Hoe meer open, eerlijk en echt je bent over je werk, hoe meer het waarde voor je publiek. Fake en glitter verhalen delen lijkt misschien even fijn, maar op de lange termijn is het schadelijk, voor iedereen

I’m a bit lost here. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe the future starts when we get lost. When we look for being lost.

Our 'Exploring Futures image shows people with maps. Not because we promise to show the way, but perhaps because we want to help you get lost.

So maybe it’s about stopping. About suspending movement. About realizing that we can’t just keep doing what we were doing. That true futuring starts the moment we understand the past can’t continue on the same path and buy a pause.

But what do we have instead? Well, to begin with we were never really about 'desired futures', we were more about changes - the kinds that are already visible but go unnoticed because we rush too quickly toward the next 'desired future'.

Today, our politically correct 'desired future' looks different, all these GDPRed SDGs 5P peppered with GSIs. But they are still just as clearly defined. Even when today’s futurists talk about 'uncertainty', it’s 'our kind of uncertainty' - controlled, measured, with KPIs in place to track progress

Constantly changing, shifting, evolving? Apparently that wasn’t self-evident - worse even, the very ‘transition’ was understood as movement toward a defined goal. Back then that goal was liberal capitalism, Fukuyama’s 'end of history'. The rest of the world just needed to catch up.

The 'future' always sounded to me like a kind of fetish, something we chase without questioning too much. When I was studying sociology in the 1990s, our program was called Understanding Societies in Transition. I remember thinking that was redundant - aren’t all societies always in transition?