Output / Research Journal
The importance of now!
When working with foresight, one of the key things we have to do is to not forget that foresight has to start somewhere.
Note 5.
The roots of the future are found in the now. And now is an underexplored and somewhat undertheorized part of foresight research overall. The starting point, the set of moments that we begin with, is essential in order to really get to where we need to be. And this is true for a couple of different reasons.
The first reason is that we have to share a diagnosis in order to be making any statements about the future at all. This is the insight of author Richard Rumelt, for example, who says that the most important part of strategic work is to start out by formulating a diagnosis, and he has this idea that this diagnosis is best reached by asking a very simple question. And that question is "what is going on here?"
The second reason the now is really important is that now defines the limits of what we currently know. We know some things to be true and we have some visibility into the future, with a rather higher probability than what we usually have when we talk about the future. So our now might be a week or a month, depending on the issue or domain that we're exploring. Figuring out what this now looks like — and also understanding that this now is not just an instant in time — means that we know where we start and where things start to become the future. This is not a clear line, it's a fuzzy line, but it's an important line to explore. Where does our now become the future?
The third reason the now is important is that now as a concept is constituted in different ways in different organizations. So if you think about the Roman Empire, for example: for them to make a decision about what's happening now, they had to trust couriers and people delivering news over a period of perhaps months or even years in some cases, which meant that the now being constituted in that organization was constantly being constructed from many different information streams. So the now that any organism or organization has access to is always a then. This is so for human beings too, because our nervous systems need a couple of microseconds in order to synthesize all of our senses and then give us a sense of what's happening now.
So the now you experience is actually a then.
All together, what these things mean is that we have to understand the now if we want to do proper foresight work. And the now is interesting also in figuring out how far back it stretches. One of the underestimated techniques in foresight is to ask yourself what kind of visibility forward you have by looking at what kind of visibility you had historically, going up to now. So take artificial intelligence, for example. If I want to project artificial intelligence five years into the future, I should ask myself what I knew about the state of artificial intelligence such as it is today, or what I could reasonably have predicted, if we go back five years in time. And as we do that, we realize that five years ago there was no ChatGPT, LLMs were known only by a very, very few, and the discussions around AI that are currently so at the center of society were nowhere to be found. So for any domain, we should always explore the visibility forward by looking at where we are now and then going equally far back in history and asking what we then knew about what is now our now.
So what we end up with, in a sense, is a renewed understanding and respect for the importance of the now. When we do foresight, we really need to anchor ourselves in a now that's well described, diagnosed and understood, and we also need to figure out how that now is constructed. That now gives us an anchor to understand the visibility that we can reasonably expect to have into the future. All of this seems to suggest that any foresight exercise should start with a discussion of the now.
And sometimes the hardest question of all can be to answer the question: but what happens now?
