The Future of Now

If you’re a regular reader of our newsletters, you know that Leadership + Design has chosen to focus this year’s articles on the future and futurist thinking. 

We believe that, by shifting our time horizons, and entertaining multiple possible futures, school communities and school leadership teams can become more agile, creative, and optimistic as they move into what’s next. 

But while that’s true, another idea is also important to remember: your life – and the lives of your students – are happening now. And nothing is more real than that.

In other words, the future is not the opposite of now. The future is just a now that hasn’t happened yet. 

Futurist thinking, therefore, is a toolkit for imagining future nows, each of which is as real and as ephemeral as the now where you have chosen to read this article. It’s an act of care for moments that will be very real to the people you love – and people you don’t even know yet. 

At L+D, one of our favorite books is The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which defines words that don’t yet exist, but should. One of my favorite entries is sonder – “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” 

As futurists, we could add a corollary definition: “the realization that future humans – including future you – will be living lives as vivid and complex as your life today.” In that sense, futurism grounded in a commitment to now is a radical act of empathy. 

We must reject the either/or framing that we can prioritize the future, or now, but never both at once. If futurism detaches us from what is happening now, it’s yet another practice that threatens to disconnect us from our humanity and lives. 

On the human level, schools often encourage people in their communities – especially our students – to sacrifice today with thoughts of tomorrow. I’m not talking about a healthy and well-developed ability to defer gratification. I am talking about our failure to distinguish between constructive adversity and simple drudgery, the often-implied argument that if you’re miserable today, somehow it will be worth it later.

A Head of School I work with said something very wise at the beginning of our time together, and I’ve been tempted to get it printed on a bumper sticker: “high school is not a waiting room for college. It’s a time of life.” Where she said “high school,” you could just as easily insert kindergarten or middle school or any stage of schooling you work in. 

It’s a welcome rejoinder to the dominant idea that “the real world” is somehow something that exists only after school, rather than an experience that our students and our colleagues navigate every day. College is also the real world, just like your career and retirement and even bingewatching videos. Wherever you are is the real world – indeed, it’s the stuff that makes up our lives. 

At the level of the institution, a commitment to futurist thinking shouldn’t metastasize into a hyperfocus on long-term planning. The quality of your institution rests on the experience people are having today. 

A common duration for a strategic plan is five years. Futurist thinking might encourage us to think in terms of ten years – what Jane McGonigal argues, in her book Imaginable, is how far we can constructively imagine the future. If you follow some of the exercises we share this year, we would hope to help you think another 10x – perhaps even 100 years into the future.

But what about 1,000 years into the future? 100,000 years? 100,000,000? What is the future of your school then? 

It’s a somewhat ridiculous thought experiment ultimately designed to make a point: no school can have a strategy for being swallowed by a dying star. The institutions we steward will not last forever. Futurist thinking is not about chasing permanence. It’s about steering your institution toward a series of preferred moments, both immensely valuable and fleeting. 

If you think forward long enough, imagining your school stretched out into the future like an elongated strand of spaghetti – as if it were passing through a black hole, which might even happen if you stretch it out far enough – your imagination will spring back to the present, or snap entirely. 

Leaders must wear metaphorical bifocals, practicing empathy toward people experiencing future nows while staying grounded in the present moment. It’s just one more opportunity to practice the vital skills of managing ambiguity and rejecting either/or thinking.

The best form of futurist thinking is present for the singular value of now, as well as imagining – and working toward – the nows we hope to make possible.