When you read the news and think about how to keep abreast of events or perhaps even stay ahead, how do you feel? If the answer is unsettled, uneasy, uncertain or completely unsure, you are not alone.
When global crises are more complex and interconnected than ever and the present is moving so fast, planning for the future can almost feel impossible. That’s because the uncertainty of the future triggers something deep within us. Our instincts are hardwired to focus on survival, making the unknown feel like a threat. And when we’re in a place of fear it’s very hard to think expansively, abundantly, creatively, and imaginatively. Let alone know what steps to take, to make that better future a reality.
How do we break through that fear and make space for new possibilities?
Answering this becomes particularly hard when we’re talking about the kinds of institutions tasked with grappling with global crises (think governments, funders, bureaucracies…). Driving transformative change via typically slow moving organisations is daunting. But when we consider these organisations are made up of people, then we can start to focus on understanding how that wiring is set up - working with our brain’s settings. and not against them.
By using tools like strategic foresighting, backcasting, visioning and even play, then not only can we start clearheadedly preparing for the future and building resilience; but we can also start driving meaningful change right now.
In this article we’re setting out five of the most common challenges we come up against in this kind of work, breaking each one down from a behavioural perspective, and showcasing examples of how we have worked with partners to overcome those challenges and build intentions and strategies for the future.
Mental processes like creativity, emotions, and biases, are often ignored in futures work, but understanding them can help individuals and groups better navigate discussions about what’s ahead. The way we remember things, the feelings we have, and the mental shortcuts we take all shape how well we can imagine and plan for the future.
Our brains are wired to process information based on past experiences, which can make imagining new futures difficult. This is exacerbated when we’re stressed or under duress. We often struggle with predicting the unknown, and so rely on linear thinking instead of exploring the myriad possibilities the future could hold.
The brain prefers familiarity and tends to base predictions on past patterns. This is partly why thinking about the future feels uncomfortable - it’s outside our known world. It’s also because as adults, we’re often trained out of using our imagination in our day-to-day lives. Even though imagining futures for a group develops a shared identity, and imagining oneself in the future is essential for personal motivation and well-being.
Stress can also dampen creativity and imagination, making us more focused on the present and the immediate past and harder to imagine what the future might hold, especially when it involves rapid change and unfamiliar possibilities.
As part of our role on the Frontier Tech Hub we work with UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) staff and global partners to understand the potential for innovative tech to address global challenges, and then test and scale their ideas.
To tackle the question of How might AI might change diplomacy in the next 10 years? we took policy advisers on a 60-minute Fieldtrip to the Future to the year 2034, where they navigated two distinct AI-driven diplomatic scenarios in trade & economy and human rights and experienced new ways of working with coworkers like diplobot.
By providing role-specific contexts, participants could not only imagine potential futures but also experience them firsthand; engaging emotionally and intellectually with what that future might feel like. By helping institutions visualise how tools like AI could reshape diplomacy, we’re equipping them to prepare for the disruptions ahead. The FCDO are now proactively exploring how AI tools can help diplomats practise negotiation scenarios.
Imagination at its best isn’t just about dreaming big. It’s about imagining an ideal or ‘normative’ future, and creating a clear path from where we are to where we need to go. It’s about making the unknown less intimidating and empowering people to take action.Through techniques like immersive experiences, visualisation and simply getting into a more imaginative mindspace, groups can bypass cognitive biases and unlock fresh perspectives. When people see, feel, and experience future scenarios tailored to their world, they start to understand not just the technical side, but the emotional and social impact of what’s to come. Immersion turns abstract ideas into something we can touch, feel, and act on—essential for driving change and sparking innovation.
As humans we tend to think in linear terms. We assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, with small changes over time. This ‘linear thinking’ can limit our ability to grasp larger shifts or breakthroughs.
The brain loves patterns, which makes linear thinking feel more natural. We often assume that tomorrow will be like yesterday and struggle to conceptualise non-linear progress such as bell curves (i.e. a decrease after a trending increase) or exponential changes (i.e. an accelerating uptick), like the ones we’re seeing with AI.
We have natural blindspots for disruptions like the C19 pandemic unless we think intentionally about patterns or possibilities that are non-linear and plan for them.
Through horizon scanning (exploring trends likely to affect the next 10 years of AI and education) and signal mapping (early signs of trends that are yet to emerge), we’re identifying shifts, signals of change, and potential future scenarios in the rapidly evolving AI space. This allows us to spot opportunities that can help bridge the widening digital divide in learning.
Our horizon scans involved candid discussions with 42 diverse stakeholders from 37 organisations across 22 countries. Additionally, we developed a prototype web signposting platform on Slack to scrape over 60+ relevant sources, using AI to filter and curate signals into six key themes.
These activities have highlighted the key trends, tensions, and paradoxes shaping AI’s impact on education, and we’ve mapped where the education sector and ministries of education need to adapt by creating a framework based on the three horizons (upgrade, disrupt, and transform) to understand how AI will affect equitable learning outcomes for students, teachers, and the broader education system.
Thinking forwards to spot signals that might disrupt current trends or stop them in their tracks (instead of just extrapolating from today) allows us to engage with future possibilities in a more realistic and innovative way.
The interaction between current trends is also often overlooked, but convergences and confluences can completely change the course of things - just like what we’re seeing with the convergence of technologies that has made AI possible today. Such exercises help us anticipate challenges and opportunities that we might otherwise miss and think not just in the needs of today (in this case, AI upgrades for education) , but also plan ahead for what’s next (disruption of AI in education systems) and where things might head (transformation of education in the age of AI).
Hyperbolic discounting is a brain pattern we all tend to have, whereby we tend to prefer immediate rewards over long-term benefits, even if the long-term rewards are much greater.
This explains many of the challenges we face in areas like climate change, where the benefits of action are long-term, but the costs of inaction are immediate. In strategic foresight, this matters because we have a tendency to jump to solutions right away, when sometimes a more long term approach might be more appropriate. Or we may miss some of the opportunity costs and trade-offs involved in taking action (or in delaying action).
The brain is hardwired to prioritise instant gratification—this was useful in evolutionary terms when survival depended on immediate rewards. Delaying gratification requires intention and even incentives otherwise we tend to prefer even smaller rewards, sooner, rather than having to wait longer to get a larger reward.
Each year, GIZ runs a Future Forum for their keenest staff passionate about creating a more just and equitable world using strategic foresight methods.
We were fortunate to be invited to kick off GIZ’s Future Forum 2023 with 460 participants from 67 countries, with visioning workshops to explore How we navigate the polycrisis and drive transformative change to ensure a healthy Earth for all within planetary limits? Resulting in transformative visions for agriculture & food systems, energy, transport & mobility, and resources & circularity.
We pushed participants to imagine bold, socially empowered futures, rather than just predicting what’s likely. We designed a Vision Compass and Postcards From the Future to guide them in shaping a 2050 world driven by big, systemic changes, without prescribing local solutions.
This session set the stage for the entire conference, creating urgency for change, clarity on values, and a roadmap for making transformation a reality through a deeper understanding of the immediate trade-offs and actions needed (you can read the full report here).
Addressing hyperbolic discounting - this tendency to want rewards sooner - is critical for large-scale behavior change. This becomes especially true in areas like climate action, where the real benefits may take decades to materialise.
By breaking down long-term goals into smaller, more immediate steps, accompanied by strong rationale and narratives that remind us of the bigger win down the line, we can create momentum for bigger changes.
The famous systems thinker, Donella Meadows, said “Pay attention to what’s important, not just what’s quantifiable”. Our reliance on data and evidence can sometimes overlook the human and emotional aspects of decision-making. In our work, we’ve learned that while data is crucial, we must also prioritise the wellbeing and lived experiences of people impacted by these decisions.
Our brains are good at processing quantitative data, but they can struggle with qualitative insights, or the emotional aspects of decision-making; and we often undervalue personal experiences when making data-driven decisions.
As people we all are compelled by stories and narratives, typically more than we are by statistics and data. But in complex settings these elements are easily neglected. It’s not just information that shifts our behaviour, it’s the shared human experience.
Donella said: “No one can precisely define or measure justice, democracy, security, freedom, truth, or love. No one can precisely define or measure any value. But if no one speaks up for them, if systems aren’t designed to produce them, if we don’t speak about them and point toward their presence or absence, they will cease to exist.”
At Brink, we worked with TRANSFORM (a partnership between FCDO, EY, and Unilever) to explore What the future of work could look like for the 83% of Kenyans working in the informal economy.
Using participatory methods and a local team of citizen scientists, we set out to surface grounded insights that could shape more inclusive policies and funding decisions alongside our partners Laterite, Procol Kenya, Ideas Unplugged and Busara.
Over several months, we listened to over 700 people across Kenya, gathering both quantitative data and deeply personal stories from the ground. We hosted monthly sharing events to bring together key players from across the ecosystem, sparking rich conversations and building momentum around informal work as a driver of resilience and innovation.
Our insights were qualitative and quantitative and included a series of portrait images to tell personal stories about hopes and fears regarding the future of work. These were used to inform TRANSFORM’s investment strategy and support policy dialogues focused on enabling, rather than overlooking, the informal economy, and on presenting a nuanced, empowered and true picture of what that informal economy comprises.
Through the work we identified practical mechanisms that could unlock more supportive systems for informal workers, including:
• Access to friendly, affordable credit;
• Investment in good-quality, fit-for-purpose infrastructure; and
• Legal frameworks that protect and empower informal operators.
These ideas offer a clear pathway for donors, governments, and the private sector to co-create a future of work that’s both inclusive and future-fit.
Explore the full story here and take a look at some of the beautiful photos by Ideas Unplugged that capture the spirit of the work.
The future isn’t just about numbers; it’s about people. Balancing data with human experience ensures that the innovations, systems shifts and policy recommendations we create are not only efficient but also equitable and sustainable.
AI is no longer a distant concept. It's changing our world now. But how do we incorporate AI into our futures work without letting it overshadow the human element?
A number of things are occurring in our brains when it comes to AI use.
First up is the uncanny valley. The brain is understandably uneasy of something that seems to mimic human nature but is also obviously unhuman. Especially when that thing seems to challenge the very nature of human decision-making!
Related to that is the issue of trust. Currently a lot of AI tools are a black box, making it difficult to build trust due to the lack of transparency on what’s feeding into it, how it works and its tendency to hallucinate.
This can be somewhat mitigated by asking for sources and prompting AI to check its answers, or by using reasoning models that break down tasks and explain their logic. Increasing transparency fosters trust, ensures accountability on the user’s part to check the content generated, and enables users to understand and potentially challenge their output.
Another cognitive gap arises round representation and resonance. AI is mostly built on flawed and biased datasets and LLMs have been known to draw on mis/disinformation rather than truth and facts It is therefore not always a fair representation of truth nor of a vast proportion of the world’s population. Unaddressed, this compounds biases and widens digital divides.
As AI becomes more integrated into our day-to-day lives, understanding how best to work alongside it helps make the most of its potential.
At Brink, we actively leverage AI-driven tools to enhance our foresight exercises. We collaborate with generative AI for scenario development and utilise character simulations to bring these scenarios to life.
Our approach to horizon scanning is evolving as we move from web scraping and capturing signals in a database, to more thoughtful web signposting, where we build a list of curated data sources and use AI to automatically analyse and categorise them, so an ongoing feed of relevant links and articles can be published in a platform like Slack.
This process feeds directly into human-led sensemaking sessions, enabling us to connect the dots on emerging signals effectively. Web signposting enhances our capacity to process vast data volumes, equating to the analytical power of multiple researchers.
In the Frontier Tech Hub's Fieldtrip to the Future, we delved into AI's potential to transform diplomacy by 2034. To make these future scenarios immersive, we developed artifacts such as Priya, an AI-generated trade advisor chatbot from 2034. Priya engaged participants in real-time conversations about her work and life, with responses dynamically generated based on our envisioned future. Tools like ChatGPT refined her backstory, while Character AI facilitated interactive experiences, bringing Priya to life as a fully realised character.
AI has the power to supercharge our work by making processes faster and more efficient, but it also requires us to be thoughtful about how it’s used and think intentionally about ethics and unintended consequences. We are using AI to complement, not replace, human intuition and creativity—designing tools and methods that enable us to craft compelling artefacts and tap into vast pools of information, all while keeping the human touch at the core of innovation
As humans we possess a remarkable ability: mental time travel. We can shuttle backwards and forwards in time, and simulate what the future might look like.
The power to shape a more resilient, equitable, and transformative future resides in our ability to understand and leverage this mental time travel. After all, the future is not a passive arrival; it’s an active creation, a journey we embark on together, guided by our collective vision.
If you’re ready to explore how foresight and behavioural innovation can drive transformative change within your organisation or sector, we’d love to connect. Reach out to Gita at gita@hellobrink.co to learn more about how we can collaborate and build a better future together.
