Future comes into being, when…

Future comes into being when relationships succeed!

Zygmunt Bauman by Michał Nadolski, via Wikimedia Commons

The philosopher Zygmunt Bauman asks: How to make the world fresh again?

What sets OUR kind of future research apart from all the others? In a nutshell: the human factor. That means relationships. Relationships between people. But also between technology and mind. Humans and nature. Our inner and outer worlds. Society and economy.

The future happens when relationships succeed. That’s the way it is in love, but also in “Enlightened Digitalisation”. Or in “Enabling-Technology”.

  • Emotion and empathy:
    Everything in the future ultimately depends on human relationships. The meaningful cooperation between people, reflected in the successes of the technical, social and economical. And from our relationship to ourselves: to our inner becoming, to our personal (future) energy.
  • Power of confidence:
    Let’s forget the debate about optimism OR pessimism! The future will not be “bad” or “good”. (The end of the world is coming, but most of the time it is delayed by a few thousand years). Good future is created by the ability to transform.
  • Inspiration instead of prophetic posturing
    It is important to help people and organisations to DESIGN the future consciously. It’s less about prophecy than about the power to see the world and its possibilities with new eyes. Forecasts can be useful for that. But only when we understand them as instruments of the mind to better understand the world in its complexity.
  • Better questions instead of clever answers:
    It’s about finding the right questions that can replace answers that turned out wrong. The philosopher Zygmunt Baumann had only one central question in his whole life: HOW TO MAKE THE WORLD FRESH AGAIN???

Constructive visions: retelling the future

© Julian Horx

There are endless stories in the marketed future. Many are about gloomy abysses, about dystopias that are supposed to warn us about the mistaken tomorrow. In today’s culture of agitation, doomsday warnings no longer lead to resistance, but to depression and cynicism. Utopias have a similarly fatal effect: they create illusions that can only be disenchanted. And they contribute to disastrous manipulation and power strategies.

© Zukunftsinstitut Horx GmbH

In our future work, we therefore take the path of CONSTRUCTIVE VISION. Instead of projecting from the present into the future, we look BACK FROM THE FUTURE TO TODAY. Constructive visions do not show the future from the perspective of problems, but from the side of SOLUTIONS. They allow a mental change of perspective. They anticipate the future that grows in us!

To quote Zygmunt Bauman: The world becomes FRESH again – when we look at it in wonderment and from scratch.