In this course, we're really working on improving our mental flexibility of improving our imagination when it comes to seeing and believing how things could be different, and this technique we're going to learn in practice now is super fun, it's super fast, it's great to do in-groups, and it's called a 100 Ways Anything Could Be Different. I first learned this technique from Tina Seelig at Stanford University's design school. This is one of her favorite methods that she uses to help Design students and MBA Business students think of possible business opportunities, possible startups that they might want to explore. So she use it in that context. I use it to think about how the future could be different. But it's the same rules either reason you're playing. The first thing that you do is you list a 100 things that are true about the way something works today, and you really have to try to get to 100. You can use a Google Doc and work together. You can use a big whiteboard or poster and try to write it altogether, but you're not done until you come up with a 100 things. This really forces you to list out all of your assumptions about how things work and how reality works so that you can start hitting back against each of those assumptions one at a time. After you've listed 100 things that are true about something today, and by the way, that something could be: What's 100 things that are true about McDonald's, the restaurant chain, today? What are 100 things that are true about how we celebrate birthdays today? What are 100 things about how we treat dogs and cats that are pets today? What's 100 things that are true about earning a college degree today? You could pick anything. So you pick a thing, 100 things that are true about it, and then, you pick one of those things and try to make it not true. Describe a version of reality in which that thing would no longer be true. We're going to walk through an example now because this is a little bit heady and it'll help to see it done in practice. So let's say we were to pick, as a topic, marriage. We will try to list 100 things that are generally true about marriage today. Now, of course, you'll always find exceptions, but generally speaking, what are some things that are true about marriages today? So here are some things that we might say. We might say that marriage, generally, is between two people. That tends to be true. That most people have one marriage at a time. That marriages are intended to last, even if they don't always last. That we explicitly state that we are entering into them for the rest of our lives. In most parts of the world, marriages are expected to come with some degree of romantic partnership or at least sexual partnership. That is an assumption. You can choose to marry yourself or have your family help you choose who to marry, but it's not, for example, random who you marry or you don't outsource it to the government to tell you who to marry. Most marriages start with a wedding. That there's some ceremony to mark the beginning of the marriage. That ending one is a pretty complex legal process. There are a significant number of obstacles and bureaucracies that you have to go to to endure marriage. So those are all things that are true, generally, for most people about marriage today. What we would do in this future forecasting technique is we would try to imagine a future in which one or more of these things were no longer true. So we might try to imagine a world in which a marriage could be between three or more people. That you could have multiple marriages at a time. That a marriage would actually be a short-term partnership. That you enter into four specific reasons and expect them to end at a certain time. You might set an expiration dates. That there might not be any expectation of romantic or sexual partnership. That there would be marriages that would be quite commonplace that have nothing to do with that. Maybe algorithms we tell you who to marry. We would take the idea of choice out of marriage and we would let an AI decide for us. Maybe weddings would actually become quite uncommon. Maybe it would be more common to celebrate five or 10 years into the marriage, if you still had a marriage, or maybe you would have a dramatic celebration at the successful conclusion of the marriage which you had scheduled to end in 20 years or three years. Maybe, in this future, that ending a marriage would be as simple as tapping an app and declaring it over. Now, can you imagine a future like this? Well, as a reminder, we do so often say here that any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous. In that spirit, I'd love to share with you a video of a future scenario that imagines the future of marriage. This was created by the students of one of our researchers here, Jake Dunnigan, who you will meet in this lecture series, actually, just a few videos. Jake asked his students to pick a topic they were passionate about. They picked The Future of Marriage, and they imagined a future in which they flipped and reversed many of these things that are true about marriage today. So you can take a look at this immersive video scenario and it will really give you a great idea of just how far you can take your foresight and your insight when you believe that at least 100 things could be different from how they are today.
