Every organization has to learn how to think about its future. The learning can come through subject matter expertise, experimenting and reflection from experience. I continuously see organizations, and communities and schools, that do not know how to think about its future in an inspiring, compelling, engaging and realistic way. As a result, their conversations are stuck in speculative circularity and backwards looking analysis that moves nothing forward. They get bogged down in past time and spin their wheels in the present, insanely hoping that more of the same efforts will yield different results.
Until people learn how to grow an intimate relationship with their future, they keep the future at arms length with fear, worry and clinging anxiously to their past. When they grow this relationship, they dream and invest in small manifestations of their dreams. Everything they do in the present is inspired by the future narratives they create. They refuse to outsource their future to anyone or anything they hope will save them from their illusion of powerlessness.
