Envisioning the future is not a talent or gift, but a skill that can be developed. Those who are particularly skilled at envisioning the future are often attributed with the gift of vision and genius, like modern‐day oracles.

As someone who has spent decades developing the skill of envisioning the future, both individually and in collaboration with others, and who so deeply enjoys the process that colleagues and friends have coined the state of mind that I venture into (“Brianstorming”), I can say firsthand that the process is deeply personal, vulnerable, and can be developed like any other skill.

Envisioning is deeply personal in the sense that it necessitates the personal experiences and synaptic connections of an individual in order for the result to have relevance in the context of the individual, organization, industry, and/or market for which the envisioning is developed. You cannot pay someone else, regardless of their degree of skill in the process of envisioning, to adequately envision your future or the future of your organization. Organizational leaders must develop the process of envisioning the future, both individually and collaboratively, if their organization is going to reach, retain, or expand a market leadership position and create lasting value. From a social systemic viewpoint, this process of envisioning the future, as opposed to having it envisioned for them by external advisors, also serves as a foundation of mutual buy‐in that can sustain momentum when challenges arise.

Envisioning is a vulnerable act of creation—of imagination, a distinctively human skill, and a skill that can be observed under development in any child. For adults, envisioning becomes vulnerable in that it begins with an admission that the future is unknowable and therefore cannot be controlled, and, like any act of creation, exposes an individual's thinking process or line of reasoning to others. This is one of the reasons it is important that organizations transition to operating as social systems instead of mechanistic systems, in which empathy, reason, vulnerability, and candor are seen as skills as valuable as data science, project management, or engineering.

In terms of skill development, envisioning the future is a recursive activity, with lengthy feedback loops, and it can be developed in the same way as any other skill. No rational person, in considering a software engineer who has written a particularly elegant function in JavaScript, would assert that some people were just born to write code and that the oracles blessed them with innate programming talents. That developer had to learn the syntax of writing code and the theory, and then practice over weeks, months, and years to develop the skill to the point that it culminates in elegant code. This is not to say that individuals do not have natural aptitudes that lend themselves to particular skills, but that those skills are not deterministic at birth but can be developed even after childhood.

The skill of envisioning the future is developed in the same manner as the skills of writing software or project management: a combination of theory and practice. There are many thought leaders who have written about both the theory and the practice of creating a vision for the future (some of whose books can be found in the “What Should You Read Next?” section at the end of this book), and advisory firms can be hired to serve as guides and facilitators for technology, business, and industry leaders steeped in the social systemic context of an organization in order to envision a future for the team, organization, market, and industry.

Once a future vision, or a set of several future scenarios, has been developed, it can then be traced backward to the starting point of the present to determine what needs to be in place to achieve that future vision, then create a plan for growing from the starting point to the other without losing the pieces that made the culture great in the first place. As Mark Hammond, the founder of Bons.ai, an autonomous artificial intelligence platform acquired by Microsoft in 2018, describes it, “It is not a replacement operation, it's a growth operation.”

Functional Reimagining

Every person, team, organization, and ecosystem serves a function within one or more broader systems. Functional reimagining is a creative process that begins with an examination of what part the subject of the creative process, such as an organization, serves within its broader containing systems. These systems could be the overarching organization, the market, the industry, the education system, and society (to name a few).

A team that delivers a daily report to leadership on a given aspect of the organization, for example, is not a reporting function. Reporting is the method by which the team delivers on its core function of informing the daily decisions of leadership with information about the organization. Depending on the context of the organization, there are many ways in which this team could be functionally reimagined.

Functional reimagining in this context would begin with a deeper understanding of what decisions are being made by leadership on a daily basis and what information is needed to inform those decisions. From a social systemic viewpoint, for example, each leader has a style in which they best consume and interact with information. Some leaders may want a daily bulleted list of key metrics. Another leader might prefer a 15‐minute morning readout of the state of the business with summarized insights and an ongoing discussion with an internal analyst who serves as an advisor. Another leader with a background in data analytics might want access to a self‐serve business intelligence dashboard. Beginning with this context in mind informs the process of envisioning possible future scenarios, and what combination of reports, dashboards, and interaction between the team and the leaders it supports would best fulfill its core function within the broader system.

Zoomed out to the context of an entire organization, a core function might be to clothe people for formal events. This function plays a part within every sector, including, as examples, the fashion, entertainment, public, and private sectors. Reimagining the performance of this function would begin with an understanding of the current social systemic context of clothing people for formal events, which, after the COVID‐19 pandemic, may consist of fewer events than before the pandemic. Additionally, some might be meeting team members, colleagues, or industry peers for the first time post‐pandemic, and therefore be willing to spend more for higher‐quality items. Furthermore, due to the social impact of the pandemic in regard to increased comfort with shopping online and waiting for shipping, paired with store closures and low inventory, lowering the likelihood or confidence in venturing to an in‐person store, the ability to purchase fashion items that can be shipped to one's home might be worth a cost premium to enough consumers to justify a reimagining of the methods by which the organization fulfills its core function in society. Each of these is a hypothesis that would need to be proved or disproved in order to meaningfully contribute to overarching theories of how the organization can best fulfill its core function, the process of which will be covered in Chapter 15.

Multiverse Reimagining

The multiverse is a theoretical group of multiple parallel universes, often depicted within science fiction with subtle differences that accrue to uncanny experiences for those who can travel between them.

Imagine waking up in a parallel universe in which your house is the same, all of the same people exist with the same history and relationships, with the one difference being that the team and/or organization you work in or lead does not exist. No one has ever heard of your team or organization, except for a benefactor who has given you the charter to build the team or organization from scratch. You look up your colleagues online and see that they all have different jobs at other organizations, with no mention of your team or organization in their work history.

What would you build? This creative process also begins with considering the function the team and organization performs within its containing systems, and requires a social systemic lens to consider the roles and motivations of the humans that comprise the team and social systems of the organization and the broader containing systems.

Once a future vision of the organization has been developed, the process of discovering and rediscovering the context of the system, clearing the digital fog, designing for inevitability, and creating a more human future can begin.