Our Mental Time Machine
未来, future in Chinese, literally means “what has yet to come”, implying that it’s yet to be known, AND yet to be created. We’re often too overwhelmed in the labyrinth of uncertainties to remember there’s power to be gained in this complexity, missing out on opportunities to learn and grow.
I could recount how I started to become a futurist in a drawn-out personal memoir. It would include moments such as a recurring childhood dream of traveling to a futuristic city with a computerized, AI-powered robotic monkey. One of my favorite places growing up was a theme restaurant in Beijing, where a friendly-looking robot, made of smooth, shiny white plastic, had lengthy and funny conversations with 8-year-old, goggly eyed, future futurists. In hindsight, it was likely connected to a back office where an adult had extra fun behind a microphone. I devoured a decade’s worth of Science Fiction magazines in my freshmen summer, after a year in Industrial Design and fell completely in love with them (and with the boy who lent them to me). I was fascinated by the future, the endless possibilities shaped by technologies, politics, societal shifts, and environmental issues, for better and for worse.
As it turns out, the fascination about the future is not unique to the nerdy, imaginative, and creative type.
(Depiction of the Forked-Tube Task Given to Children and Great Apes. Source: Redshaw and Suddendorf (2016), ‘Children’s and Apes’ Preparatory Responses to Two Mutually Exclusive Possibilities.’)
Futures thinking is an innate ability that has propelled humans to advance.
We all have a mental time machine in our head. We keep a calendar, schedule mortgage payments, book tickets and lodging for a trip, get on a diet to become healthier, go get a degree in a field we could potentially work in, and explain projected outputs of a project to our teammates, bosses, or clients.
We learn to anticipate multiple future outcomes at an early age. In an experiment conducted in 2016 with 2-4-year-old children and adult chimpanzees, cognitive scientists created the upside-down Y shaped tube so reward would come from one exit or the other. Two-year-old children and all of the apes failed the test because they covered only one of the exits and thus caught the reward about half of the time. In contrast, by age four, human children consistently succeeded in getting the reward by placing their hands at both exits. (And yes, I plan on testing my daughter as soon as she turns four this summer!)
And, we started to attempt to predict the future with considerable effort since ancient times. The Antikythera mechanism is an Ancient Greek hand-powered orrery (model of the Solar System), described as the oldest known example of an analogue computer that was used to predict astronomical positions and eclipses decades in advance. The instrument is believed to have been designed and constructed by Hellenistic scientists and has been variously dated to about 87 BC, between 150 and 100 BC, or 205 BC.
There were gods and goddesses who possessed the ability of foresight in multiple mythologies and cultures. It’s interesting that they are associated with other powers representing important values along with foresight. Prometheus, also as bringer of fire and wisdom. Shiva, while her third eye also represents higher consciousness. Fujin (Japan), with foresight for weather prediction, controls the elements to maintain balance. Odin, who sacrificed an eye for wisdom and foresight.
Fast forward to January 2020: while keeping my early pregnancy a secret, I signed up for a Strategic Foresight training program at the University of Houston. Something felt just right. Being pregnant got me to anticipate a future that’s no longer just about me and my lifetime. I finally invested in learning how to consider, understand, and plan for the future to add to my professional toolbox. What I didn’t know was that January 2020 would become the beginning of a new era for so many others.
On the last day of the training, news broke about a deadly virus spreading across continents. In a classroom filled with strategic thinkers from NATO, US government agencies, major corporations, independent futurists, and management consultants like myself, everyone was dumbfounded and hesitant to comment. We said our goodbyes and “see you in the future” with a sense of foreboding.
We all desperately wanted to know what would happen next, while knowing we couldn’t know at that moment.
Wouldn’t we all want to know, so we could be better prepared for a global pandemic, a regulation shift, a supply chain disruption, or an economic downturn? Wouldn’t it be great if we could emerge ahead of the competition, first to market with the perfect application of a new technology, riding a major trend wave, dominating the field? Aren’t we all tired of reacting to changes and fearing uncertainties? Is there an equivalent of a crystal ball for all of us to use, or in nerdy terms, a framework, methodology, and formula?
My mental time machine was ticking in 2020, while many of the business leaders I talked with shared their concerns and fears about the future and prompted me to imagine the world beyond the immediate threat of a global pandemic. The dots between years of practice in Design and Innovation connected with those of Strategic Foresight, and it quickly became McKinsey’s new Design x Foresight practice, serving clients globally across industries, and collecting invaluable insights from these opportunities for conversations and exercises with these business leaders.
I will be writing more about these learnings. Here is one to start with:
The leader’s mindset gives us courage and agency to look into the future, to explore, learn, and stay open to possibilities and probabilities. It takes a leader’s mindset to become a leader, not the other way around.
Do you regard yourself and the organization you serve as a leader? What’s your mental time machine taking you these days? What makes it interesting or scary? Do you have a methodical way to parse complex uncertainties and reach a clear vision and an actionable plan? Maybe we can help.
Additional reads on the innate human ability to project into the future
The Invention of Tomorrow - A Natural History of Foresight by Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, Adam Bulley https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Tomorrow-Natural-History-Foresight/dp/154167572X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0
Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind “Current evidence, although indirect or based on anecdote rather than on systematic study, suggests that nonhuman animals, including the great apes, are confined to a "present" that is limited by their current drive states. In contrast, mental time travel by humans is relatively unconstrained and allows a more rapid and flexible adaptation to complex, changing environments than is afforded by instincts or conventional learning.” T Suddendorf 1, M C Corballis https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9204544/
Exploring the Links between Neuroscience and Foresight “Episodic foresight is identified as the primary neural mechanism that enables humans to construct images of the futures, providing explanatory power to further define and understand the processes that are invoked in futures studies and foresight activities.” Maree Conway, Foresight Futures, Australia https://jfsdigital.org/2022-2/vol-26-no-4-june-2022/exploring-the-links-between-neuroscience-and-foresight/