I remember when Palm-Pilots were cool. (My older sister got one. She was cool, too.)
It was the early 2000’s. I couldn’t possibly imagine what could be cooler than a Palm-Pilot. (I mean… email. In. Your. Palm!)
It’s 2016. My husband just sent me an iMessage® and it rang on my iPhone®, MacBook® and iPad®. Any one of those devices has approximately 5 million – give or take – more things than a Palm could do.
Back in the Palm-Pilot days I couldn’t even begin to visualize what today would look like. Yet, when I look back now I see how far technology has come. This phenomenon is called the end of history illusion and it applies not only to technology.
Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues write about the end of history illusion:
"Time is a powerful force that transforms people’s preferences, reshapes their values, and alters their personalities, and we suspect that people generally underestimate the magnitude of those changes."(Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson 2013)
What would happen if we as individuals and as leaders of organizations were able to envision a future of such magnitude? Futures Thinking is here to help.
Futures Thinking is used to...
"discover, examine, evaluate and propose possible, probable, and preferable futures. The aim is to orient people’s mental models to consider different possible futures… The futures thinking also offers the possibility to actively shape the future.”(Ojasalo, Koskelo, and Nousiainen 2015)
We are talking about taking traditional strategic planning to a whole new level.
Over the course of the next semester I will be exploring how to use Futures Thinking to shape my own life and the future of the businesses I work with through my design thinking practice. In addition, I’ll be working with a team to identify trends around the topic of design and creative culture. Our first step is to collect signals about the topic. Follow our progress on our ‘Design & Creative Culture Signals’ Pinterest® board.
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Sources:
Ojasalo, Katri, Minna Koskelo, and Anu K. Nousiainen. 2015. “Foresight and Service Design Boosting Dynamic Capabilities in Service Innovation.” In The Handbook of Service Innovation, 193–212. Springer. http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4471-6590-3_10.
Quoidbach, Jordi, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Timothy D. Wilson. 2013. “The End of History Illusion.” Science 339 (6115): 96–98.