Finding the Compass to our Ideal Future
“Taking time to consider what we hope to see in the future does not need to take us away from the urgent work of now. Instead, it can help us take action that addresses immediate needs while making moves toward transformation”
Idea in Brief
This blog explores the futures thinking tool - Now vs. the Future from our futures toolkit.
The tool can help users to identify actions that can take us from where we are to the futures we want.
The example below applies the Now vs. Future tool to the child care crisis in USA.
By Katie King
Child care in the United States is in crisis. While consensus on this point is broad, we lack the political will even to stop the bleeding, much less to transform our approach to how we care for the next generation.
In times like these, the thought of articulating an ambitious and aspirational vision of the future might seem useless or even naïve. Difficult times often cause us to put our heads down and continue along the expected path. We tell ourselves that we will think big when the emergency is behind us. Focusing on today feels prudent and responsible.
On the contrary, the most important time to craft and immerse ourselves in our aspirations is when they seem most out of reach.
We are on a trajectory toward a future where child care will continue to be unaffordable and inequitable and where the system will continue to undermine the dignity of the children, families, and caregivers who participate in it. If we do not take the time to consider an alternative vision and work toward it, we will be complicit when we find ourselves in that future. That’s because we are always shaping the future, even if we choose not to think about it. We owe it to ourselves and to the communities we serve to develop bold visions for the future of child care and outline what it might take to get there. Otherwise, the actions we take to staunch today’s bleeding will leave us with poorly healed scars.
Now vs. Future
Not everyone avoids future visioning because they lack the will or interest. We have all participated in visioning conversations that ended with lofty language and little else, so some skepticism about the value of the process is warranted.
A futures thinking tool called Now vs. Future helps us go further than the initial vision-setting step. It enables us to understand what we would observe and experience if our visions became reality by identifying actions that can take us from where we are, to the futures we want. The tool, adapted from a systems thinking tool called the Vision Deployment Matrix, can help us:
Specify future vision,
Diagnose current reality
Clarify gaps and ways forward.
The Now vs. Future tool can be applied to entire systems, to organizations, or even to a a single program or initiative. Anything that has a current reality and could benefit from a future vision can be the subject of this tool’s exploration.
Envision the Ideal Future
In this process, we begin by stating an aspirational vision. A vision is a bold image of a future in which external reality aligns with our most deeply held ideals. Though we are unlikely ever to achieve them fully, visions can compel action. After we have named what we hope to see, we can begin to understand the conditions that could bring that ideal future to fruition. A vision can only become reality if it is supported by a set of aligned beliefs, structures, and activities. By digging deeper into the factors that would underpin the vision, we can understand how we might build from today’s reality to the ideal future.
Clarify the Current Reality
Next we consider the current reality. We do that by reflecting on the activities that we observe today, the structures that enable those activities, the explicit and implicit beliefs that underlie those structures, and the vision – often unstated – that characterizes the system today. Often, we assume that we have a shared understanding of what is in place today. However, once we take the time to describe these aspects of our current reality, we tend to gain new insights about what we are facing or learn that others who have a different understanding or experiences.
Additionally, by naming what is true today, we can see more clearly the ripple effects of letting what’s happening continue. We often come to see that we are contributing to a future vision that we do not want.
Identify Critical Gaps
Once we have a sense of where we want to go and where we are, we can identify the gaps between the two. In some cases, the current reality and the ideal future may not be as different as we had thought. In others, we may have felt as if we were closer to where we wanted to be. While we can find many gaps between the current reality and the ideal future, a few will likely feel most important.
Notice Opportunities and Develop Strategies
With an understanding of the most important differences between the ideal future and current reality, we can begin to develop strategies for closing those gaps. That may mean identifying new ways forward, letting go of what is no longer serving our ideal future, or thinking about existing efforts that can be expanded or leveraged to push the system closer to where it needs to be.
Reflect on Insights
Comparing today to the future is not merely a thought exercise. Taking time to consider what we hope to see in the future does not need to take us away from the urgent work of now. Instead, it can help us to take action to address immediate needs while making moves toward transformation – with a wide lens and with our vision of the future clearly in our sights.
Now vs. Future: An Example with Child Care
Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash
The example below applies the Now vs. Future tool to child care in the United States. It provides an indicative – not comprehensive – look at the system. Your ideal future or what you observe in the present may be different than what appears here.
This example can serve as a starting point for your own exploration or simply a reference as you consider your own ideal future, current reality, and strategies to align them.
Key Insights
In addition to developing strategies for closing gaps between the current reality and the ideal future, this process can yield some useful insights that can inform the path forward.
If we are not actively imagining and working toward our own vision of the future, we are passively contributing to someone else’s.
In its current form, the child care sector operates in ways that reflect the unjust social and economic status quo. Though few people would call that their vision for the future of child care, most of the system’s beliefs, structures, and activities are oriented toward that outcome. Without a different vision of the future that we state clearly and operationalize, we are tacitly contributing to a future of continued inequity, scarcity, and dehumanization.
Our value statements don’t reflect our actual values.
The economic arguments for child care – that it allows parents to work and that it sets young children up for educational and, eventually, career success – are the first ones for which many of us reach when outlining the benefits of a functioning system. Even advocates who believe in child care’s deeper value to children, families, and society often use these claims because they seem most palatable and seem like the easiest way to build support. However, those narratives can undermine our efforts to orient child care systems toward the needs of children, families, and providers when the human needs do not have a visible economic benefit.
“We need to explore ways to talk differently about child care – both in our everyday conversations and in our cultural narratives – and reject the premise that economic productivity is the key benefit of a high-functioning child care sector.”
What happens at the small scale contributes to the large scale.
Families and providers operate under a cloud of stress and sacrifice. People learn to make do because they need to. But living in that way can lead us to assume that the scarcity of time, resources, and support is inevitable rather than an outcome of the way the child care system was designed. As we aim to transform child care into a sector where people are flourishing, we can look for small ways to choose abundance over scarcity. Whether that be in the ways we approach partnerships or seek funding or something else, we can look for opportunities to replace competition with collaboration.
Applying Now vs. Future to Your Context
The Now vs. Future tool can help stakeholder groups describe their visions and what they would entail and pinpoint action steps to move toward them. In the Futures Toolkit, we outline some steps to help guide you through applying this tool. If you are working with a group, its members may have different ideas about what belongs in each box. Capture as wide a range of perspectives as possible. The tool is meant to help you generate ideas rather than develop a firm consensus.
Following the Compass
We do not have a map to the future, but our values and aspirations can guide us. They enable us to notice the distance between where we are and where we want to be and develop strategies that become our path forward. Though the future is uncertain, when we ground ourselves in aspiration and vision, we can at least know that we are heading in the right direction.
Why not check out our futures toolkit with instructions, examples, and templates for three futures thinking methods that can be used by anyone who wants to create powerful long-term change for children and families.
This blog is part of a series on futures thinking and child care, co-produced with KnowledgeWorks.
Katie King is the Director of Strategic Foresight Engagement at KnowledgeWorks. In her role, Katie manages externally facing strategic foresight projects and partnerships, co-designs and delivers workshops and contributes to KnowledgeWorks’ publications about the future of learning. She is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists and co-author of The Futures Thinking Playbook.