Tomorrowland

For our nation's future, is it time now to reimagine the American Dream?

The original artwork was created with the assistance of DALL-E.

When I was recently in Milan, the CEO of a large Italian company told me over lunch that on some days, she’d love to have a crystal ball that could give her some certainty about the future—and a chess board to guide her toward creating the right strategy for her family’s business in these turbulent times.

I found that wish to be both compellingly authentic and held by quite a few leaders in our growing #NewRules network. When I got back to New York, I shared her comment with strategic futurist Wayne Pan, just before interviewing him for an upcoming segment of our #NewRules podcast.

Pan laughed. “Wishing for certainty is understandable,” he said. Trouble is, neither Pan nor anyone else in today’s growing, $200 billion strategic futures industry can deliver any certainty about what the future holds—not now, nor ever. “Certainty doesn’t exist when talking about the future,” Pan says. A research director at The Institute for the Future, Pan quipped that “there are possibilities we can create”—but time travel isn’t one of them.

We sat down with Pan after he returned from an annual, global meeting in Dubai with some of the world’s top futurists, who cite a sharp rise in the demand for their services amid rising geopolitical tensions and global concerns over whether climate change and emerging technologies will bring us together or tear us further apart. Having lived and worked in six countries across three continents, Pan has not only been helping Fortune 500 companies explore and plan for the future, he also brings a global and cultural perspective to his work based on a deep and passionate appreciation of cultural differences and local contexts.

To be future-ready, he told us, we must reevaluate everything—from our belief in the need for constant growth to how we define success, perceive reality and characterize the American Dream.

What follows are some short, edited excerpts of our conversation. Our full interview with Pan about what he cites as some of today’s key signs and signals foreshadowing the future will be featured in its entirety on our podcast.

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MARCIA: Just about everyone, it seems, is experiencing a huge and long-swirling transition—a trajectory of accelerated change which makes many of us feel like the world is in a constant and unprecedented state of flux and uncertainty that won’t be ending soon, if at all. How should we think about the future?

WAYNE: The fractures we see in society today are clues that we are not in a system that everyone feels a part of, nor a system in which everyone feels they belong.

…I think we’re beginning to see how brittle our social systems are and how deeply tied they are to old “truths” that are no longer true, or for some people, never were.

…We’ve also built many of our present systems around this idea of limitless growth and infinite resources. But that doesn’t make sense anymore, especially if we now have limited resources and populations that are decreasing rapidly. Japan now has a well-documented decline in its national birth rate, so something has to give. If Japan is going to hold constant on its desire to limit immigration flows, then its pyramid is going to tip. This is being faced by many countries, so we in strategic futures-thinking have to look into the future and ask, ‘Are we protecting this notion of nation states or will this, too, have to change in the future?’ What’s important is to be clear about the changes happening now and to collaboratively, if possible, decide which values as a global society we now have and will need and want to carry forward.

MARCIA: A lot of our dominant social narratives are also no longer relevant. How big is the gap between what we’ve told ourselves as a society to make sense of the world, and what is actually true, and how does that gap influence your work?

WAYNE: The stories we tell ourselves to make sense of the world will have to change. The dominant economic mindsets that exist now and influence how people relate to each other are things that also must change, so we can see what kinds of systems might make more sense for tomorrow. …Futures thinking helps us look hard at this moment of time to understand why many or our systems are now fragile so that we can design and develop new resilient systems to take their place.

MARCIA: I also teach change management and media at Columbia University, and many of my students are deeply into calling many of our systems into question. Futures thinking has been moved to the front burner for systems change work, and it’s inspiring.

WAYNE: It’s kind of funny that GenZ can often get a lot of grief for questioning the systems we have in this time of disruption, conflict and accelerated change. I and a lot of people in my generation grew up learning certain dominant narratives, and were taught that these truths were just how things were supposed to be, and we accepted them. But now GenZ is calling things into question because they see things around them sort of falling apart in ways that we haven’t yet accounted for, nor really have been able to help them understand.

I mean, if you tell a young person today that the mark of success is purchasing a house and that they have to figure out some way to spend $2 million on a house somewhere, it just seems laughable now. So as a futurists, part of getting to the truth has been realizing that the American Dream was never really meant for all of America. It was a narrative that we were sold and one that isn’t holding up anymore as more and more people feel less and less able to access this dream. GenZ, I think what they’re seeing and calling into question is, was any of this true in the first place?

…The kind of futures thinking we also need to practice now is to explore the edges, where people are making what might seem like absurd assertions or inventions so we can uncover new perspectives and understand what’s driving them and where these fringe ideas might lead, and how they might scale. I don’t want to paint futures thinking as this sort of head-in-the-clouds type of discipline, but it does start with allowing yourself to consider all of the possibilities, and then to work your way back from there. We start by challenging narratives that don’t hold other possibilities in place.

MARCIA: How difficult is it to have these conversations? Some people tend to have a natural bias toward ideas and concepts that confirm, as opposed to contradict, ideas they already believe. Such biases can sabotage our capacity for fresh thinking. On the other hand, some conflict can help teams build something better. How does creative conflict play into futures thinking and design?

WAYNE: I think it’s important to acknowledge that there are people and interests, consciously or not, that don’t want to reset the narratives we have now, right? There are some invested in a particular current narrative and specific trajectory. It’s a situation in which we need to find ways to have civil discourse and productive conflict so we can collectively build things we can all live with. It’s not just about winning. It’s not about my idea winning over yours. To be successful, it’s got to be what we, together, can envision for the future and figure out what we can do together to ensure it will be a big part of where we’re headed. …We need a new kind of literacy to help us design the kind of future we wish to have.

…What I see in the U.S. now is a civility challenge. We are, in our culture now, so hyper-competitive and we want to win and now we feel like we’re on a team— but our team has to win and that does not help civil discourse, nor help us to create the creative collaboration needed. We need to break that mindset, to dismantle it. We need to begin to relate to each other as people in better ways, and agree to disagree without hating each other or thinking our identity is at stake if someone doesn’t agree with us.

MARCIA: What are some of the signs and signals you’re observing now, in today’s society, which foreshadow the future in your view?

WAYNE: While attending the global futures summit in Dubai, I ran into some folks who had undertaken this amazing project in Toronto, called the Method Collective. They created a public space for collective grieving, this really amazing sort of public art space that is tapping into this really growing need by people in society today to process grief and generational trauma and to provide people with the opportunity to connect with each other in person. And that, itself, is a signal.

…What then does that mean for us? How should we interpret this? This could have many interpretations, and that’s why futures-thinking should never be done alone. You want to gather as many people and voices and perspectives together as possible to begin to think about what this might mean for all of us.

MARCIA: What other signals have you discovered that merit further study?

WAYNE: Some of the effects of the world we’re living in now are already locked into the future, and will keep happening two or three decades from now — like how the amount of carbon we’ve been pumping into our atmosphere will be influencing climate change—and our responses to it—for years to come. Acknowledging this, facing it, will help us to build community structures that are more resilient, and adaptable and flexible to our personal and institutional needs. Or, beyond climate, for example, we also look at things like food systems. Do we need to spend money to develop synthetic food? What if all or some of that money went into eliminating food waste or into soil restoration or back into more urban and rural farms? Each system carries a lot of questions designed to explore new possibilities.

MARCIA: What, then, would be your “new rule” for those wishing to have more certainty and for their companies to manage resilience?

WAYNE: Have humility. Let go of this really human desire to have certainty. Aim for clarity, instead, about what you want to happen and tap into your inner child who asks why, who questions everything and who’s brazen enough to imagine and envision different realities and how we might be able to get there.

…I think if we really want to transform our world and create one that’s adaptable and flexible enough for all the changes coming our way, I think we have to allow ourselves to open ourselves back up to possibility, so we can envision all sorts of different things. If you put in the work to understand all of the different possibilities, you don’t need to fear moving forward.