Your Role in Future
How understanding others' tomorrow helps you shape today's decisions.
This is not a future of work / workforce essay. At least not at the top. Primarily, it’s about identifying and exercising your agency in shaping the future – even or especially when you might feel lost amid rapid and unexpected change. It’s about refusing to let “the future” feel like an abstraction and instead, making and keeping it personal, purposeful, and human.
Leading into a recent futures/leadership program that I was invited to co-design and facilitate, we asked the participants (a group of senior healthcare executives) to do an unorthodox bit of pre-work: Have someone close to you – ideally a family member – make a quick sketch illustrating what they hoped their life might look like 10 years from today, and ask them to talk you through the drawing.
Each participant brought one of these future illustrations to the program kickoff meeting. Most of the executives came with drawings done by their children. Others, drawings by partners or spouses. The futures imagined and depicted ranged from “going to college” to “becoming a professional tennis player” to “enjoying travel and local volunteer work in retirement.”
In small groups, the participants were invited to discuss the drawings and reflect on a few questions.
What jumped out to them about the drawing? Was there anything surprising in that depiction of a future 10 years out?
What role do they play in the future the drawing depicts?
Where did they see any tensions between the present as it exists and the possible as imagined in the drawing? And how could they help the artist navigate those tensions?
As the conversations unfolded, a few key themes quickly emerged. First, because the drawings were done by people close to the participants, the futures depicted inherently mattered. Each participant felt invested in the future that they were sharing with the group – regardless of whether they were actually depicted in the illustration.
Second – and this is absolutely related to the first, the participants found themselves naturally drawn to asking how they could support those future visions, how they might be able to work today toward bringing those futures a bit closer to realization.
Third, the participants often found that some of the details in the artists’ drawings weren’t exactly what they might have expected or assumed, and they generally saw those differences as representing an opportunity to learn about or explore a different perspective on a desirable future.
Fourth, the participants were in many cases able to identify aspects of the future vision that weren’t necessarily being served, enabled, or honored as well as they could be in the present, and they were often able to describe specific ways in which they could help the artist explore the gap between the present and the preferred future – and even find ways to begin reducing it.
If you’re already getting the sense that this whole process – exploring a future vision that you’re invested in because it matters to people who matter to you and then using your outside perspective to identify ways that you could leverage your influence and agency to bring that future closer to reality – MIGHT apply to other areas of your life where you can exercise leadership, well… you’re going to be a great futures facilitator. Because this is exactly the argument I’m making here.
You can essentially use the same sequence to explore your role in enabling other futures that matter to people in your life and work – mentees, team members, new hires, project partners, etc. It might not involve a literal illustration, but it will definitely involve exploring a vision of a preferred future set on a time horizon long enough to allow opportunities to shape it.
And the process begins with the same step: an act of curiosity about how someone else envisions the future and then reflection on your role in helping them to create it.
@Jeffrey