Sensemaking Frameworks
Intro to Futures, Week 6
This week was all about comparing different frameworks used in futures studies to make sense of the present in a way that allows us to say more interesting things about possible futures, or reduce the likelihood that we’re totally surprised by what happens. The main obstacle to this is the fundamental complexity of the earth and the societies we build on top of it. It’s easy to overlook signals looking forward, which then seem painfully obvious in retrospect1. How can we minimize how much of the world we forget to think about? This is the main purpose of these frameworks.
A natural solution to this problem is to divide the world into categories that approach being mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (MECE), or what I would call a partition in the strict mathematical sense of the word. Because the world is multi-dimensional, there are several natural ways to approach this problem, and most of the frameworks below fit pretty well into one of these partition strategies.
Conceptual
The most straightforward partition is to break up the world into a descriptive taxonomy: for example, look at the political, economic, social, and technological issues and trends relevant to the problem at hand - these are the P, E, S, and T of PEST, and to a large extent, enumerating the entities in each category just is the exercise. Other categories can be added to more finely slice up the problem space; the only rule is that it still has to spell something: add environmental factors for STEEP, throw in legal and ethical for STEEPLE, or even throw in industry, resources, demographics, energy, and religion for STIRDEEPER. If, for the problem space you’re dealing with, you can’t distinguish between religious and social concerns, or between energy, industry, and the economy, then it’s a sign you should stick to the simpler acronym as a matter of parsimony. This approach is based on categories that will make instant sense to most people, and so it has the advantage of being extremely approachable as a group exercise.
Significance
A more complicated approach, focusing specifically on how we as humans engage with and assign meaning to pieces of the world, has the benefit not only of centering the conversation around us as agents able to affect which futures become more likely, but also underscoring the extent to which the present is affected by our images of and thoughts about the future. One approach in this vein is Verge: calling out the relevant ways we define our world, relate to each other, connect people/places/things, create goods and services, acquire and use the things we create, and destroy and waste what we have. Within each of these categories, we can think about what’s dominant today and what may be dominant in the future.
Emotional/Agentic
Inayatullah’s six basic futures questions focus heavily on the role as part of the feedback loop that creates the future, partitioning possible futures by how we feel about them and what we can do about them: asking us what future we predict and why, what we’re afraid of and if there’s anything we can do about it, what are the hidden assumptions in our predictions, what alternative futures might emerge if assumptions change, what future you prefer, and what you can do to move toward it.
Temporal
The Three Horizons method carves up the future across time, looking at the way things are being done now, the early changes that look likely to disrupt the current way of doing things, and the faint signals that suggest something even more fundamentally different beyond that. It’s basically the result of asking “and then what?”, thinking hard about the answers, and then asking it again.
Surprise
The Menagerie of Postnormal Potentialities organizes potential futures by categorizing the extent to which they surprise us2. Black swans are reasonably well known due to Nassim Taleb’s book, though the definition is blurry in common parlance: much like Europeans assumed all swans were white until they encountered black swans in Australia in the seventeenth century3, some possibilities are considered to be extreme outliers (perhaps even impossible), have an extreme impact, and be predictable in retrospect. Continuing the animal theme, many things called “black swans” today are better described as black elephants4: something with massive impact that is likely to occur, experts are publicizing the likelihood of the event, and yet people either dismiss the possibility or just refuse to prepare for it (and often act as though they weren’t “properly” warned): covid5 and climate-change-induced natural disasters are good examples of this. To round it out, they introduce black jellyfish, high-impact events driven by normal systems going “weird” when stable or slow-changing systems are changed by introducing positive feedback loops, causing chaotic runaway change that can quickly change systems in unexpected ways. Think of the network effect of adoption rapidly changing the world to making Twitter the main source for many news outlets - the more people were on it, the more content there was and the more people were reading it, so not only did it start to seem important but it also started rewarding the kind of content that drives engagement (outrage etc).
Ignorance
Finally, I’ll mention another approach from the Postnormal Futures world, related to the Menagerie but worth discussing separately: the Three Tomorrows. This is superficially similar to Three Horizons, but even though the categories are presented sequentially it’s more about the epistemic differences between them than about the temporal component. The first tomorrow is the “extended present”, where we experience the (often waning) influence of key trends/institutions/ideas from today. The uncertainty associated with this is the “plain ignorance” of knowing how fast and in what direction these influences will change, which we can reasonably estimate with some confidence and reduce the uncertainty by careful measurement. The second tomorrow consists of “familiar futures”, images we’ve seen in science fiction or speculative articles or Elon Musk tweets, sometimes also called “used futures” to underscore that these images didn’t arise organically but come from a particular set of institutions with specific incentives6. The ignorance we face here is termed “vincible” because even though there’s no study that can teach us more about it, we can identify what to look for in the future and what questions to ask to identify which path is dominating. The third tomorrow is the world of the “unthought futures”, where brand new things happen that don’t fit in our conceptual boxes. These carry “Invincible Ignorance”, because by their very definition we can’t prepare for their arrival. We can, however, increase our “future resilience” by thinking hard about the paradigms we rely on, what assumptions they rely on, and what we would do if those assumptions could no longer be relied on.
Because each of these frameworks acts as a different partition over the present/future, one way to go deeper is to combine frameworks to stimulate even more thought and force more ideas to be considered for the issue of interest. The downside is that crossing partitions increases the work multiplicatively, so trying to do STIRDEEPER x Six Questions creates 60 buckets to fill in.
A great example is that financial instruments based on bundles of subprime mortgages in 2008 were priced assuming the risk of default for each mortgage was independent of the other mortgages in the bundle, instead of realizing that a lack of confidence in bank solvency could simultaneously cause a huge proportion to default all at once, or realizing that the prior realization would create precisely such a crisis of confidence.
It’s also worth mentioning that the Postnormal Futures work differs from the other approaches in that it goes beyond providing a descriptive model of futures and moves into critique and advocacy.
Per Wikipedia, they didn’t just believe there were no black swans - “black swan” was a common expression to denote something that didn’t and presumably couldn’t exist.
As in, “the elephant in the room”.
WHO, FEMA, Bill Gates, etc, tried to warn anyone who would listen for years, especially after we narrowly avoided disaster by containing SARS.
An interesting side note: not only are these futures manufactured in the present by human activity, they also have their own gravity pulling the future toward them: the aesthetic of 2001 inspires Steve Jobs to create devices such that the world looks more like 2001, writ large.