Reperceiving the Future

Abstract

The future is an aspect of time and like clock time tends to be taken for granted unquestioned as an experience. There is a tendency for both futurists and management scientists inadvertently to adopt a first-order paradigm. In this article, I introduce a second-order approach in which the presence of the decision maker is acknowledged. In this approach, the phenomenology of time consciousness provides a basis for expanding time into a present moment with richer dimensionality, enlarging linear causality to a set of multiple influences on the present moment, some of which originate in aspects of what we call the future. We need to extend the scope of futures methods by considering the interaction between agency and uncertainty. High agency combined with high uncertainty is not yet well supplied with appropriate methods. In this region, the act of reperception is fundamental; algorithmic decision methods are out of their depth. In this different paradigm of time, anticipatory systems are crucial. Practice needs the capacity to navigate in a constantly shifting landscape that distinguishes three qualities of the future symbolized as three horizons. One is the future as seen from the dominant present situation. The second is a future desirable emergent states. The third is a future that holds the powerful and turbulent dilemmas between the other two and requires the navigation skill of the decision maker as an anticipatory system. At the core of this anticipatory system is a multidimensional future consciousness with the capacity to see into the future through different lenses of awareness in the present moment.