Polyfuturism — One World, Many Futures

Following on from an earlier post, Where Have All The Futurists Gone? I had a conversation with another fellow futurist from South Africa (and my co-author of the book, ‘The Future Starts Now’) about the state of the profession on an upcoming podcast.

Bronwyn said something in response to a question I posed about Afrofuturism, the cultural aesthetic, philosophy of science, and history that explores the intersection of the African diaspora culture with science and technology and envisioning black futures that stem from Afro-diasporic experiences. This is slightly different to Africanfuturism, coined by Nigerian American writer Nnedi Okorafor in 2019 and is more deeply rooted in African culture outside of the larger diaspora and ignores Western influences. But irrespective of these definitions, what she said made perfect sense — futurism and future studies largely ignore the many cultural influences that make up our world in favour of determining one type of future, driven by technological advances and Western society.

It made me think about why this is the case, and why cultural futurism/ futurology has been kept at arm's length because it focuses mainly on the aesthetic and science fiction of the future from the perspective of indigenous culture and out of formal studies and practice.

Then by accident, I came across a recent HBR article on foresight and corporate strategy and it all made sense. There is no room for diverse futures in the boardroom when all they’re concerned with is hitting the next quarter’s KPIs.

Would I rather have a crystal ball that always showed me the future, or a chessboard that always told me the right strategy?

The thing is, it’s very evident that corporate foresight has largely failed as a strategic weapon, otherwise, every single company using it would not be hiring and firing faster than a firework display on New Year’s Eve. When the pandemic hit not one company was prepared and when plans finally started to swing into place everyone ignored human nature and culture in favour of believing that civilisation would prefer to live and work wearing virtual reality headsets locked into an online approximation of their Dilbert Cube.

This domain is true strategic foresight: a disciplined and systematic approach to identify where to play, how to win in the future, and how to ensure organizational resiliency in the face of unforeseen disruption.

Well, I think we put that argument to bed, so let’s move on.

These days, foresight must do more than change the perspectives of a company’s leaders. It must drive business results.

This is back to the crux of my previous piece, where foresight and futurism have been reduced to nothing more than a wish.com version of a Six Sigma Black Belt that married an Actuary. There is little room for the visionary futurism that the World experienced in decades past that set imaginations racing and that can think beyond what we already know. As Bronwyn pointed out in the podcast, the World has raced towards The Singularity without question but beyond this point everyone has stopped thinking about what the possible or preferable futures could look like and how society could be shaped.

All diversity — whether cultural, societal, biological, religious or whatever ceases to be considered because humanity at this point all moves forward at the same time and under the same vision.

But this is not the case, nor should it be. And this is why cultural futurism, or as I want to call it, Polyfuturism, needs to become a pivotal and central theme in all future studies and foresight practice going forward.

And there are many others to consider beyond Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism:

· Polynesian Futurism — Polynesian Futurism is a speculative process based on Polynesian culture and specific problems we face. It uses this context to create a unique future and reject the popular historisation that separates Polynesians from the modern world.

· Queer Futurism — Queer Futurism asks us to imagine a world not constrained by normativity.

· Indigenous Futurism — Indigenous Futurism gives Indigenous writers, artists, filmmakers and other creative practitioners a chance to imagine and carry out thought experiments and see themselves in the future, practising Indigenous knowledge, ideas along with science and technology.

· Retrofuturism — Retrofuturism invokes later technologies from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries while remembering the past’s vision of the future.

· Cyberpunk — Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a “combination of lowlife and high tech”

· Solarpunk — Solarpunk is a genre of Speculative Fiction that focuses on craftsmanship, community, and technology powered by renewable energy.

· Atompunk — Atompunk is a sub-genre of speculative fiction and science fiction that centers on the 1950s and 1960s historical events, particularly the Space Race, nuclear technology, the Cold War.

· Steampunk — Steampunk fuses the first Industrial Revolution’s hands-on machinery with a practical DIY ethos in the postdigital world.

· Utopia

· Polytopia

· Dystopia

· Protopia….

The list is endless and yet all are ignored in pursuit of strategy, profit and ultimately, conformity. Whilst many are steeped in purely speculative science fiction the concepts still form part of cultural ideologies and movements that exist today.

In fact, science fiction prototyping is an aspect of future studies that rarely enters the corporate world because it’s considered an unqualified or unquantified narrative response to strategic requests. And yet in ignorance, the omission completely invalidates any real cultural impact of the foresight being provided.

Tom Vanderbilt, said in his article, Why Futurism Has A Cultural Blindspot, “when it comes to culture we tend to believe not that the future will be very different than the present day, but that it will be roughly the same.” and goes on to say that psychologist George Lowenstein and colleagues argued, in a phenomenon they termed projection bias that people “tend to exaggerate the degree to which their future tastes will resemble their current tastes.”

In other words, the more we approach this idea of a Singularity the more the profession of foresight becomes obsessed with treating every aspect of future studies in the same way without considering deep-rooted cultural influences or indigenous visions for the future.

Projecting the future often presents a similar problem: The object is foregrounded, while the behavioral impact is occluded. The “Jetsons idea” of jetpacking and meals in a pill missed what actually has changed: The notion of a stable career, or the social ritual of lunch.

Again, the march of technology blinds us to making predictions purely based on the influence of that advance in singular contexts.

When was the last time a corporate-focused futurist driven by qualitative research to reflect bottom line results based on a predetermined set of strategies paid any attention to the wider and diverse social or cultural context of their work?

And before you bleat in the comments, I mean wider than what the marketing department will present to you in their data-driven PowerPoint trend decks or that survey you conducted which will ultimately fall foul of David Ogilvy’s classic quote that consumers don’t think how they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say?

Back to HBR we go…

For that reason, strategic foresight should be horizontally positioned, working with different units like marketing, finance, operations and product development, to ensure that the company collectively knows where to play, how to win, and crucially, will be prepared to adapt in uncertain business climates.

Sigh.

You should now, between the previous piece and this one, sense that I loathe how constrained, rigid and boring the art of foresight and futurism has become. That the unbridled and unconstrained art of futurology and future studies of the past gave us predictions we were unprepared for beyond what data could tell us. Yes, many were wrong and have never come to pass but many have become blueprints, for good or bad, for Silicon Valley in the present day.

Many practitioners paint pictures of trends that appear far-fetched or futuristic but are nothing more than grounded in the here and now, written over and over again elsewhere in blog posts from armchair pundits who aren’t paid a fortune but foresee the same.

Is that corporate strategy and foresight or nothing more than what Generative AI is being accused of — just regurgitation of trend analysis and data projection?

In the end, because culture itself is hard to predict then it is ignored as a factor in future studies, especially the boardroom variant. What cultural influence can teach us is that the future we think we want may not be the preferred outcome that another culture wishes to see manifest and so Polyfuturism has to become part of the discipline irrespective of what the technology, corporate strategy or national interest is.

We inhabit one planet but each of us is culturally diverse and envisages slightly different futures ahead. It’s time to take these into account and stop futurists chasing the idea of conformity driven by either a corporate or a technological strategy.

Wouldn’t you rather witness many bright futures or just a single grey one?