To think about the future, we have to look back, too, explains Rachel Hatch, chief operating officer at Institute for the Future (IFTF), a strategic foresight nonprofit. Her organization researches the present and the past, looking for indicators to what's ahead, making strategic planning possible for the long term. During NeighborWorks America's upcoming symposium, "45 & Forward: Readying Our Field for the Future," Hatch will help nonprofits that attend think ahead, too.
The Institute for the Future was founded in 1968, and is the longest running independent strategic foresight institute in the U.S. "It's not about predicting the future," explains Hatch. "Rather, it's about becoming better prepared for the future. Our mission is helping organizations, communities and leaders become future-ready."
When NeighborWorks looks back, it's at a 45-year record of helping people find a safe place to call home. But what do affordable housing and community development look like 10 years down the road? What's next?
"What foresight does at its best is give us a taste of the future so we're better prepared – so we're less unmoored when it happens," says Hatch. "You can navigate with greater confidence because it's not your first time considering the future. There are no facts about the future, as such. So we look to signals of change and drivers of change to plan for what's next."
Teff Teffera, digital experiences manager at IFTF, and Hatch will take the lead during NeighborWorks' symposium, guiding participants through exercises in foresight. Here, they share some of their background and reasons why foresight is important.
What is a futurist?
Hatch: We conduct research about the future, typically focused on a 10-year time horizon. As part of our practice, we train people across a wide range of sectors in strategic foresight. That's what we look forward to doing in Pittsburgh: Training people to think about the future at this moment of the anniversary. When we're together, we'll collectively create a different kind of imagination space. We train people in an imagination space about the long-term future. People often think in the three-year strategic planning cycle, but we want to train people to look even farther ahead.
How do you explore the future?
Teffera: Over the decades, we've developed tools to support the intellectual scaffolding that's needed for the entire foresight cycle — from preparation to foresight, to insight and to action. History is important. A rule of thumb is to look twice as far back as the future we want to explore. We look forward to doing that in the field of affordable housing and community development.
Hatch: Sometimes we look forward as far as 50 years or 100 years. But 10 years is a sweet spot for groups that are trying to use foresight to relieve real pain points that decision makers face in the present.
Could you talk about the concept of imagination?
Hatch: One of our colleagues, Jane McGonigal, wrote a book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything: Even Things that Seems Impossible Today. She wrote it during the context of the pandemic, where every day we'd see a news headline that deemed something "unimaginable." Schools are shutting down. The supply chain is breaking. You could tally them up, but in reality, a global respiratory pandemic was imaginable. I remember when I first joined the Institute and we were working on scenarios with the staff for what would happen if there was a global respiratory pandemic. I vividly remember people saying, "Oh my God, the kids would be home from school. How would I work?" I remember someone else saying they had some masks from a painting project stored out in the garage and maybe they'd wear those. It was striking when these did ultimately come to pass in 2020.
The metaphor I think of is this: When you're in a room and the ceiling is low, you feel the heaviness. In a high ceiling room, it allows us that space to think more expansively; to externalize what we hold in our minds as private imaginations of the future into a more collective experience. To imagine together.
What are some drivers you look at in affordable housing and community development?
Hatch: We look at a range of factors that include climate change, a change in demographics, the regulatory climate that you have to grapple with, artificial intelligence and more. IFTF also recently completed research on the future of children and families, which will provide insights as well, as will the other participants. The tone to strike is one of what we at IFTF call "urgent optimism."
Teffera: People sometimes feel the future is just coming toward them; they have no sense of agency. Through the process of the foresight cycle, as they understand change is happening, they do start to find themselves in that future; see themselves there. Optimism is an outcome we hear from people as they work through the strategic foresight cycle.
What drives you to do what you do? Why should we be looking to the future now?
Teffera: We all plan for the future but for me it's the systematic way I do it that I find most appealing. You internalize the tools, internalize the mindset. Ultimately, it's about realizing the future you want – the preferred future. It's a tool and it drives you toward the future you prefer.
Hatch: When I think of NeighborWorks and the housing and community development space, it feels like the context is changing every day. It's important to take the time to envision a preferred future and themselves in it. An anniversary moment feels like the hinge between the past and the future.
Why is future thinking important for this particular sector?
Hatch: I think of the affordable housing space as central to equity – and IFTF's vision is a world that systematically harnesses the tools of futures thinking to create more equitable and sustainable societies. To me, the housing and community development space has always played a role with regard to social change. While there is more work to do, we wouldn't be where we are if it weren't for the commitments of NeighborWorks in particular. Yes, it's important now – in 2024 – to make this investment of thinking about a preferred future. But I think it's always been in the mix. When you look at the history of leaders like Dorothy Richardson, what strikes me is that while neighborhoods were being torn down, there was a preferred future that she was envisioning and calling people into: Not to tear down neighborhoods but to fix them. She and others had to voice that for it to become a reality.
How much should we be thinking about the future and why?
Teffera: When we talk about the future and the capacity to handle this future, people have very different takes. A lot of people do feel the future tends to happen to them. If that's how it feels, then let's use tools to map out what the possibilities are, what the threats are. Once we do that, you can watch out for signals. You can make it a daily practice and keep it going to consider the future – the plurality of the future.
Why should people attend NeighborWorks' symposium?
Teffera: We will explore the neuroscience of foresight, teach easy entry points into thinking long-term that can become habits, and even creatively generate headlines from the future. It's going to be practical and fun!
Imagine the future for yourself and your community! Register for NeighborWorks' symposium, to be held on Aug. 28 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. You can also subscribe to our blog and receive key insights and takeaways from IFTF's exercise.
08/09/2024
