O futuro pode ser uma causa a actuar no presente

Um artigo à boa moda antiga na revista HBR de Julho-Agosto de 2020, "Learning from the future".

"If companies want to make effective strategy in the face of uncertainty, they need to set up a process of constant exploration—one that allows top managers to build permanent but flexible bridges between their actions in the present and their thinking about the future. What’s necessary, in short, is not just imagination but the institutionalization of imagination. That is the essence of strategic foresight.

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uncertainty precludes prediction but demands anticipation—and that imaginatively and rigorously exploring plausible futures can facilitate decision-making.

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Humans tend to conceive of time as linear and unidirectional, as moving from past to present to future, with each time frame discrete. We remember yesterday; we experience today; we anticipate tomorrow. But the best scenario planning embraces a decidedly nonlinear conception of time. That’s what Long View and Evergreen did: They took stock of trends in the present, jumped many years into the future, described plausible worlds created by those drivers, worked backward to develop stories about how those worlds had come to pass, and then worked forward again to develop robust strategies. In this model, time circles around on itself, in a constantly evolving feedback cycle between present and future. In a word, it is a loop.

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Once participants began to view time as a loop, they understood thinking about the future as an essential component of taking action in the present. [Moi ici: Ao ler isto, como não recordar Ortega Y Gasset e como ele nos mostra que o futuro pode ser uma causa a actuar no presente] The scenarios gave them a structure that strengthened their ability to be strategic, despite tremendous uncertainty."