Using Future Studies To Cope with Top Challenges

The following is an adapted excerpt from “ Imagine Then, Act Now: Futures Literacy for Learning Organizations,” published by Mount Vernon Ventures.

According to a recent NAIS survey, heads of school identify the following as the top three risks at their school:

1. Responding to conflict in and about independent schools.
2. Caring for students and staff during stressful times.
3. Ensuring the school’s sustainability.

To address these issues, school leaders need a robust form of “futures literacy,” which is “a universally accessible skill that builds on the innate human capacity to imagine the future’ in order to help people better understand the role of the future in what they see and do.” These words come directly from the recent book, “The Manual for Design Fiction.”

Futures studies expert James Dator envisioned four general ways we can make sense of future trajectories as we take on top challenges:

1. A Continuation Future where business as usual and the status quo for the most part stays the same.
2. A Limits and Discipline Future where behaviors must adapt to internal and environmental limits.
3. A Decline and Collapse Future where system degradation or failure emerges and is resolved and/or exacerbated.
4. A Transformation Future where new technologies, businesses, or behaviors change the game

In reality, school leaders face challenges and opportunities that could involve any of these four paths.

Organizational leaders need insights, tools and frameworks to seize opportunities for transformation while avoiding the risks of collapse or getting stuck in the same old status quo. We know how challenging that can be because, “In reality, the speed with which businesses and organizations are forced to confront future questions requires an agility more akin to rapid software development or minimum product design,” wrote Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby in 2023. “There’s seldom time for a six-month exploration of any topic, with multiple stakeholder meetings and expert soundings. A multi-day sprint is the more likely use case for the approaches defined here.”

To gain the agility necessary to respond successfully to the top challenges facing schools, we need a new approach, beyond the traditional forecasting practices, that helps us optimize the best strategic position. We need an approach that understands that there are multiple probable, plausible and possible futures. The way we strategically position ourselves in the face of these futures can ensure that we influence matters toward a more preferable future, one of regenerative transformation.

One clear example of how The Mount Vernon School has embraced this approach took place in January of 2023. OpenAI had recently released its latest large language model, ChatGPT-3, and teachers were rightfully anxious, even panicked in some instances. Teachers all over the world asked, “What is our policy when it comes to AI in the classroom?” They were demanding their leaders forecast the future of AI developments to develop an optimal policy that could mitigate any and all challenges presented by the quickly developing technology. That would have been a losing strategy.

Instead, The Mount Vernon School asked teachers to imagine probable and plausible scenarios, which were simplified into three situations:

1. The excited, early adopter of artificial intelligence who wants to put AI to use right away with their students.
2. The worried skeptic of artificial intelligence who is inclined to ban the technology altogether.
3. The suspicious teacher who suspects that AI has been used in a way that compromises academic integrity.

What we discovered at Mount Vernon was that we didn’t need a policy as much as a strategic position that was ready to address any of these scenarios. In the words of futurist studies scholar Scott Smith: “Futuring is about understanding the landscape of potential futures in such a way as to guide better decision making in the present.” To address some of the top challenges heads of schools are facing, we need what Jay Ogilvy has called a scenaric stance: “a state of constructively maintaining multiple states of possibility in mind at the same time – considering, processing, evaluating and being ready.”

Too many managers, when faced with overwhelming complexity, “aren’t goal-seeking, but ‘ills-avoiding’– aiming constantly at strategies for avoiding pain, harm, or constraint,” wrote Kees Van der Heijden. A scenarios-based planning approach to futures foresight practice empowers managers and leaders to move from maintaining the status quo when faced with probable and plausible challenges to being able to see the opportunities for transformation as well. To bring it back to one of the opportunities before us, AI researcher Melanie Mitchell makes plain that one thing that separates us from robots is “being able to use your mental models to imagine different possible futures.”

The research presented in “Imagine Then, Act Now,” is meant to do just that: to evolve and grow our mental models such that we see not dystopian or utopian futures but protopian opportunities, which are preferable “state[s] that [are] better today than yesterday, although it may be only a little better…” Protopias are “a continuous dialog,” explained Nikolas Badminton, “more a verb than a noun, a process rather than a destination, never finite, always iterative, meant to be questioned, adjusted and expanded…”

A scenarios-based approach provides just the right mental model for that kind of agile, iterative work that our complex futures will continue to demand of us as organizational leaders and visionaries. The definitions, trends and implications in the report are intended to equip and empower not just leaders but entire diverse teams of engaged educators to develop together a “futures literacy” that prepares all of us for the inevitable uncertainties that define our times. In this way, we can work collectively to ensure that our unknown futures prove to be preferable ones, all because we are strategically positioned to make the most out of any and all of the inevitable challenges and opportunities that lie before us. How might we as schools equip all learners to use this work to design a better planetary existence in our complex, more-than-human world?

Find out more about how a futures thinking approach could strengthen and enhance your school's strategic position by downloading and reading MV Ventures' latest R&D report.