Digital and networked technologies have brought dramatically different scaling dynamics to many markets, meaning that it has never been more important for businesses to have a point of view on the future whilst maintaining the agility to be adaptive to changing contexts. The future is rarely predictable (despite what some futurists would have you believe) but it's sensible to have an opinion about direction and to explore potential future scenarios.
One of my favourite ways of thinking about and visualising the future (in order to help make smarter decisions today) is the Futures Cone (sometime called the 'cone of possibilities'). The tool sets out a range of possible futures, categorising them into plausible, probable and preferable. Something like this:
Probable futures: These scenarios take account of current trends and project out what is most likely to happen. The challenge with this of-course is that contexts can change rapidly or dramatically rendering futures extrapolated from known scenarios at a given point in time useless. So the only way to do this well is to continually adjust but even when you do that it's pretty difficult to account for unknown unknowns.
Preferable futures: These may represent what we'd actually like to happen, and so may diverge slightly from probable futures and stretch feasibility a little. The trap here of-course is coming to believe (perhaps through confirmation bias) that preferable futures are probable. The process of 'Backcasting' as it has been called, is where we imagine a preferred future and work back from there to think about what we need to do in the present to make it more likely to happen.
Plausible futures: These focus on what could happen, and are futures that are perhaps possible but less likely.
In business we of-course require different types of thinking to map these possible futures well. Inductive reasoning extrapolates a generalised conclusion from specific instances or observations. That conclusion may be likely, but is not certain so this thinking requires insight, interpretation, connection. Deductive thinking goes the other way, working from general observations and rules to create specific principles or conclusions and so involves logic and sequence. Abductive reasoning often begins with incomplete information but works towards a plausible explanation or scenario and so requires imagination and is perhaps more about asking the right questions. I suspect that it is this imagination which is often valued the least in business.
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
