Future-fit you
How will you play your part in creating the future?
“You can never plan the future by the past.” — Edmund Burke. 1
If, as Dr Peter Senge suggests, “Leadership is the capacity of a human community to shape its future” then anyone who takes responsibility for playing their part in creating a future-fit organisation is contributing to leadership. 2
So how can you play your own part most effectively?
Cultivating a 2D3D mindset is a pivotal place to start. 3
An individual with a 2D3D mindset operates in line with a fundamental, but frequently overlooked truth about human perception, namely that none of us ever sees the whole picture in any situation.
We each come at things from our own particular angle, bringing our unique, individual, diverse, but inevitably partial perspective to situations.
It’s from these diverse perspectives that the innovation, agility, and adaptiveness characteristic of future-fit organisations emerge, enabling them to thrive in an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
Widespread adoption of 2D3D mindsets enables sense making, decision making & action taking to become more joined-up, iterated, embedded and distributed throughout an organisation.
The biggest barrier to future fitness is when individuals, especially influential ones, mistake their 2D perspective for the whole picture.
When we fall into this trap, others who see things differently appear misguided or mistaken.
Then we’re only able to relate to others who see things the same way we do, so we align with them and alienate everyone else.
The most systemic contribution a future-fit you can make to shaping a bright future for yourself and the organisation or organisations you work for is to adopt a 2D3D mindset, enact it in your actions and interactions, and by example encourage others to do the likewise.
Future-fit you
What would your unique future-fit you look like?
What would it feel like to be your unique future-fit you?
How would you act and interact?
How would you create value with others, contributing to sustainable, widely shared prosperity, in terms of human flourishing and wellbeing? 4
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These are important questions that can only be meaningfully answered experientially.
But how do you create an experiential awareness of something that only exists in the future?
You use your imagination.
Imagination
Throughout the modern and postmodern eras, the vital role of imagination in human progress has been progressively devalued and ultimately dismissed by scientific materialism.
That’s despite truly gifted scientists acknowledging its fundamental importance, the most obvious example being Einstein himself:
“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world”. 5
In a turbulent world where the future can’t be predicted by extrapolating the past, the recognition of the fundamental importance of imagination is essential.
Two perspectives from contemporary thinkers help illuminate what imagination is, why it’s so important, and how we might revitalise it’s central role in creating future-fit selves and organisations.
Firstly, here’s Dr Iain McGilchrist from his magnum opus The Matter With Things:
“Imagination is not, as it is sometimes conceived, the capacity to conjure the unreal, but, for the first time, to see the real — the real that is, for reasons of deeply ingrained habit, no longer present to us.
It is not a means of placing something else between us and the world, but of removing the accretions that prevent us from that world’s fuller realisation.
To see is not just to register sense-data, but to see ‘into’ the life of what is seen; and ‘through’ it to the greater picture that lies beyond it, is implicit in it, and make sense of it in terms of the totality of experience.” 6
Secondly, here’s cognitive scientist, Professor John Vervaeke of the University of Toronto speaking here in Cambridge in February 2022: 7
“(French philosopher) Henry Corbin described imagination as an equivocal term with two different meanings — one is imaginary and the other is imaginal.
“The imaginary is our more prototypical understanding of imagination. This is internal visualization — and we can do it right now: picture a sailboat in your mind. Were its sails up or down? You can answer, right?
The imaginary disconnects you — in cognitive science lingo you “go offline”. It disconnects you from your perception in a way that can be disastrous because with the imaginary, with your mind wandering, you can be attentionally blind to your environment. So the imaginary is imagination that takes you away from perception.
The imaginal is the opposite. The imaginal is externally projected “seeing like” and “seeing as”.
Think of a child picking up a stick, tying on a cape, and “I’m Zorro”. They’re not forming an imaginary picture in their head. They’re not disconnecting from the world of perception. They’re assuming an identity to see what it tastes like. They're trying to see as Zorro sees, and they might gain important skills or virtues — what it feels like to be heroic perhaps.”
Vervaeke gives a further example:
“I’ve also been a professional Tai Chi instructor for a couple of decades and when I have novice students come in I first have them just stand. This kind of pisses them off because they want to be doing the cool stuff — but they have to learn first how to stand.
So I say stand as if you're in a shallow stream and from your knees down sinking into the mud. You want to have the feeling that you're not skimming along the surface of the floor but sinking into it, rooted down. From the knees up to the midsection, imagine the water flowing by in the stream. You want this to feel like it's got the flexibility and the force of water. And from the midsection up is in the air. You want it to feel as insubstantial as air feels.
Why is this important? Because normally our attentional configuration is like an inverted triangle. Our attention is all up in our head, with very little attention lower down. When you're like that it's easy to push you over. But when you imaginally augment your perception, you get properly rooted. You reorganize your attentional triangle and now you're ready to fight.
So, the imaginal is not imagination that takes you away from perception — it’s imagination for the sake of perception.”
Questions for reflection
What does my future-fit self look and feel like?
How would my future-fit self act and interact to create value with others, contributing to sustainable widely shared prosperity, human flourishing, and wellbeing?
How will I use my imagination to create my future-fit self?
Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791, Volume IV, p. 55). Edmund Burke (1729-1797) was a Dublin born statesman, economist, and philosopher who served as a British MP between 1766 and 1794.
The Dance of Change (1999) p 16.
For more detail on 2D3D mindsets, see this previous post.
This phrasing is borrowed from my colleague Paul Barnett’s observation that “all businesses and organisations exist to create value which should contribute to sustainable widely shared prosperity, measured in terms of human flourishing and wellbeing.”
“What Life Means to Einstein: An Interview by George Sylvester Viereck” The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929).
The Matter With Things (2021) Kindle version p1188 of 2996.
I’ve edited Vervaeke’s verbal delivery slightly for flow. You can watch his Cambridge talk here. The whole talk is around a hour, plus 50 minutes Q&A — all very informative. The section quoted above is from 38:50 — 42:02.