Ways of thinking about the Future

 The last post was about Geoff Mulgan’s thoughts about the future in which he made a reference to what someone had called the tenth chapter problem – namely these books which spend the first 9 chapters describing the mess we’re in but cannot produce anything for the final chapter except anodyne platitudes and truisms. Mulgans’ lecture shows how it should be done by offering some imaginative ways to think about the future 

But there are many methods that can be drawn on to expand a possibility space. 

Applying a few simple rules can help anyone or any group to generate options, for 

example to transform an existing activity like childcare, pensions, libraries, tax 

so as to multiply options.  
First you think about extension - taking an aspect of existing practice and going 

further, like Bach’s extension of fugues to six voices or extending the idea of rights 

to new fields, extending school hours, extending suffrage by giving the vote to 

sixteen-yearolds, or six-year-olds.  
Then you try grafting (or combining) taking an idea from another field and applying 

it to another. Again, this is very common in the arts—for example, grafting ideas 

from photography back into painting—and other examples include the way that the 

idea of auctions was grafted onto the management of the electromagnetic spectrum 

(the radio waves used for mobile phones, satellites or television), or how the idea of 

the jury was grafted onto democracy in the form of citizens’ juries.  
A more radical approach is to use inversion, as practised in the Middle Ages during 

Carnival, when for a day the poor pretended to be rich and vice versa.  What if 

farmers became bankers (as happened with the microcredit provided by Grameen 

Bank); patients became doctors; or social care were provided by people who had 

themselves been recipients of care?  What if consumers became makers of things? 
Addition and subtraction are also useful. Baroque and traditional Hindu architecture 

are good examples of extreme addition, and any social service can easily add on new 

elements—like a family doctor who also offers advice on welfare. Much modernist 

art and music favoured subtraction, leading to Malevich’s painting ‘White on White’ 

in 1918 or the silence of John Cage’s 1952 composition 4′33″. This way of thinking 

can also be generative in social contexts: what if you took away half of the roles in 

a hierarchy or introduced a maximum income? Or what if you had to cut a budget by 

half?  Noone likes cuts but I’ve worked with public parks that faced a 50 per cent 

budget cut and were prompted to come up with dozens of creative ways of raising 

money, through events, music, festivals and food, leaving the parks more vibrant 

than they had been before. The cheap prices of today’s supermarkets are only 

possible because Clarence Saunders in Memphis in the early twentieth century had 

the inspired idea of subtracting service staff and letting customers pack their own 

bags. 
Sometimes, not doing things is better than doing them. A surprising example of this 

was found in the military’s experience that taking immediate action to treat soldiers 

suffering from PTSD tended to make it worse. It proved better to let people mobilise 

their own resources and then to focus on the 4 or 5 per cent for whom that approach 

hadn’t worked. Less can be more. And of course veganism is an approach which 

subtracts—excluding meats and dairy products from diets— while much law and 

regulation is now focused on reducing energy use, carbon emissions and travel, 

rather than increasing them. 

If these are some basic methods creative thought can also be helped by mobilising 

metaphor and analogy—seeing one thing and thinking of another (a variant of the 

grafting process described above). Much of social change comes from shifts in 

metaphors. Do we see society as a war, a body or an organism; a building, a machine 

or a family? Is the economy analogous to a household, which means being very careful 

not to spend more than you earn, or is it more like an entrepot or trading post, 

in which case debt may be essential? 
We are at a time of extraordinarily fertile analysis of the past – the ‘long durées’ of 

inequality, governance, values, families – and just as fertile analysis of the present. 

But we’ve made it harder for social scientists to engage with understanding or 

shaping the future. If we really are in a time of multiplying crises then we badly 

need options, and social scientists need to be part of this work. 

 We need the best brains to be working out how to design and run a zero carbon 

economy; a society with more disability; how to make ubiquitous smart technologies 

serve us rather than the other way round; how to counter polarisation; 

misinformation. We need to populate our fuzzy pictures of the future with complex, 

rich, plausible deas, pictures of the possible – a possibility space that is capacious 

and helpful for action in the present. There may not be an immediate demand for 

these, not least as governments attend to the immediate.  

But it is precisely at these times that we need to look ahead, just as in dark days of 

1930s and WW2 some worked hard to think about what could come after, from 

designing welfare states to macroeconomics, decolonisation to human rights and 

the creation of the UN, which a decade before it was founded seemed utterly 

utopian. 

Further Reading
Future Matters – action, knowledge, ethics  B Adam and C Groves (2007) explores 

the adequacy of current ways of handling the future – although the book is just over 200 

pages, this is only google excerpts
Future Babble D Gardner (2010) more books could benefit from this useful summary
Future Vision – scenarios for the world in 2040 Richard Watson and Oliver Freeman  (2012) 

The book is almost 300 pages and is a useful outline of scenario planning – the epilogue 

traces 10 possible shocks.
Global Trends 2040 – a more contested world National Intelligence Council (2021) 

You can always rely on the security services to demonstrate a realistic approach! 

The final section on 5 future scenarios is particularly worth reading.
Global Risks Report 2024 (World Economic Forum) I’m not a great fan of WEF reports 

which tend to suffer from groupthink. This a short (120 page) report which doesn’t 

mention the risk of pandemics.