Don’t Win the Future

If, like me, you find President Obama’s already overused “Win the Future” catchphrase catching in your throat, you might also be wondering how he decided on this feel-good, but nonsensical slogan.* It seems incredible that an administration that so readily talks about future technologies doesn’t give better consideration to the strategies behind their promotion. Reducing the dialog to the metaphor of competition diminishes it before it has even gotten started. The future isn’t a prize, a thing to be won, it’s a process, a never-ending unfolding of the possible. As futurist Jamais Cascio recently wrote, in encouraging us to “Win the Future”, President Obama “is not just asking us to do something that simply cannot be done, he’s asking us to accept a meager, ephemeral sense of triumph, when we could do so much more.”

It should also make us wonder about the government’s collective grasp of the concepts and processes essential to futures thinking. As complex as our challenges are and will be in the coming decades, we need to be using all of the tools at our command.

I’ve wondered from time to time about the idea of some sort of federal “Department of the Future” or “Office of Foresight”. Part of me rebels against such an Orwellian-sounding governmental agency, but on the other hand, we need to be making policy decisions with a much longer term, systems oriented view than we currently do.

Certainly, there are other departments and agencies that incorporate futures methodology – intelligence agencies and the military, for example. But there can be little doubt these entities have a particular focus and therefore are limited by their own filters. Would we be better served by a nonpartisan futures equivalent to say the Congressional Budget Office? Something which could provide an assessment of potential impacts for a particular piece of legislation? Could we reduce wasted tax dollars, not to mention avoiding unintended consequences, especially ones that could have been readily foreseen?

Remember the tax credit for ethanol production? Because a significant percentage of corn crops were diverted to energy production, food prices around the world skyrocketed. (Commodity speculation was also a contributing factor, though it can be argued this was exacerbated by the policy.) People in some parts of the developing world suffered considerable hardship and many starved. Was such an outcome so impossible to anticipate?

Despite this, I’m not saying I’m entirely convinced an “Office of Foresight” is the right way to go. But I do think it’s worthy of exploration and dialog. It’s not as if there aren’t already precedents. In the UK, the government’s Foresight Programme was established to help them think systematically about the future and its application to developing policy and strategy.

Of course, there are already futures organizations that inform and advise government, but could we be better served by a more fundamental integration of these disciplines into our policy making process?

Maybe this is a good idea. Maybe it isn’t. What do you think? As for me, I know we can do better than to approach the future with the same mentality we bring to a basketball game.

*(Full disclosure: I was and still am an Obama supporter and contributed to his 2008 presidential campaign.)