Attuning To The Future

Visit four possible futures to better understand your own

by Robert Gilman

IN CONTEXT #44, Summer 1996
© 1996 by Context Institute



Last August I facilitated a process for the Findhorn Community which, in keeping with the Findhorn way of doing things, I called "Attuning to the Future." The immediate justification was to help them with some land-use planning, but the deeper purpose was to help them better understand their own orientation, as a community, towards the future. It all took place in an afternoon workshop attended by about 30 community members, including most of the leadership of the community.

In this article I would like to share the essence of this process, ... and elicit your feedback (more on how to do this later).


THE PROCESS

The basic approach is like the scenario-based management training approach used by companies like Shell Oil. In this approach, you, as a participant, are given a scenario for a possible global future and then asked to describe how you would function in that setting.

In Findhorn's case, I went through the following cycle four times, each time with a different possible future.

Each cycle began with a guided visualization:
  • The visualization starts with my telling the story of how this particular future developed over the next ten years.

  • Then, still in the visualization, I asked the participants to imagine how (through what activities) the community might best fulfill its mission in the context of this scenario.

  • Finally, because this was a land-use planning exercise, I asked them to imagine walking around the community and seeing the kind of buildings and land-use that would ideally support these activities.

After each visualization we got quick statements from the participant about what they had imagined, listing these on newsprint without discussion. These lists provided useful input for those doing the land-use planning and provided others in the community with a graphic demonstration of community the diversity of community visions.

What were the scenarios? I call the four scenarios "More of the Same," "Disaster and Collapse," "Eco-tech Triumph," and "Transformation of Consciousness." While there are many scenarios that could be used, these were chosen:
  • for their contrast
  • to provide a good balance between being
    • challenging and insight provoking and
    • at least somewhat plausible
  • for their relevance to the group's concerns.

The scenarios were also not meant to be "good" or "bad," rather each has its pluses and minus, its challenges and opportunities.

Here is how each are characterized:

More of the Same: The central characteristic of this future is that the past turns out to be a good guide to the future, at least in the sense of straight-line extrapolations from the past. This doesn't mean that you or your organization or community do not change, but rather that the context in which you find yourself in the future is sufficiently similar to what you see around you today that assuming "business-as-usual" works just fine.

Disaster and Collapse: In this future, "business-as-usual" doesn't work at all. Indeed, in this future various natural and human calamities have effectively swept away most of the major familiar economic and governmental institutions, significantly reduced the world population, and focused the lives of the survivors at a simpler, more local level.

Eco-tech Triumph: Starting with a breakthrough in the cost of solar (photovoltaic) cells, this scenario develops a future in which many of the technical and institutional ideas about a humane and sustainable society that we've described in IN CONTEXT get put into practice -- and they actually work! The problems of both the environment and the economy are solved and the world is set firmly on a course towards full sustainability.

Transformation of Consciousness: The essence of this scenario is that the social consensus as to the meaning of life changes at a sufficiently deep level so that the moral/philosophical legitimacy for our present social, economic, and governmental institutions is withdrawn. One example of how this could get started would be if there was simultaneously:
  • a substantial growth in the number of people who had (and recognized they had) significant intuitive and/or extra-sensory perceptions, and

  • a mainstream recognition of the validity of those scientific experiments and studies which indicate that consciousness is not tied to matter.
This could then evolve into a consensus worldview that saw this human life as just part of a much larger journey of consciousness, and "success" in this life as generally having little to do with today's materialist goals of wealth, power, and the avoidance/denial of death.

We could have stopped once we had completed the cycle for each of the four scenarios, but I couldn't resist adding another step to the process. I asked everyone in the group to come up with four numbers, from 0 to 10, representing how important they felt each of these scenarios would be in the actual future (with 10 for very important, 0 for not at all). This was done in the spirit of recognizing that, given the complexity of real life, the actual future was unlikely to be a pure case of any one of these, but might well involve some blend. It was also not a question of what you wanted, but rather what intuitively, or in your gut, you felt was most likely to really happen.

I won't tell you the results, other than to say that it was rather eye-opening for the community to see their internal diversity in this way.


YOUR TURN

I have a few requests:

Please send me your rankings, from 0 to 10, for how likely you consider each of the above four scenarios over, say, the next 20 years. I'll compile your responses (not attached to names) and post them once we have enough of a sample to be interesting.

Please send me your thoughts on the four scenarios. How would you tell the story, in as plausible a way as possible, of how any one of these scenarios might develop? What are the challenges and opportunities that you see connected with any of these scenarios, especially what might be some of the surprising pluses and minuses? What other substantially different scenarios should be considered? I'll post these responses as a forum.

Looking forward to hearing from you!
(at rgilman@context.org)


© 1996 by Context Institute

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Last Updated 29 June 2000.

URL: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC44/Attune.htm

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