Visioning: Creating Preferred Futures
Intro to Futures, Week 14
Last week I covered how scenarios fit into a standard futures engagement: after scanning for relevant events, issues, and trends, but before creating a preferred future1. That is, once people have been given a taste of how different the future might be from today or from the “official future”, they should be more capable of imagining a future deeply in line with their goals and values. The process of envisioning or co-constructing a preferred future is called visioning, and, to continue a theme, there are myriad ways to walk people through this process.
As a resource for what a canonical visioning-centric exercise looks like, I’m linking to the doctoral dissertation of Wendy Schultz2. Wendy is a pillar in the field, and is particularly well-known for her work on preferred futures. She describes a multi-day process for a group, starting with a cathartic exercise of understanding the problems in the group’s context and getting specific about the elements or issues that are difficult to deal with. Then, partly to cut through potential despair from the prior step, the group talks about its strengths and capabilities, through the lens of problems that have been overcome in the past. Next, the group imagines the best future outcomes they can: what would they really love for the future to hold? This kernel of a vision is then fleshed out significantly via incasting methods3 and then backcasting is used to generate a plausible path to this future. Last, plans are made to use the resources of the group to start the journey toward the preferred future. This process requires a pretty broad and advanced set of facilitation skills, especially in heterogenous groups with divergent interests, difficult personalities, high stakes, etc.
A more postmodern approach to building a preferred future is Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), designed by Sohail Inayatullah4. It serves as a way to deconstruct the present reality into its underlying components. First is the litany layer, where the surface understanding and public description of the issues being considered are listed; the easiest way to think about this is what are the headlines about relevant issues, events, and trends? These can mostly just be collected rather than requiring any analysis. Below this is the systems layer, where the underlying elements and relationships that give rise to the litany above can be explored. It’s fine if different subgroups think about the causal structure differently - if it increases buy-in, distinct systems of causes can be delineated. Third, below the systems come the worldview layer, where participants examine the underlying societal paradigms that undergird the systems5. Last, the myth/metaphor layer undergirds the worldviews with the unconscious and archetypal images that provide the emotional and instinctive foundation for everything built on top of it. In the context of visioning, doing this work allows the group to see how changing elements of the myths, worldviews, or systems would lead to outcomes more aligned with the preferred future.
Other futures methods from the discussion of sensemaking frameworks could also be used as ways to enhance this process. For example, the categories in Verge could be used to facilitate a discussion about what we want definition, relationships, connection, creation, consumption, and destruction to look like in the future, taking the place of other potential forms of incasting. Another option would be to look at the Three Tomorrows6: think about what paradigms are dominant now and will continue to be felt for some time, what the new ideas are that you want the future to reflect, and what changes would be necessary to transition from the former to the latter; this would serve as a structured way to do the backcasting.
Though, of course, in a field as young, practice-focused, and filled with strong characters as foresight, there isn’t a universal flow to the process.
For those following along, I’m especially focusing on the process outline on pages 156-162. Wendy also wrote a wonderful inventory of visioning methods that influenced the rest of this post, but I’m not able to find a public copy to share.
CLA can be used more generally to understand issues in foresight work and construct scenarios, and it deserves more space and consideration than I’m giving it, but here I’m focusing on its application to preferred futures.
For example, classical liberalism, Catholic social teaching, or historical materialism.
From my current vantage point, I think I did a poor job describing these in week 6.