Telling the Future is Creating The Future

Reflections on the unseen power of strategy, Pt. 1

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Does it also seem to you that as a generation, we are far more future-focused in our daily lives than at any other time?

Our days and nights are punctuated by weather reports and market trends, predicted events and modelled futures, all sold convincingly by salesmen, statesmen, politicians and celebrity voices. Predictive algorithms feed us a chorus of futures recited daily like scripture.

We check the weather app before opening the blinds. We respond viscerally to rage-bait on social media before knowing whether it's true.

Awash in all this ‘future-speak’, it’s not surprising we too speak of tomorrow as though it’s already known. As though the “As it is written, so let it be done” was uttered by us.

Why this fixation?

Is it because the present no longer feels like a place of power?

Is it because, entangled in entrenched systems, locked into inherited routines, and restricted by prescribed ways of living and doing, we feel cornered? So, in feeling cornered, we escape into the only available place of opportunity and freedom, tomorrow?

If today feels unchangeable, then naturally, tomorrow becomes the only clean canvas we have for painting something new or different. The future becomes not just the place of hope, but our last domain of personal agency.

Given our psychological tendency toward predictability, certainty, and cognitive ease, the predicted future, with its glittered, well-laid path, becomes the easy and frictionless one to follow.

Think of the narratives we absorb: "AI Will Replace 40% of Jobs Within the Next 10 Years", "Owning a Home Is No Longer Realistic for Most Millennials and Gen Z", "The Middle Class Is Disappearing—You’ll Either Be Rich or Poor" 

The result? Resignation. Acceptance. Surrender.

In doing so, we are recruited. We are recruited into mistaking possibility for inevitability.

We begin to live as if…as if the forecasts were fate; as if we wanted it all along; as if we chose it.

Our minds, our bodies, our actions subtly align with what’s been anticipated, and like a platoon of obedient soldiers falling into step, we start to march to the rhythm of the projected future.

This foretold future becomes our present, not because it was destined, but because it was obeyed and enacted in the quiet, repeated micro-activities of daily life.

What if we refused the script? What if we ignored the trends, the predictive programs and persisted in what is directly in front of us? What if we honoured, not the external influence, but what naturally arises within us, from instinct, presence, from the ordinary touch-points of life?

What if we reclaimed today, not as a defiant reaction to a future we don't like, but as the tranquil, clear-eyed understanding that ‘today’ is the only place where futures are truly chosen, not followed?

What would you choose?

How would today be different?

Even one unforecasted choice sheds light.

Perhaps it's worth remembering that telling the future is creating the future, because in believing it...

WE make it so.

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This is just the beginning of a deeper reflection on the role of strategy in shaping futures and their acceptance. The focus will be on small to medium businesses. More soon.

If you're wondering, this reflection offers some insight into how I approach strategy—quietly, creatively, and with a long view, especially for those building with meaning in mind.