Contributed By: Julian Bleecker
Published On: Sep 22, 2024, 24:23:24 PDT
We’ve all seen those sleek corporate videos showing a pristine future where everything works perfectly. You know the ones - gleaming surfaces, holographic interfaces, and not a charging cable in sight. But here’s the thing: the real future isn’t going to arrive in a perfectly packaged box with a chrome finish. It’s going to show up piece by piece, mixing with our old furniture and probably requiring yet another software update.
So how do we actually design for this messy, realistic future? Having spent 20+ years working with organizations on this challenge, I’ve found that it requires a fundamental shift in how we think about and approach future planning. These are things we offer to train you and your team. Let me share a view into what I have found that actually works in practice. These are approaches, techniques, and sensibilities I’ve used in my own work; it’s what I used to start my own successful company OMATA — in fact, it’s the approach I used to create the OMATA One, a product that was a finalist in the 2017 Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards.
The first step is to stop thinking about the future as something that you read about in some science fiction film, and certainly not the future you see in a ‘vision of the future’ video. Start thinking about it as something that happens in your kitchen. Ask youself ”what’s the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning?” Real innovation is about understanding how new capabilities might fit into people’s actual lives. It’s about imagining the contingent multi-valent aspects of the future. It’s about the charging cables, the software updates, the psychic contingencies and challenges; the positive aspects and the speed bumps along the way to your job.
For organizations, this means changing how they approach future planning. Instead of isolating “innovation” in R&D labs or outsourcing it to consulting firms, companies need to embed futures thinking into their everyday operations. This could be as simple as having regular team discussions about how current trends might evolve, or as structured as creating “future artifacts” - physical objects that help people experience potential futures in tangible ways. Learning to do this through routine exercises allows organizations to build a future-oriented sensibility that permeates all levels of the organization. Our 1/2 day workshops are a great way to start this process, as are the Design Fiction Masterclasses and Design Fiction Studio courses we offer.
When it comes to actual implementation, the key is to focus on transition states rather than end states. How do we get from here to there? What are the steps along the way? For product designers, this might mean creating prototypes that deliberately include imperfections and limitations. For policy makers, it could involve developing “day in the life” scenarios that show how new regulations would affect ordinary citizens.
Consider how successful innovations actually spread. They rarely arrive as perfect, fully-formed solutions. Instead, they evolve through multiple iterations, each one building on what came before. The smartphone didn’t emerge fully-formed - it evolved from the PDA, which evolved from the electronic organizer, which evolved from the paper calendar.
One of the most important practical lessons is the need to plan for multiple futures rather than trying to predict a single outcome. Organizations need to develop what I call “adaptive strategies” - approaches that can flex and evolve as circumstances change.
This might mean representing multiple perspectives on the future. Holding multiple possible outcomes in your head at the same time can be hard. It can be disorienting and counterintuitive. But it’s a critical skill for navigating the complexities of the real world.
In the Design Fiction mode, this might involve creating a representation of some aspect of your future as a glowing (sponsored?) product unboxing video (the good!), a balanced product review in a Fast Company “round-up” of new products, and pointed critique of the same product in an opinion article or Reddit review post (the bad!). Doing this allows a product team to indicate a range of perspectives on the work, and represent areas where they can focus their attention, improve potential shortcomings, and anticipate challenges.
Perhaps most importantly, futures thinking needs to become part of everyone’s role, not just a specialized function. This means training people throughout the organization to think about long and medium-term implications and providing them with tools to explore future possibilities.
Now, not everyone will thing considering implications has value. Some will think it’s a waste of time or distraction from the “real work”. But, the real work is about making sure the work you’re doing now is going to be relevant and useful in the future. The real work is about creating superlative products that live up to their specification and true potential. The real work is about making sure that the policy you’re developing is going to be effective and not create unintended consequences. The real work is about making sure that the strategy you’re developing is going to be successful in the future.
For example, a customer service representative might spot early signals of changing consumer behavior, while a maintenance technician might notice emerging patterns in how products wear out or break down. Strategy and policy teams can then use this information to develop more robust plans that account for a wider range of possibilities.
These insights are invaluable for understanding how the future is actually unfolding.
The impulse to measure and quantify is deeply embedded in organizational culture, but futures work challenges this paradigm. While traditional business metrics focus on concrete outcomes and ROI, the value of futures work often lies in its ability to expand thinking, challenge assumptions, and inspire new possibilities - qualities that resist conventional measurement.
Consider how we engage with art or literature: we don’t evaluate a novel’s worth solely by counting its pages or measuring reader comprehension. Similarly, the value of futures work might better be understood through its ability to:
- Generate meaningful conversations and debates
- Challenge existing organizational narratives
- Open up new possibilities previously unconsidered
- Create emotional resonance and connection with potential futures
- Inspire novel approaches to current challenges
- Foster organizational imagination and creativity
Instead of trying to force futures work into traditional measurement frameworks, organizations might benefit from embracing its inherently speculative nature. The goal isn’t to predict accurately or measure integration success - it’s to maintain an open, imaginative dialogue about possibilities.
This doesn’t mean abandoning all forms of evaluation. Rather, it suggests shifting from quantitative metrics to qualitative reflection:
- Does this work spark new conversations? What has emerged from the conversations and activitiess?
- How has our thinking evolved? Can we capture this evolution in visual form or through a collection of artifacts?
- What assumptions were challenged?
- What new questions are we asking?
The true measure of futures work might be its ability to keep us questioning, imagining, and remaining open to possibility - outcomes that defy traditional metrics but are nonetheless vital for organizational evolution.
The reality is that meaningful innovation doesn’t happen through grand visions alone - it happens through careful attention to how people actually live and work. By focusing on the everyday aspects of the future, organizations can develop more realistic and effective approaches to innovation.
This doesn’t mean abandoning ambitious goals or exciting possibilities. Rather, it means grounding them in the messy reality of human experience. After all, the most profound changes often come not from revolutionary leaps but from evolutionary steps that slowly, inexorably, transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.
So the next time you’re thinking about the future, don’t start with the flying cars. Start with the charging cables, the software updates, and the way people actually live their lives. That’s where the real future happens - one ordinary day at a time.