Facing Our Futures: How foresight, futures design and strategy creates prosperity and growth

‘Nikolas Badminton cracks the code on the leadership model for the future in this must-read masterpiece.’

Josh Linkner, five-time tech entrepreneur, New York Times bestselling author, venture capital investor

‘In this increasingly volatile and uncertain world it's even more important to be prepared and build resilience in your business through proven methods well explained by Nikolas Badminton.’

Paul Polman, Co-founder and Chair of IMAGINE, former CEO of Unilever

‘Whether you are a CEO of an organisation that is in transition, or a pioneer that is looking for new ways of looking at the future, this book will give you extensive knowledge and practical tools… A must read for every new or experienced futurist!’

Loes Damhof, UNESCO Chair in Futures Literacy

‘Nikolas provides important thinking on exploring realistic and holistic futures that support planning for a resilient human race.’

Youssef Nassef, Climate Adaptation Director, United Nations (UNFCCC)

‘Frank, succinct, and fundamentally optimistic, just like Nikolas himself, Facing Our Futures is the manual you need to make sense of, and more importantly, be a part of creating the sorts of collaborative, inspiring, sustainable futures we all want to arrive at.’

Bronwyn Williams, Futurist & Partner at Flux Trends

‘There’s no doubt that holistic futures design is the missing link for disruptive thinkers. You have to read this book and see how Nikolas takes world leading companies to the next level!’

Shawn Kanungo, Disruption Strategist, speaker and author of The Bold Ones

‘Nikolas supplies the framework to upgrade your strategic planning capabilities and establish futures consciousness in your organization.’

Tom Goodwin, Innovation Leader and author of Digital Darwinism

‘Facing Our Futures is an erudite and practical framework through which businesses can analyze a wide range of future outcomes, and then develop strategies that enable them to outflank the competition over years or even decades.’

David Rodnitzky, Founder, 3Q/DEPT

‘An incredibly thoughtful work, pulling insightful resources from diverse fields, written in a skeptic, pragmatic and relevant manner, [which] seeks to discover more truths as data comes in. Very addictive and quenching.’

Saško Despotovski, Managing Director, Hinna Park Capital

For Maximilian – be curious, brave and have hope as you look towards our futures

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Glen Hiemstra

Preface: From Futurist to Hope Engineer

CHAPTER 1

What is Foresight?

CHAPTER 2

Looking Back Towards Our Futures

CHAPTER 3

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark

CHAPTER 4

Lessons from the Frontlines

CHAPTER 5

Facing Our Futures

CHAPTER 6

Global Water-Energy-Food Futures

CHAPTER 7

Igniting Imagination

CHAPTER 8

Backcasting

CHAPTER 9

Futures Consciousness

Index

Acknowledgements

My partner Sarah and my son Maximilian – thank you for the support, inspiration and patience. My mother Carol and dad Roger. Nancy. Gary and Catherine. Kharis and Jane O’Connell, Ryan and Rachel Betts, Nick Black, Andrew Howell and Meena Sandhu, Andrew Jackson – the OG DARK FUTURES crew. The Pirates. Gila Golub and her community, especially Mary Ealden for the constant support. Tiffany Hamilton and John Bruce. Joel and Tasha Greensite. Yousef Nassef and the team at UNFCCC. Billie and Marc Carn. Dré Labre. Leah Zaidi. Matt Nelson. Sarah Tesla, Polina Bachlakova and Amber Case for believing in my first futures event. Landon Gunn. Jordan Eshpeter. Chris Dancy. Mike Merrill. Carl Schmidt and the UNBOUNCE crew. JP Holecka, Dave Smith. Josh Ingelby. Qasim Virjee and the Startwell crew. Rafeeq Bosch. Saško Despotovski. Glen Hiemstra, Dr. Cindy Frewen, Richard Yonck, Anne Boysen, Ramez Naam. Jared Nichols. Melissa Eshaghbeigi. Karl Schroeder. Dr. Jake Sotiriadis. Dr. Wendy Schultz. Dr. Joseph Voros. Madeline Ashby. Brett Macfarlane. Tracey Follows. Theo Priestly. Bronwyn Williams. Oksana Andreiuk. Liza Amlani. Loes Damhof. Ian Burbidge. Carol Ann Hilton. Pia Puolakka. Rotem Petranker. Phil Batalgas. Dana Martens. Peter Nowak. Natalie Nixon. Rocky Ozaki. Monika Bielskyte. Cathy Hackl. Ben Feist. Marianne Lefever. Shawn Kanungo. Denny Unger. Denise Brennan. Samantha Mathews. Sarah Prevette. Keith Ippel. Katie Metaverse. John Gray. Freddie and Karen Ghatala. Amanda Klassen. Bernd Patek. Eric Termuende. Jeremy Shaki. Norman Armour. Kristy O’Leary. Natalie Godfrey. LaSandra Hunt. Michelle Sklar. Karen Geary. Jen Browne. Megan Brand. Trish Neufeld. Ann Shin and the Fathom Film crew. Nikola Danaylov. Drex. Lynda Steele. Jeff Sammut. Michael Hiscock and the CTV Your Morning crew. Cory Ashworth and Janice Ungaro. Ryan Semeniuk. Catherine Roy. Petek Unsal. Jeff Jacobsen. All my speaker agency friends in Canada, UK and the United States. Josh Linkner and the 3 Ring Circus/Impact Eleven crew. All the speakers at From Now, Future Camp and DARK FUTURES. All the clients that have inspired me to push further and take bigger chances. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA). A huge shout out to so many people who have been great to virtually discuss this book and the field of futures design and foresight across social media. Also, a big thanks to Joe Wallace, Laura James and the folks at the Coachella Valley Economic Partnership (CVEP) that gave me a space to write this book during my retreat in Palm Desert.

Most importantly, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓- and Skwxwú7mesh-speaking peoples, the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations, the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee and the Wendat peoples and all Naïve American, First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. I pay tribute to these and the indigenous peoples of the world. We truly owe a great debt to you, and we must listen to and learn from you more than we do each day.

Foreword by Glen Hiemstra

The human species has a remarkable ability to remember and learn from the past, to dream about, anticipate and envision the future, and to live in and devise immediate actions in the present. While we may not be as unique in these abilities when compared to other species as we once thought, still it is a shame to note how little we humans – whether as a species, as communities, as organizations, as individuals – engage these skills to create the potential for better futures. It is a strange paradox that we can remember and anticipate and dream, but most of our behaviour in the present seems designed to merely muddle through without ever looking back or ahead.

The modern practice of futures studies, begun around 1970 or so and now more commonly labelled strategic foresight, has been an effort to remedy this paradox. This new book by Nikolas Badminton is a contribution to the literature of both why the project of strategic foresight is worthwhile and how to go about doing it in systematic and effective ways.

My own journey into becoming a professional futurist began with exposure to the works of Dr Ed Lindaman, Fred Polak and Alvin Toffler as the 1970s began, then later the works of Barbara Marx Hubbard, Hazel Henderson, Elise Boulding and many others. Of the original three only Toffler is particularly well known. More about him in a moment. Lindaman, a college president when I met him, had been director of program planning for the Apollo project at North American Rockwell, and was a philosophical thinker about the very long-term future. He crystallized three fundamental questions about the future – what is probable, what is possible and what is preferred, arguing that exploration of the first two questions provides the best raw material with which to answer the third and ultimate question – what future do we want, and by extension which steps might we take that make preferred futures more likely? Lindaman was an ardent student of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French theologian, scientist and philosopher. Chardin once famously wrote:

‘One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing – if not ultimately, at least essentially. To be more is to be more united – and this sums up and is the very conclusion of the work to follow. But unity grows, and we will affirm this again, only if it is supported by an increase of consciousness, of vision. That is probably why the history of the living world can be reduced to the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes at the heart of a cosmos where it is always possible to discern more.’¹

Enhancing our ability to ‘see’ is in many ways at the heart of strategic foresight, not in the sense of seeing precisely what is to happen in the future but in the sense of enlarging our understanding of possibilities, of future options, and thus finally of our own role in creating and not merely responding to the future.

Not long after I met Dr Lindaman, The Image of the Future, the seminal study by Dutch sociologist and futurist Fred Polak, was published in English.² The 1973 translation of Polak’s original work, by Elise Boulding, is still typically listed among the foundational works of futures studies. Polak ‘was the first in the post-World War II period to undertake the difficult conceptual work of clarifying the role of the image of the future in the social process at the societal level’ (preface to The Image of the Future, 1973, p. vii).

Focused on the history of Western cultures, and thus subject to contemporary post-colonial futurist critiques, Polak nevertheless laid out the provocative thesis which became a cornerstone of my own futurist writing and consulting. He wrote:

‘Any student of the rise and fall of cultures cannot fail to be impressed by the role played in this historical succession by the image of the future. The rise and fall of images precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures. As long as a society’s image is positive and flourishing, the flower of culture is in full bloom. Once the image begins to decay and lose its vitality, however, the culture does not long survive.’ (The Image of the Future, p.19)

In her preface, Elise Boulding commented: ‘The pessimistic tone of the second part of The Image of the Future, as Polak depicts moment-ridden man trapped in a moment-bound culture, never gives way to despair. At every turn, the author reminds us that there still is a turning possible, that new vistas can open up’.

Here again we see a call for new ways of seeing, for new vistas that can enable us to escape the trap of a ‘moment-bound’ culture. It has been this fundamental viewpoint that led me to conclude that the most potent leverage point for change in communities and organizations is indeed the image of the future. If, by doing the work of strategic foresight, or futuring, people change what they expect to happen or think is possible in the future, or change their vision of preferred futures, then they feel driven to reconsider their present plans and actions. In other words, change the future and the present will follow.

Of course, it was Alvin Toffler, working with his spouse Heidi, who captured the anxiety of those trapped in a moment-bound culture but confronted with rapid and unrelenting change, in his best seller Future Shock in 1970. For me, a college student at the time, this book challenged my concepts about change and stability.

A decade later, I met Toffler at a gathering of the original World Future Society, where he asked in his keynote why the field of futures studies, then more than a decade old, had had so little apparent impact on public policy. His own answer was that the field to that point had focused too much on identifying likely futures, and not enough on exploring less likely but highly impactful possible futures.

Which brings us back to Nikolas Badminton and his current book. The unusual contribution that Nikolas has been bringing to the field of strategic foresight is his insistence on including what he calls ‘dark futures’ in the discussion of future images, and doing so with a very long view, as in hundreds or even thousands of years rather than the quite short time horizons that most futurists adopt.

As the first quarter of the twenty-first century draws towards a close, it is quite clear that possible dystopias loom. In my reading, Nikolas’ thesis is that only by anticipating possible dystopias and confronting the meaning of them, as a part of strategic foresight, can we gain the courage and motivation to choose something better. Indeed, in my experience while the image of the future is a key leverage point for change, it is only a sense of urgency that gets people to begin to move out of our moment-bound existence. We hope, and we move, only if we see.

Glen Hiemstra

Futurist Emeritus at futurist.com

and founder of the Futurist Think Tank

Notes

1 Sarah Appleton-Weber, ‘The Human Phenomenon’, 2003

2 Fred L. Polak and Elise Boulding, ‘The Image of the Future’, 1962, Journal of Political Economy

Preface: From Futurist to Hope Engineer

A continued journey to enlightenment, and progressive futures exploration.

It was mid-February 2024 and I stood in a high-end Orlando hotel checking out to head to the airport after delivering a keynote to 1,200 people. A well-put-together man was on the phone and stood in the queue next to me when he recognized me as the futurist on the stage. He said a few words into the phone and promptly hung up – it was his mother – no mean feat to do that considering he was of East Indian heritage. He walked over and shook my hand, ‘Your keynote was great. You’ve changed how I fundamentally look at the world by engineering hope for a better world.’ I thanked him and we chatted about holistic futures thinking and diving into those dynamics that will shape our world – megatrends on economic shifts, population migration and climate change, the voracious growth of data and artificial intelligence, the need to create sustainable business, and how to we need to ignite imagination, build anticipation, and deepen empathy as core organizational capabilities. All of which I have written about in these pages.

Since the hardback release of this book, I have dedicated my craft to helping others develop an awareness and capability to unconsciously see patterns and explore the futures ahead of them. I help move from cycles of hype (blockchain, web3, metaverse, generative AI etc.) towards hope where some of those things make sense in small and impactful ways with a focus on human productivity, efficiency, and resiliency. I have reaffirmed my role as ‘Hope Engineer’ and now that has taken on a life of its own in the community. The work is being taken to the next level through the hope we must have to imagine better futures for all, and hope that we can make progress happen towards them every day.

More organizations and governments are now developing futures capabilities and hiring my team and me to help guide them. Writing white papers for the US Department of State to influence policy, developing design fiction for Disney to imagine international expansion, and speaking to all hands meetings at companies for 37,000+ people have become commonplace.

There has been a distinct shift from using foresight as an ‘inspiration’ to it being placed in the organization as a serious strategic capability that informs stakeholders on business-critical issues and intersections across geopolitics, climate change and global warming, the fragility of the water-energy-food nexus, technology, hybrid work, and the emergence of ‘Cold War 2.0’ with the conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, the rise of BRICS and political upheaval at home and abroad. We’ve been accelerating into the darkness.

The work I do with clients is still focused on suspending our collective beliefs and biases of how we imagine (and want) the future to be, and opening our eyes and minds to the possibilities for many futures and new ways of operating in the world together to address these challenges. It’s become clear to many that we must now consider positive and dystopian trajectories and futures to create a world view without censoring the possibilities of what may go wrong – something that’s prevalent in the spin, narratives and storytelling in modern society.

Becoming a Futurist

I was born in 1972 in the United Kingdom. The 1970s and ’80s were strange times, ruled by complexity wrought by our unchecked industrial complex, short-term thinking, and political wrangling with what seemed like little consideration for humanity or our preserved futures.

Between the ages of eight and nine, two pivotal things happened in my life.

In 1979, I bought a book about the future – The Usborne Book of the Future. It was a mind-expanding, technological trip through time to the year 2000 and beyond. This was a child’s book that speculated on what the 2000s were going to be like. Some of the predictions are remarkably close to things we have now, and others are not. All of them were about a single, modular future with hyperloops, moon colonies, wrist computers and so much more. I loved the suspension of disbelief and the view of the future. Its unedited re-release in 2023 underlines how much we still need fantastical ideas today.

The second pivotal moment was the first time I used a home computer. My cousin had a BBC Micro connected to the small portable TV in his room, and he showed me how to upload games from a cassette (remember that?) and play. This was a magical and definitive moment. Having a computer became an absolute must-have in my life. A couple of years later, my folks would buy me a Sinclair ZX Spectrum – huge respect to the now deceased Sir Clive Sinclair, who I feel did more for computer literacy in the UK in the 1980s than anyone else.

During the 1980s the world was going through a step change towards being data-driven and tech-centric. At the same time, I embraced the burgeoning subculture of punk rock, skateboarding, exploration of new ideas in media and design, and class rebellion. At the same time, I spent countless hours hidden in public libraries diving deeper and deeper into reading encyclopaedias and thumbing through books on Eastern religions and strategic thinking – The Tibetan Book of the Dead, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and the The Book of Five Rings written by the legendary, innovative and deeply philosophical Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi.

It was at that time I found George Orwell. I devoured Nineteen Eighty-Four. A fictional vision of a future he believed might come to pass – a crumbling society with overarching control from Big Brother who perpetuated a corporatized authoritarian world defined by newspeak to diminish. Feels like the crushing systems of social media and the governmental resistance we see prevalent today with no real idea of who Big Brother is.

Orwell’s imagined worlds felt far on the horizon and yet also familiar. It felt like he gave me permission to explore dystopian ideas of what the world may turn out to be in an unchecked, totalitarian state.

In 1993 I started studying Applied Psychology and Computing – cognitive psychology, computing, database design, human–computer interaction, complexity and chaos theory, linguistics, and the early days of artificial intelligence. The professors seemed like misfits willing to embrace more edgy ideas on the futures that were likely to come with the advancing of the human–computer ecosystem. What I learnt is still hugely relevant to the work I do today.

When I started, I found the ability to use some of