Why Every Leaders is a Futurist
A futurist is someone that thinks, designs and plays in the future. A leader is someone who leads people towards a vision for the future. Therefore, leading is inherently about the future and every leader is a futurist, says Alicia Shao, a senior service designer at Lego, external lecturer at Köln International School of Design, mentor at Amazing Design People List, and most importantly, a Futurist at heart.
Today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions
What we do right now in order to pursue our vision is what shapes the future. As much as we can’t turn a wooden chair back into a tree, we can’t revert the impact our products have on the users’ behavior. Anything we put out there will result in future impact, small and big. And that impact is out there forever.
In her speech at the Product at Heart 2023 conference, Alicia shared a great example which was captured Francesca Cortesi, a fellow Product at Heart-speaker:
Francesca was reminded that nothing we do in our products is consequence-free by the powerful example of the plastic bag. Before its invention, the widespread use of paper bags required cutting down massive amounts of trees while the product wasn’t very portable, reusable and lightweight. The “sack of the future” successfully solved such problems. Nowadays, we know about the problems that plastic causes.
How can we avoid our products becoming problems in the future? Well, let’s start by thinking about it! Even though we’d love a stable, certain, simple and clear view of what’s to come, we won’t be able to predict the future. The future is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Therefore thinking about the future is messy. Instead of trying to predict what can’t be predicted, we should use the future as a playground to think about what’s not possible today but could be possible tomorrow and what can we do today to prepare ourselves for that.
Alicia suggests to use different lenses to look at the future, such as
Storytelling
Speculative Design
System Thinking
Each of these lenses will deliver different perspectives about the future and reveal more insights about what it might hold in store for us.
Storytelling: The future is a social dream, woven together by stories
We tell stories about the future all the time. There are movies and books that tell very concrete stories about the future. Over dinner, we exchange on where we see ourselves in the future. Our stories imagine the future as a set of experiences based on our own subjective imagination.
None of us knows what the future looks like but by sharing stories, all of us can get a feel of what could become possible. Sometimes these stories become reality! Think of Frankenstein who brings people back to life by using electricity - nowadays, we call that a defibrillator. Or think of the replicators in Star Trek which were machines that create (and recycle) things - today, we call that a 3D printer. Stories put the future together, piece by piece. We explore it together through our collective imagination, and by that, the future becomes a social dream, woven together by stories.
The future isn’t a linear projection of what we know
It’s difficult to not think of the future as a linear projection and to break out of that thinking. To make it a little easier, Alicia suggests to divide the future into four different scenarios, categorized by their desirability and whether or not change happens incrementally or radically:
Continuous growth would be incremental and what we all desire
An eventual collapse would be incremental too but undesired
A dystopian survival scenario would be radical and also undesired
A complete transformation would be radical and desired (if it’s positive)
In our day to day work, we usually focus on the continuous growth scenario, but what happens if there are complete transformations and what could that even mean? How can we prepare ourselves for a dystopian survival? Use this 2x2 to have meaningful conversations with your stakeholders and team about the future.
Speculative Design: The future is selfless
From the perspective of speculative design, being a futurist is not about solving problems but rather finding problems. It is not about innovation but provocation. The point of thinking about the future is not to come up with a physical output or product. It rather is to make space for conversations.
And such conversations should not only be centered around humans. “We have to register ourselves outside the constraints of our own human narrative and bring equality to all things that deserve it”, says Alicia. That means that we also consider the things around us such as the trees, the animals and even the plastic bag. Everything, human or un-human, equally deserves a future and therefore the future is selfless.
The future offers us the possibility to dream new dreams. To fix what we are unsatisfied with in the present. Yet, it is difficult to imagine something that we don’t know yet. To make it easier to get into the right mindset, Alicia suggests to begin with a simple question: “What if?”. This kicks us into counterfactual thinking, meaning we think in counter to the facts we already know. What if we turn blue, 24 hours after we lied? What if we measure success not through KPIs? What if our products could talk to us about how they feel? What if we don’t have to ship new features at all? Challenging our “facts” will help us to find new angles for thinking about what’s to come in the future.
System Thinking: The future is change rippling through a system
System thinking is meant to understand things holistically (as a whole) and through synthesis (the relation of its parts). In order to understand the various possible futures, we need to understand the system better. For that, we should not look forward but backwards.
When looking into the future, we can use historical data as input to determine a direction for it. This realization comes from the fact that change such as environmental or economical change follows patterns and these patterns can be anticipated.
Alicia says, that “The future is rooted in the experience of time, the future is rooted in our actions in the present, the future is rooted in the living systems around us, and the future is rooted in the earth.”.
Ask yourself “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?”
Even through the different lenses of storytelling, speculative design and system thinking, it’s difficult to imagine what’s going to change in the next 10 years. So, consider not asking yourself that question. Instead, ask “What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?”. When building products, it makes much more sense to build them based on the things that won’t change rather than the things that would.
The things that won’t change are human needs: to be loved, to be fed and so on. The tools to serve such needs will change but the needs themselves will stay. Instead of asking what our users want (e.g. faster horses), we should understand what they need (e.g. to travel faster).
Thinking about the future is like going to the gym. You want to train the muscle of anticipating the future so that when the time comes, you have the practical skepticism, the mental flexibility and the empathy for it.
Become urgently optimistic
As Product Managers and Leaders, we need urgent optimism. That’s what Alicia puts out as her final takeaway for us. We need to believe that our desired outcome will come true in the future. Because this is how the future is created. It’s created by people like us who start thinking about something new, something different and then putting the actions in place to make that dream a reality.
If we want to live in a better future, we need to have the optimism to be able to dream of it. And how do we become more optimistic? By thinking, playing and learning about the future.
Congrats, you are a futurist!
