How to dance with uncertainty using Futures Thinking in 7 STEPS or less!

This blog article is based on my speech during the Global Foresight Summit 2020 — https://www.globalforesightsummit.com/

Futures Thinking is like learning how to dance to unknown music. Instead of being paralysed, a Futures Mindset gives us the skills of how to find a new rhythm until we are comfortable with a considerable amount of uncertainty and yet capable of making future-oriented decisions. In this blog article, I will talk about how we all need to learn how to dance with change and how a crisis can be excellent training for our brains to look for new opportunities instead of solely focusing on the threat. Once we found our rhythm, we can use maps of the future as additional guidance to find our own pathways into the future. In the end, the future is our dance partner, and it is on us to decide who will lead. So shall we dance?

The recent events of the Corona crisis lead to high uncertainty, leaving most people and businesses react with panic, anxiety and being paralysed only thinking about the current developments and their painful consequent — health-wise and financially. I know that in these times we are all looking towards support and many hope that that the discipline of Strategic Foresight can provide a higher certainty and can anticipate or even predict future events so we can be better prepared. However, there will always appear things that we haven’t thought about, and the current Corona crisis is the perfect example. Although futurists and scientists have been talking about a future pandemic for years, no one could have known for sure how it would spread, or identified all resulting implications that have been unfolding. The main benefits of applying Strategic Foresight lay within training our thinking rather than our predictive skills. Having a Futures Mindset will help us to acknowledge situations of high uncertainty. And instead of running in panic mode, we can re-focus on new opportunities such events provide and how we can proactively shape a positive future within this unique circumstance. In the end, we may be more successful with than without the crisis.

Futures Mindset as a unique way of thinking that enables us to act at any time and in any situation, even in the unpredictable. I describe a Futures Mindset as a unique way of thinking that enables us to act at any time and in any situation, even in the unpredictable. Futures Literacy is the competency of being able to use Foresight methods and concepts while applying Futures Thinking. However, I understand that the notion of Foresight and Futures Thinking can be confusing. Therefore, let me share a short story to make those terms more visual.

How I learned how to dance

I am a former Latin dancer, started ballroom dancing and trained for tournaments when I was about ten years old. As a young child, I always felt the rhythm within me, but still, I did not know how to dance. The hardest part for me was not learning the steps but finding the beat of the music. The only way to learn how to count the beat was to practice. I had to listen to hundreds of different songs until I knew exactly when the beat would drop on the count of one and by now — even over 20 years later, I can count in and find the number one of a beat in every song without the slightest effort. Recently, I’ve returned to dancing and wanted to learn how to dance the bachata and salsa. Due to my former practice, I’ve always been able to dance to this kind of music once my partner was good at leading. I could count the beat, understood the basic steps and the rest was improvisation. I’ve listened to the new beat, found the pattern and learned to adapt to the new moves and rhythm. However, one challenge remained. When social dancing, you don’t know precisely how well your partner is until you feel how he leads, or in the worst case not. So I had fantastic times on the dance floor once my partners knew how to lead, but felt very clumsy once they did not. So I decided even though, I had the rhythm and could move to the beat, I needed to learn the steps and routines. Finally, when a partner did not know how to lead, I was still able to dance with him, remembering the steps, and I could even take over the lead once he was insecure. With all those skills, I was more confident dancing salsa or bachata and was ready to explore and navigate on the dance floor. So what has this all to do with Foresight and the future? Let me explain.

Comparing dancing and futures thinking

Imagine that uncertainty is something like unknown music you’ve haven’t heard or danced to before. Futures Thinking is something that enables you to find the beat of every song, and with training, you will adapt to any rhythm and can move to any music. So without a partner, you’re now looking pretty good on the dance floor, and over time you are more and more comfortable to dance to other unknown music — ergo you can handle uncertainty. Now it’s time to find your dance partner. In this case, your dance partner is the future. So when the future is quite specific and knows how and where to lead, you look fabulous and feel very secure. However, if the future is not a good leader, ergo full of instability and surprises, you will struggle to enjoy the dance entirely. Hence, you would need to know the steps and maybe even able to lead. While Futures Thinking gives you the right skills to move in uncertain times, knowing the next steps and where to go is like applying the proper Foresight methods. They will provide you with structure and enable you to lead by making future-oriented (or in our story partner-oriented) decisions and follow step-by-step actions to move around the dance floor. And once you have adopted a Futures Mindset ultimately, you even know how to react to the slightest signs of change of direction from your dance partner, the future. Finally, it is then on you to decide if you follow the recent events and keep on reaction to the signals your partner, the future, provides or if you choose to lead into a different direction, and steer the future around the dance floor on the pathway you desire.

Let’s break this down step by step

STEP 1 — Handling uncertainty can be compared to trying to dance to unknown music

Imagine you would have to dance to a song that you’ve never heard before, then this song usually created the same insecure feeling as the uncertainty that the future is throwing at us at the moment. Because the future is not written, yet, we cannot predict what will happen, but we can learn how to move within this unknown field while feeling quite comfortable. In times of change, people are searching more and more advice from futurists around the world and hope they can tell them how the future will unfold. And this makes total sense because in school or via our educational system, we have learned about the history and how to classify past events. But no-one told us how to think about the future and how to obtain an overview of emerging developments. To cope with the real VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) world, we all need to gain a certain degree of Futures Literacy by using Futures Thinking, applying Foresight methods and ultimately obtaining a Futures Mindset. So any unusual future event that appears can be described as a new piece of music we’ve never listened or danced to before.

STEP 3 — Your Dance Partner is the Future

There are situations in life, where we notice that we are not alone on the dance floor. And in our example, our partner is the future. We will have certain assumptions about how our dance partner will look, move and act, but in the end; we don’t know for sure until we start dancing together. And as long as our expectation meets reality we feel safe and look fantastic, but if the future, our partner, acts unexpected, we start to tremble. Similar, in real life, all scenarios and theories about the future are based on our assumptions. Too often, we believe that we have to be most accurate when creating scenarios and taking on multiple months-long processes to think about any possible outcome. I want to challenge this in saying that, indeed we need a certain threshold of numerous scenarios, but it the end their outcome doesn’t really matter. The real value lies within the process of creating and discussing the future and stretching our thinking to identify more creative and strategic options. Similar to dancing with as many dance partners as possible in order to create a certain resilience. We will never be able to predict the future in the best possible way or prepare for its worst cases entirely. And hence the approach of trying to get the most accurate results may also bear more risks than actual advantages, especially, when being overconfident about a particular outcome.

As allegedly stated by Mark Twain “It Ain’t What You Don’t Know That Gets You Into Trouble. It’s What You Know for Sure That Just Ain’t So”.

What is the concept of the Future(s)? Read more here: 

STEP 4 — Knowing the dance steps and routines describe the process of using Foresight methods

In the end, it matters how we handle the future, can adapt to its lead and learn to take steps on our own. Using Foresight methods is like learning the new steps of a dance, it is training and rewiring our body movement to our brain, enabling moves we weren’t capable of before. Like dancing steps, Foresight methods can break down the complexity step by step until we can dance a whole routine and understand underlying systems. However, even with knowledge of all the steps (or in this case Foresight methods) if we cannot count to the beat (ergo haven’t broader our thinking and challenged our underlying assumptions), we won’t be able to dance in rhythm. In the best case, we can only dance to the rhythm our dance partner — the future provides. Hence it is crucial to learn how to count the beat and dance to unknown music, before applying the steps. While Futures Thinking gives us an independent and broader mind, helping not to panic, Foresight methods enable us to explore alternative futures and, therefore, train our adaptability. Consequently, I see applying Foresight methods and tools as a learning and thinking experiment for what may come.

STEP 5 — The capability to anticipate when to take over the lead is having a Futures Mindset

Now after dancing with the future for a while, feeling comfortable with the unknown music, it is on us to decide when we will take over the lead, instead of continuing to follow a given future. A Futures Mindset enables us with way more skills than just prepare or adapt to the future. It empowers us with specific skills to anticipate when it is on us to take actions and start leading. It is the understanding that we have the power to change the future and reshape its appearance. It combines the efforts of challenging existing assumptions and biases and exploring different futures to identify the opportunities for positive change. Meaning that we do not need to wait for a specific future to come true in our favour, or to stand still until we can apply the measures, we prepared, but instead establish particular actions to write the future on our own. Further, we are resilient for any future shifts that might appear, as we can adapt our thinking in a way that we can create an utterly new outcome based on the new parameters given to us. Rather than seeing lost opportunities, it’s about creating an agile over a planning mindset that seeks change and avoids coming to a halt.

STEP 6 — Knowing where to lead to is having a preferred image of the future in mind

Once we’ve decided to take over the lead in the dance, we need to know where to go and which decisions to make. To make decisions in the present that empower our vision of a desired future, we need to imagine a positive future worth living. It’s the way of thinking about the future that enables us to remain active in the present and to make decisions based on the future we want instead of reacting to what may come. Too often, we are focusing heavily on how the consequences will lead to destruction or negative future. Though, we rarely imagine how a world would look like where we have solved significant issues. Depending on those future images in our heads, we are making decisions in the present. So if we think of an adverse future all the time, unconsciously we will make decisions that lead into exactly this threatening direction as our actions will follow our imagination. Hence, we need to focus on a positive future and visualise our goals, e.g. winning the dance competition.

STEP 7 — The dance floor is a Futures Map you need to explore and navigate through

Now that we’ve learned how to dance by counting the beat, knowing all the steps and taking the lead, we need to explore the dance floor. We won’t be able to test the ground by looking through a periscope or staring into a crystal ball. Instead, we need to get on the floor, feel the surface and start exploring. Thinking about the future is a journey or a tournament — not a single dance. So let’s smash those crystal balls and create more tangible maps of the future that are not predictive but explorative. Hence, we need to interlink our understanding of Futures Thinking with the results of specific Foresight methods like trends, challenges, impacts and multiple scenarios in a more applicable and tangible way. Let’s create Future Maps that outline future relevant ideas and insights. Such maps can only be created within a community and through systematic conversations of diverse futures thinkers.

What is a Futures Map? — a community and conversation-driven approach to map future impacts and implications by a diverse group of futures thinkers. — Join our community, view our maps and participate in the mapping process: https://community.futures-space.com/