What do you think are the greatest barriers to change when it comes to protecting our future?
impact Lab 3. week 5 reflection
I think the greatest barrier to change when it comes to protecting our future is a lack of imagination. That sounds harsh, and I don’t mean it in terms of creativity. I believe that everyone is creative to some extent. I mean it more in the sense that most people struggle to foresee a future that is overly different to the one they are living in now.
Since discovering I have ADHD last November I have been learning about the ways in which all our brains work differently. For people with ADHD we can imagine futures so vividly that they feel real, they feel as if they already exist, we feel the joys or the sorrows of that imagined future even though it hasn’t happened yet.
What we struggle with is seeing all the building blocks that will get us to that future. All the small tasks and steps that need to be taken to get there. I can vividly imagine myself living the life of an entrepreneur or an academic or running craft classes or a ryokan in Japan. I don’t feel limited by my current state because I don’t focus as much on the incremental work needed to get there. For a long time I thought that’s how everyone’s brains worked and I struggled to understand how people made the outcomes they wanted, happen.
What I understand now though is that most neurotypical people imagine the steps in front of them, thinking about each action chaining together and building on the last. They see a logical, linear progression of “if I take this action then it will grow into this and so the future is likely to be this”.
The Futures Cone: A tool for imaging futures that don’t necessarily follow the linear and probable progression.
Dr Joseph. Voros’ extended version of the futures cone, 2017.
When we think about protecting our future I think most people think in this linear fashion. They look at the world as it is and project it forward, mostly unchanging. They acknowledge there will be subtle shifts, perhaps the people in power will change, perhaps there will be fires, droughts or floods. They may even go so far as to imagine a pandemic happening again now that they’ve had that lived experience, or perhaps people old enough to have lived through WWII might entertain the thought that such a thing could happen again.
They take scenarios they have experienced before and project those forward, assuming they will be as they have experienced before. And mostly in the context of their own lives, our realities are constructed with us as the main protagonist so that makes sense. Perhaps they imagine they’ll get married, have children, grow old. Those are all patterns we’ve seen time and time again.
But when we think in this linear progression, using only our past lived experiences to imagine the future, we imagine only a future that looks like today. We fail to imagine the wildcards, or even to imagine the current likely scenarios of climate change, because they depart too much from our current reality.
If you can’t imagine a future where the world is destroyed by climate change and war and feel that level of anguish and despair that comes from it, how can you maintain the motivation to avoid it at all costs? If you can’t imagine a world where we have completely curbed our consumption and created a regenerative society and felt the lightness of being, safety and stability of that world, how can you hold onto the hope and desire to keep innovating towards it, even when it feels so impossible in the present?
In order to protect our future we need both ways of thinking: The ability to imagine and feel a future vividly different from our current reality but also the linear progression to be able to work out the building blocks that will get us there.