If the future doesn’t actually exist, what is it?
According to my friend and collaborator Liam Mayo, the future is an emotion. It’s a feeling we experience when we look around and consider what’s possible.
I fell in love with foresight because it plays in the space between things we tend to keep separate. It’s both analytical and creative, based in evidence and prospective, intellectual and emotional.
The past week, I’ve been tuning into the emotional side of futures work:
- I prepared a new facilitator guide for The Systems School‘s Decision Support Tool, describing a process to notice and engage with the emotions driving change, and the emotions that seek to maintain the status quo
- I attended a fabulous webinar on Compassionate Communication, seeing our emotions as signals of our unmet needs provided by the good folk at Innate-ly
- I began recording a fun new project with Liam, using pop culture to explore how the future connects with emotion and how that can be harnessed by leaders who are doing change differently.
There’s so much good content being developed in the background that I just cannot wait to share with you in the next few months!