pandemic

Step 1.  Assess the Current Situation

What is revealed?

You can start to think about the future right now. Engage in conversations in your community, in your organization, within your family about what they’re seeing around them. Talk to people outside your daily circle and find out what life feels like for them at ground level—get at what we call “ground truth” for lots of different kinds of people. Everyone has a different view of the current situation, and those views fill in the details of a well-imagined story. What did you not know or think about before the crisis? What surprises you? What kinds dilemmas are suddenly laid bare?

Step 2.  Look back to see forward

Discern larger patterns 

Today’s health and economic crises are repeat performances of past crises, albeit in a very different context. We cannot think about the future without understanding these prior crises and the consistent patterns they’ve exhibited. What did we do in the past? What decisions did key players have to make? What can we learn from their successes and errors? History is not a rigid lesson, but it’s a prompt for our imagination. How will we turn an expanded awareness of the past into the ingredients for new stories of the future?

Step 3. Collect signals of the future

Detect novel responses to a novel virus

As important as the large patterns from the past are, the small signals all around us today point to what’s possible in the future. Signals are concrete events, data points, and developments from the present that give us hints of the future. Side by side with signals of disruption are signals of invention. What signals do you see around you today that give you hope or give you pause? What signals make you question commonly held assumptions? What signals suggest the beginning of a larger pattern that’s forming (Step 2)?

Step 4. Lay out a framework for choices

What values will make the future?

The patterns from the past and present and the signals from the future reveal choices that will mark our path. Do we self-isolate in a time of pandemic for collective well-being or do we find ourselves struggling with the choices—or lack of choices—about how much to self-isolate? Do we protect the immediate economy (in an attempt to save jobs, worker savings, and stock values in the short-term), or do we protect human lives (and thereby assure a vital workforce in the long-term)? These kinds of polar choices point to dilemmas that stem from competing values. Can we use these polar values to discover unimagined paths to travel the future.

For example, in the COVID-19 crisis, we might start by listing all the debates about how to respond. We can examine these debates to find a core set of values—polar values—that might guide our choices.

Step 5. Create your own future stories

What’s the path to the future YOU want most or the one you most fear?

Stories have beginnings, middles, and ends. Today, most of us are telling stories about how the COVID-19 pandemic started, how we’re coping with the crazy-hard challenges we face in a stay-home world and how this global catastrophe might end in three months or three years. But we can think of the future as three curves of global change.

Right now we are in the Response phase. Response is usually followed by a Reset—the time when we put the crisis into a larger perspective, when we assign it meaning, and rebuild stability. After reset comes Reinvention.  What do we want to build?  What choices do we need to make?  Who needs to make these choices? What can I, my community, or my organization do to make our future story a reality? And how do these choices shape four archetypal futures of Growth, Constraint, Collapse, and Transformation?