. What gets hard is the uncertainty that piles up once you stretch the question across more domains and longer timeframes. No one knows how the future will unfold, and that's the point — exploring a few possible versions of it (sunny, rainy, something in between, something stranger) is a way of making better decisions in the present, not a way of being right about what's coming.

The broad shape of a futures process

Most exercises follow a similar arc. You start from where you are, then open the question outward — gathering trends, signals, things on the edge of view. You deepen what you've found, looking at causes and underlying patterns. Then you narrow: filtering, structuring, and distilling all of it down into a handful of possible worlds worth taking seriously.

From there it's up to whoever's sponsoring the work — review strategies against the different worlds, flesh the worlds out further through design, or take what you've learned somewhere else entirely.

If you want to see the longer version with the tools laid out in detail — five whys, causal layered analysis, STEEP scans, futures wheels, scenarios, backcasting and so on — that's what The Double Hexagon is for. This page is meant as the gentle on-ramp.

A few places to start

If you're an individual, you can use futures to think about:

• Your own career trajectory — the assumptions baked into where you think it's headed
• The possible trajectories of your children, or people you care for
• Decisions with long tails — where to live, what to learn, what to commit to

If you have a hand in planning for an organisation, you can sit with questions like:

• What forces are causing things to change around us?
• What do we know, and what do we only think we know?
• What possible worlds do we desire, and which do we dread?
• What's being taken for granted?

The same set of questions works for a community, or for a cause you care about. You don't need a process or a workshop to begin — you can sit with one of them on a walk, or over coffee with someone who'll push back.