Organizations erroneously believe that 100% of the value of strategic planning for the future lies in determining “what comes next” or putting a stake in the ground regarding “where we want to be.”
Most of the real value associated with strategic planning for the future emerges from a nondelusional articulation of the current situation. Just like with Uber or Google Maps, if you want to get where you are going, you have to be very specific about where you are starting from.
Futurists and strategic planners need to stop obsessing about technology end-points and become adept at the twin interrelated skills of situation analysis and world building. Situation analysis involves diagnostically fleshing out the psycho-social-economic reality of the present — how we think, how we live, how we interact, how we work. World-building, on the other hand, involves imaginatively architecting a depiction, at an MRI-level of detail, of future us. What will our Umwelt — a term coined by zoologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll in 1909 to describe the sensory bubble that surrounds an animal; its perceptual world — be?
