We instinctively love a simple story: Good or bad. Us or them. But more than ever, we need to shift away from simplified, binary thinking. The world is not black or white. It’s both. It’s a grayscale gradient. A technicolor continuum. All at once.
Thinking ahead is messy, but if we want to design futures that are truly sustainable for planet, people, and profit, we need to stop oversimplifying our choices and consider the immense complexity of our world. Explore the tensions, embrace our diversity, and acknowledge the implications of our actions. Present and beyond. But it’s not an easy feat.
We share findings from our research with thinkers and creators from diverse disciplines, across the world, to get a deeper and wider perspective on the possibilities and pitfalls ahead. We also share the outcome of processing all these insights: five overarching Dualities through which we can discover, explore, and discuss potential futures.
The Future Dualities are enablers. They are lenses to understand the tensions arising in a complex and uncertain world. And they can serve as a practical framework and mindset with which we help organizations explore and shape their strategies for what’s next.
This is not the answer. It’s the beginning of a continuous exploration.
Get inspired, ready to face uncertain futures, with a new mental framework of what’s next, and with concrete methods for applying this in your daily work. Based on this, we build a free online tool to augment human creativity and predict the future with AI. You’ll get that too.
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Lasse Underbjerg
Thinker, Maker, Speaker: Lasse is Global Future Lab Director at Designit. A futurist hybrid creative with more than 18 years of award-winning consultancy experience across sectors, competencies, and across the globe, Lasse is passionate about exploring what’s next, with relentless curiosity, empathy, and strategy. Envisioning diverse futures and solving human problems at the intersection of design and technology. Inventing simple solutions and co-creating compelling experiences. Making things people want, moving minds, and moving markets.
