To the limited extent that Aotearoa NZ has considered the future, it hasn’t taken a very imaginative approach. The dominant narrative is of an agricultural nation, just more sustainable and regenerative. To develop and give more salience to other future narratives were need to use futures thinking methods to explore other worldviews.
Environmental scanning is an essential futures practice. The purpose of scanning is to systematically identify trends, developments, and points of inertia that may influence an organisation’s (or society’s) future operating environment. Such scans are usually long, and good visual summaries are hard to find. In this post I look at one way that can help illustrate some key insights from the environmental scan I recently did for NZ Search & Rescue.
Thinking about the future often adopts a relatively short-term timeframe. We should be more courageous and explore longer timeframes, especially the next 100 years. This helps us break from our assumptions, consider what systemic changes may be desirable, and how they may play out beyond the short-term. Goldilocks and the three bears provides a useful metaphorical prompt for exploring different timeframes.
