#fred polak

How images of the future create agency for change. New post at the next wave.

I was at a workshop in Cambridge during the summer, called ‘People and Patterns”, hosted by the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The workshop was designed by Sarah Woods and Paul Ingram, as part of a research project that is trying to combine narrative and systems to develop new approaches to thinking about risk. It’s a new project—it’s been running since January 2023–and this was a…

Making change: connecting Three Horizons with other approaches to imagining different futures. New post.

I recently found a note I’d written—but never written up—as a result of the Three Horizons course I did with Bill Sharpe and Daniel Wahl at Schumacher College in the autumn of 2017. I enrolled because, although I had been involved early on in developing Three Horizons, and had used it a lot, I was aware that Bill’s practice of it had evolved, perhaps in different directions, and I wanted to get a…

Scenario planning grew out of the US positivist tradition. But it ran out of steam in the 1990s. Welcome to critical #socialfutures.

I spoke yesterday at the launch of the Social Futures Handbook, edited by Carlos Galviz-Lopez and Emily Spiers of Lancaster University’s Institute of Social Futures. (Disclosure: I am on the Advisory Board of the ISF). I have a chapter in the book called ‘A Critical History of Scenarios’. This is, more or less, what I said, which is the five minute version of an 8,000 word chapter. The chapter…

The Nature of True Freedom II: Harmony of Interests

It is our human intelligence and our  human courage which is on trial; it is incredible that men who have brought the technique of physical discovery, invention and use to such a pitch of perfection will abdicate in the face of the infinitely more important human problem. What stands in the way (of a planned economy) is a lot of outworn traditions, moth-eaten slogans and catchwords that do…

Addressing the Irony: Three Styles of Leadership

There is an important point to make regarding postmodern and contingent notions about leadership—and even more fundamentally the challenge in addressing the ironic conditions to be found in contemporary organizations and societies. No one leadership style is best. A great (or at least effective) leader is flexible in their style of leadership. This is a model of leadership that aligns with…

V. Generativity in Four Acts: Expanding and Extending Our Region of Care

William Bergquist and Gary Quehl Generativity is clearly a multi-dimensional concept with many different manifestations; nevertheless, we propose that each of the four roles tends to be center stage at a specific time in our life. Following is a preview of the prominent role of generativity being played most often at specific times in our life. Early Adulthood There is a period early in adulthood…

Thanks to good-old-Good, just stumbled upon this nifty document entitled "Building Agency in the Face of Uncertainty", which is a process tool for helping educators and leaders (and anyone, really) focus on and proactively work with the future. It works with two variables: first, our perception of the future, and how 'uncertain' or 'inevitable' we percieve it to be; and second, our locus of control, and how we see our responses to the future being in our own hands or in the hands of others. 

Basically, it asks a series of tough questions, making one assess where one is at, in terms of perception/control of the future. Do you have enough skills to shape your destiny, regardless of a stock market crash or climate change or zombie apocalypse? Do you have a fixed sense of what's coming? Or are you moving through a fog of uncertainty and helplessness? Once you've fixed your current position (and interrogated your assumptions about said position), you then try to figure out where you want to be. And then you're asked:

What has to change for you to get there?

What information and knowledge would you have to have generated?

What allegiances and support would you have to have built?

What ideas would you have had to give up?

Why and when would this be the right orientation to have towards the future?

What are the 5 ways you would be able to move to this quadrant from your previous quadrant?

These questions have the effect of moving one's focus away from one's fears and negative emotions and into concrete images to work for. Say, if one's vision of an ideal future (and there are many futures and ways of making them!) is a Transformed Philippines, then what does the present Untransformed state look like? And what will it take for you to get there?

Grateful for being able to read this at a time when the constant Dementor-feeling drives out any feeling of power and control. Need to go through this process properly (not just theoretically) but for now, even just the bones of it blasts away some of the haze and makes me look beyond the mundanities and into other, larger concerns. (Doesn't quite hit NP technological singularity levels yet, thankfully.) The use of the term "agency"--something I thought I'd left behind from my days of literary theorizing--is an added comfort. 

I still don't exactly know what the next stage for me will be, but my choices are more-or-less driven by these images of my ideal future:

Politically--increasingly decentralized government, federalist even, with various forms of devolution that are appropriate to the cultural and ecological needs of each area. Indigenous subsidiarity, in the sense that bodong councils or shariah courts can comprise its formal structures as called for. Political mindsets geared for service and sacrifice, with no space for arrogance or curtness just because you're busily doing something "important". No hierarchies, and definitely no stealing--so much so that it's not just about Government, but in the political agreements of how people deal with and treat each other.

Economically--given that in the Philippines, the circles of political and economic power are more or less concentric, both have to change in similar ways. This would be congruous with what  Otto Scharmer (via Peter Barnes) calls Capitalism 3.0, an "intentional, inclusive, ecosystem economy that upgrades the capacity for collaboration and innovation throughout all sectors of society (focus on ecosystem innovation)." Will definitely write further on Capitalism 3.0, but for me, the economic shift is probably the most tangibly exciting: green tech, cradle-to-cradle technology, economic human rights, liberalization of knowledge and capital flows. In a way, we're lucky to be stuck in Capitalism 1.0 since there are less structures to undo, but I still do wonder...

Culturally- that which is the soul of everything. Language. Food. Artisan production. Education. Less western consumerist. More real. More spirit.

Part of the challenge of wanting to make a vision real is the choosing of where to begin. Here I am muddling through the pain of bureaucracy, but steadily yearning for the freedom of culture yet again. Education, perhaps? Mark Taylor's call to abolish the university as we know it comes to mind--abolish all permanent departments, he said, and create problem-focused interdisciplinary programs on various topics such as Mind, Body, Law, Networks, Language, Space, Money, Life, Water, etc. Took that essay up for my English 1 and English 10 classes, once upon a time, and I still do wonder if that image somehow took root in my students' minds...

Ironic that this is now being typed in the bowels of Malacañang. Bone tired and the day's not yet done, but I am grateful. If there's anything that's worse than death, it's ceasing to have a vision of the future, any future. When you're so tired that you have no hope of imagining anything beyond the next meeting, the next day, the next week...then what is living for? As Fred Polak warned us so eloquently, once a society's image of the future begins to decay and lose its vitality, the culture does not long survive. If that's true for societies, then it must be especially true for people. 

By Glen Hiemstra | April 10th, 2011

Later this week, on April 15, 2011, I will be doing presentations to the World Foresight Forum event in The Hague, Netherlands. On that day I will be part of a panel entitled Roadmaps for a Shared Future, where we will discuss envisioning alternative futures in the context of the “Gross National Happiness Index” as proposed by French President Sarkozy. Thinking about alternative visions brought me back to this article that I wrote originally in early 2001. It can be found in our article archives, but is worth sharing here once again, I think. It was written prior to 9/11, by the way.

Any student of the rise and fall of cultures cannot fail to be impressed by the role played in this historical succession by the image of the future. The rise and fall of images precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive. (The Image of the Future, Fred Polak, 1961)

I have been thinking about images of the future lately. I have noticed that when I complete one of my typically positive and optimistic presentations, a certain number of people will stand in line to comment. Some wish to say that they appreciate the hopeful view of the future, but a surprising number wish to say that I am wrong, that things are bad, worse than they have ever been, and getting even worse by the moment. We do not have long to last, they say.

It is not so much that I am surprised at this view, or even that within particular limited domains the view might have some validity. It is consistently surprising, rather, to notice how pleased many people are with their assessment of the future. A few are positively giddy that things are so bad.

Perhaps it is that certain types thrive on crisis. Perhaps a dour view of the general future allows the satisfaction of feeling lucky that your personal future does not look so bad. Surveys for years have demonstrated that people tend to be more optimistic about their own future than about the future in general.

What happens when a growing proportion of a society adopts a decaying view of the future? Which vision of the future is dominant in post-industrial world-around culture today?

Robert Heilbroner, in his 1995 book, Visions of the Future, outlines three historical visions of the future, which have existed successively in the Distant Past, Yesterday and Today.