Futures Thinking
I’m curious to know how you think about the futures! Do you think about it a lot? Maybe you think about the field of study you want to pursue or the job you want to have when you are grown up. Or is it possible you already thought about climate change and how it could change your world if people don’t take action? There are lots of things we can think about regarding the futures!
I told you that we cannot ever be sure what will happen in the futures, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have an impact on how the futures will look!
There is not one future, but there are multiple possible futures influenced by the things that happen in the present.
What if I told you that we could work our way up to better futures by thinking about possible futures and acting upon them!
When we think about the futures we can think of what we want to see and don’t want to see. After that, we are able to make decisions today based on these different possibilities. We call it futures-thinking. We think about all the possibilities the futures could hold.
Let’s say that everything is possible, you can let your imagination run free. When we see preferable futures, a future we would like to see, we can make decisions today to try and make that future come true. When we see futures we don’t want to happen, we can make decisions that will try and prevent that.
For example: Climate change is scary for a lot of people. You don’t want to ruin the world you live in. You could think about possible futures where every person and animal on earth dies because of climate change and you probably don’t want that. How can people prevent this? Maybe by taking the bike a bit more often or recycling your trash. This way people can make decisions today that could make a better tomorrow.
Do you see what I mean? By thinking and making choices today you can have an impact on your desirable futures, the futures you wish for! People will never be sure how the futures will look like, but they are able to take steps in the right direction to move as close as possible to the futures they would like to see. Just think about our tree. A tree can grow in a lot of different ways and we could help it grow by watering it and trimming the branches.
