Turning Your Official Future Into a Lever

How Smart Leaders Use the Future to Change What’s Possible Today

A few weeks ago, here on the radical Briefing, I wrote about The Official Future Trap – the idea that organizations create a singular, linear projection of the future (Peter Schwartz coined this term in his seminal book “The Art of the Long View”), embed it into their strategic plans, KPIs, and incentive structures, and then ride that narrow line straight into irrelevance when reality shows up differently (which it usually does). In a nutshell, the argument was: the official future is dangerous because it closes down the space of possibilities, turns uncertainty into false certainty, and makes you blind to the futures you’re not planning for.

I still very much believe all of that (and, sadly, have seen it play out too many times). But I’ve been thinking about the flip side – and it’s been nagging at me ever since a conversation I had with my dear friend and radical collaborator Jeffrey Rogers a few days after publishing that piece. What if the official future isn’t just a trap you fall into, but a tool you can wield strategically?

The difference, for me, comes down to a single word: There’s a massive shift which happens when you consider the official future versus an official future. The official future is the one you inherited. It’s the projection that everyone agreed on in last year’s offsite, now baked into budgets and headcount plans and org charts. It’s unconscious, institutional, and self-reinforcing – and it becomes the trap I wrote about in that last piece. But an official future is something you deliberately construct – a strategic narrative, a flag you plant in the ground that says “this is where we’re going,” designed not just to guide where you are going, but also to redefine what your people believe is possible, acceptable, and inevitable. “The” is singular and narrow; “an” is something you deliberately and strategically deploy.

Which brings us to a second concept we like to talk about, discuss, and debate here at radical: the Overton window. Named after policy analyst Joseph Paul Overton, it describes the range of ideas considered acceptable by the mainstream at any given time. Politicians – and by extension, leaders of all kinds – generally operate within this window. Step outside it and you’re “radical.” Stay within it and you’re “sensible.” The window isn’t static, though. It shifts over time, and the fascinating thing is how it shifts: not usually through leaders courageously stepping outside it, but through external forces – think tanks, social movements, cultural shifts, provocateurs – that drag the boundaries of what’s considered acceptable in a new direction. Once the window moves, leaders follow. Joseph G. Lehman, Overton’s colleague at the Mackinac Center, put it plainly: politicians are (or to be more precise: were – the very Overton window of what it means to engage in politics is rapidly and massively shifting) in the business of detecting where the window is and moving in accordance with it, not shifting it themselves.

Bring those two ideas together – the official future and the Overton window – and you realize: Inside every organization, there’s an internal Overton window – a range of strategies, investments, and ideas that are considered “on the table.” Anything outside that range gets labeled “off strategy,” “too risky,” or – my personal favorite of all time – “interesting, but not for us.” And the official future, as I argued in my previous piece, reinforces the current window. It tells everyone: this is where we’re going, this is what matters, everything else is noise. The window calcifies, and over time, the organization loses the ability to even imagine alternatives, let alone create them.

But what if you create an official future that sits at the edge of (or just beyond) the Overton window? Not so far out that your people dismiss it as pure fantasy, but far enough that it stretches what your organization considers possible. Think of it as strategic anchoring. In negotiation theory, the first number on the table – the anchor – disproportionately shapes the entire conversation that follows. Even when people know the anchor is aggressive, they adjust from it rather than ignoring it. Tversky and Kahneman documented this decades ago, and the research is super clear on this: the anchor sets the playing field, whether you want it to or not. An official future works the same way. When a leader declares “this is where we’re heading” – and that destination is slightly beyond what the organization currently considers feasible – the entire conversation reorganizes around that anchor. The argument moves from “should we do this?” to “how do we get there?” and your company’s Overton window moves.

And just to state the obvious: This isn’t about making wild proclamations or playing visionary-CEO-bingo, but about crafting a narrative of the future that’s credible enough to be taken seriously andambitious enough to expand the boundaries of what’s considered realistic. You declare a specific, vivid future state – “in three years, 40% of our revenue comes from products that don’t exist yet” or “by 2028, we operate as a platform, not a product company” – and then you give it the weight of institutional authority. You put it in the strategic plan. You reference it in all-hands meetings. You allocate some resources toward it. You make it feel real and inevitable, even if it’s aspirational. Then, regularly, something remarkable happens: ideas that were previously dismissed as too bold now become stepping stones toward the declared destination. The previously unacceptable becomes the merely ambitious. And the merely ambitious becomes table stakes.

The self-reinforcing cycle I described in my original article – your official future leads to resource allocation, which informs the strategy, which then gets executed, and ultimately reinforces your official future – now works for you instead of against you, and you drag your organization toward a more expansive set of possibilities.

And, as so often in life, with great power comes great responsibility. On the constructive side, this is how every significant organizational transformation actually happens – someone with authority and/or social capital plants a flag, declares a future that stretches the window, and the organization reorganizes around it. But on the destructive side – and we’ve seen this play out at enormous scale in politics over the past decade – manufacturing an official future can be used to normalize ideas that were previously, and rightfully, considered unacceptable. Same mechanism, different intent and integrity behind it.

Let me bring this full circle. The futures cone – that beautiful framework from futures studies that Jeffrey and I deploy regularly in our work – reminds us that the further out we look, the wider the space of possible futures becomes. The official future is a single line through that expanding cone. In my original piece, I argued that’s the trap: a narrow line pretending to be the whole picture. But here’s a nuance worth thinking about: A deliberately constructed official future – one that sits at the ambitious edge of the cone – can actually widen the cone for your organization. It doesn’t narrow possibility, but expands the range of futures your people can even conceive of. It shifts the internal Overton window outward, making space for ideas, strategies, and bets that would have been dismissed as “off strategy” just months earlier.

For this to work though, you (the leader) have to do the work of exploring the ever expanding cone of possible futures, and the embedded, narrower cone of plausible and probable futures – and then develop an official future that sits at the ambitious edge of the cone.

So here’s my updated question – building on the one Jeffrey likes to ask our clients: What (plausible) official future could you declare today that would expand what your organization believes is possible tomorrow?

@Pascal