Welcome to your final week of your Introduction to Future Thinking course. Last week you practiced collecting and analyzing signals and this week we're going to start with a tool that we call Look Back to Look Forward and it's designed to help you get better at noticing change. As an introduction to this tool, I want to do another little thought experiment with you. I want you to remember and imagine yourself 10 years ago today. So subtract 10 years from your age and put yourself back in that time. This is that magic timescale, again that 10 year timescale. I want you to look back at that 10 years ago version of yourself and try to think about what your life was like at that time. Where were you living? What work are you doing? If you were working or what were you learning? What didn't you know yet? What were your biggest goals at the time? What were your biggest challenges and problems? Who did you see every day? Where did you go every day? Try to immerse yourself back in this 10 years older ago version of yourself. Now that you're there, I want to ask you a question. Ten years ago, what are two ways that you or your life was really different? I mean really really different. What would you say are two of the biggest changes that you've personally been through over the last decade? I can answer these questions. Ten years ago, I was not a parent yet, and that's probably been the biggest change. Now I have four-year-old twin daughters who take up more of my time and energy than probably anything else. Another big change is, I used to live in downtown San Francisco in the middle of the city, and if you had asked me back then, I was going to live in a city for ever, and now I live on a mountain in a forest and that is something I definitely would not have predicted but it makes sense to me now my life is changed, the city of San Francisco has changed and that's where it makes sense for me to live now. So can you think of two changes like that for yourself. I want you to pause the video and give yourself a moment to really reflect and take in these changes. Were these changes that you would have predicted? Did you make these changes on purpose? They were goals that you pursued or did they just happen to you? Did they take you by surprise? What were the ripple effects of these changes across all the areas of your life? Go ahead and give yourself a minute to really take this in and then we'll come back and talk about why this will help you think more creatively about the future. Thank you for doing that. Now, you might be wondering what's the point of this stack experiment? Why are we thinking about the past when this is a course I'm thinking about the future? Well, today is the future that we would have been thinking about 10 years ago and reflecting on all of the changes that have happened since 10 years ago was a presence can help us get better at recognizing how quickly things can change and how big those changes can be. When we project ourselves into the future, too often we imagine lives and circumstances that are really similar to today. We have to break through that mindset. So reflecting on how much and how fast things have changed in the past puts us in a much more powerful mindset to think creatively about the change that could becoming. One of your optional readings for this week is an excerpt from, "Hope in the dark" by Rebecca Solnit. She writes, "We adjust to changes without measuring them. We forget how much has changed". She suggests that we need to look back at just how much has actually changed in order to build realistic hope for the future, whether the changes have been for the better or the worse. If big changes have happened before, big changes can happen again. This is her advice and it's advice that every teacher should keep in mind. Anything could happen because anything already has. Throw out assumptions that things will remain the same. "Assess the wildly changed world we inhabit, and start over with an imagination adequate to the possibilities and strangeness of life on earth at this moment". With that advice in mind, the tool you're about to learn will help you throw out all of your assumptions about any future and start over with a more powerful imagination. This tool is called Look Back to Look Forward and it's one of 20 tools that we use as the basis for our professional certification program here at the Institute For The Future. We've picked five of our favorite most powerful tools to share with you in this specialization and of course, if you'd like to get trained in all 20 of them, you're welcome to join us at our trainings in Palo Alto or our trainings anywhere around the world.
