Disclaimer: I’m no expert in world religions, traditions, theologies, philosophies or doctrines. The point of this article is not to judge, but to highlight the fact that many of us have grown up in traditions that may influence our perspective of the future in many different and interesting ways. It is important to recognize that we are not all starting with a clean slate when we study the future.

Views on Destiny

Let’s begin by exploring how doctrines, traditions, philosophies and religious beliefs might give us unique worldviews about the future and our destiny. I use the term Doctrinal Future Time: to describe the future as it has been taught, promised, warned about, or morally structured by various traditions and philosophies.

As a reminder, Historically Imagined Time gives us an imagined story about where we came from. Doctrinal Future Time gives us a story about where everything is going. The Vices of Foresight are the lenses many of us wear that can distort our views of the emerging future.

These influences create a powerful combination that can impact our perceptions of the future, and because of that a person may not approach the study of our emerging future as genuinely open for debate and inquiry.

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Foresight is often mistaken for prediction. We imagine its purpose is to tell us what will happen next: which technology will win, which market will emerge, which threat will become serious, or which opportunity will matter most. But prediction and foresight are not the same thing.

The Future is Many Possibilities

Prediction asks, “What will happen?” Foresight asks a different set of questions: What is changing? What might follow? What assumptions are beginning to weaken? And is our current understanding of the world still good enough to guide our decisions?

Frank Diana recently wrote a great article where he explains this in detail.

Prediction seeks an answer. Orientation points us in a direction and preserves the ability to revise.

That distinction matters because the future rarely announces itself through one decisive fact. More often, it appears gradually through weak signals, anomalies, changing relationships, unexpected combinations, new behaviors, and shifts in what people value. Leaders must assemble these fragments into a working understanding of what may be emerging without pretending that the picture is complete.

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Foresight is often described as the ability to see what is coming.  The challenge occurs when foresight forewarns, but the organization fails to act. They notice the anomaly, hear the warnings, but make excuses or ignore the significance of the insight.Click to Enlarge

This is part of a series examining what I call the vices of foresight: recurring ways leaders and institutions distort, resist, or weaken signals about a changing world. One of the first breaks with reality is often moral.

When Reality Creates an Obligation

A signal appears that threatens a strategy, reputation, investment, promise, or identity. Leaders may understand what it means, but fully acknowledging it would create obligations they would rather postpone. It might require admitting an error, disrupting profitable operations, challenging powerful people, abandoning an investment, or asking others to accept an immediate cost.

So the signal is softened. It becomes preliminary, isolated, manageable, or insufficiently validated. More analysis is requested. Another meeting is scheduled. The organization continues moving by reducing the force of what it has already learned.

Sometimes waiting for better information is exactly what responsible leadership requires. The problem begins when uncertainty becomes a shelter rather than a genuine analytical condition. There is a difference between uncertainty that requires more investigation and uncertainty being used to avoid the consequences of what is already reasonably clear.

Moral misalignment begins when preserving the preferred course becomes more important than accurately naming the conditions. That is why foresight requires leaders to ask not only, “What do we know?” but also, “What would we have to do if we admitted that what we know is true?”

Air Florida Flight 90: When Information Cannot Stop the System

On January 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 attempted to depart Washington National Airport during a severe winter storm. During the takeoff roll, the first officer repeatedly expressed concern about abnormal engine indications, but his language remained indirect and the captain continued the takeoff. The aircraft failed to gain adequate lift, struck the 14th Street Bridge, and crashed into the Potomac River, killing 74 people aboard and four people on the bridge.

The accident ultimately had multiple contributing causes, but it illustrates a powerful leadership problem: relevant information was present, concern was present, and authority was present, but the information did not produce decisive action.

Organizations often fail in similar ways. People notice irregularities but raise them cautiously. Leaders hear warnings about the future, but interpret them as issues that can still be managed within the existing plan and timeline. The problem is not always a lack of information. Sometimes the system lacks the willingness, authority, or structure required to let information stop the system.

When the Model Becomes More Important Than Reality

Leaders can also be completely willing to face reality and still misunderstand what they are seeing. Every organization interprets the world through models, measures, categories, professional knowledge, and past experience. These structures are necessary, but they become dangerous when the model becomes more authoritative than the conditions it was designed to explain.

A declining measure is dismissed as temporary. An emerging competitor is judged using the economics of the established market. A new technology is evaluated by how poorly it performs the old task rather than by the different system it might enable. The evidence may be accurate while its significance is misunderstood.

This is cognitive distortion. It is not simple ignorance. Smart, experienced people can examine real evidence and reach the wrong conclusion because the assumptions through which they interpret that evidence no longer fit.

Transitions make this especially difficult because the old world does not disappear overnight. Old and new systems overlap, and the inherited model may continue to explain part of reality even as it becomes less capable of explaining the whole. Foresight therefore requires more than collecting information. Leaders must recognize when the frame itself has become part of the problem.

Challenger and the Normalization of Deviance

Before the space shuttle Challenger launched on January 28, 1986, concerns had been raised about the solid rocket booster O-ring seals, particularly under cold conditions. Evidence from previous missions showed erosion and blow-by. The risk was not invisible.

What changed was the interpretation of the risk. Previous missions had succeeded despite anomalies, so those anomalies gradually became less alarming. Each successful flight seemed to confirm that the system could tolerate more than originally believed.

This is the normalization of deviance: departures from an intended standard become accepted because they have not yet produced catastrophe. The danger is that survival begins to look like proof of safety.

Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven crew members. The disaster had technical, organizational, and decision-making causes, but its leadership lesson remains powerful. Institutions can possess relevant information while gradually losing the ability to interpret it with appropriate seriousness.

The organization does not necessarily ignore reality. It constructs a version of reality in which repeated survival becomes evidence that the danger is under control.

When Organizational Stories Become Self-Sealing

Every organization needs a story about itself. That story explains what it does well, why customers trust it, which capabilities matter, and what kind of future it expects. A healthy story creates coherence and helps people make sense of complexity.

A dangerous story becomes self-sealing. Contradictory evidence is continually reclassified so the central narrative never has to change. Weak results are blamed on execution. Departing employees are described as poor fits. Customer resistance becomes a communication problem. New competitors are dismissed as temporary or unsustainable.

The organization can explain every setback without ever questioning whether its story has become inaccurate. More information may actually strengthen the distortion because analysts, dashboards, consultants, and research teams continue producing material that is interpreted inside the protected frame.

An institution can become extremely well informed about a world that is disappearing.

The Leadership Test

This is why foresight is harder than prediction. Leaders must ask what they are already seeing that they do not want to acknowledge, which risks have become normal simply because they have not hurt anyone yet, and which assumptions are shaping how they interpret new evidence.

They must also examine the stories their organizations tell about themselves. Has a once-useful explanation become so important to identity and strategy that almost no evidence can disprove it?

Transitions are difficult precisely because the old story is rarely completely wrong. An organization may still have valuable capabilities, loyal customers, experienced people, and decades of accumulated knowledge. Leaders are not choosing between obvious truth and obvious falsehood. They are deciding when a once-useful understanding of reality has become too narrow for the world now emerging.

That is where serious foresight begins: not simply with seeing farther, but with creating leaders and institutions willing to let uncomfortable information change what they believe and what they do.

We like to believe we make decisions based on the present. We study the evidence, examine the risks, debate the options, and try to anticipate what comes next. But there is another influence quietly sitting at the table: our imagined version of the past.

I call this Historically Imagined Time.

Historically Imagined Time is not history itself. It is the version of history we carry in our heads—the compressed, edited, inherited, and often romanticized story of what life used to be like. That imagined past becomes a reference point for judging the present, and because the reference point is often distorted, it can distort our decisions about the future.

We Remember the Past Differently Than We Experience the Present

The present arrives in brutal detail. We see political conflict every hour. Crime, war, corruption, institutional failures, social tensions, economic anxieties, and cultural disputes appear continuously on our screens. We experience uncertainty before we know how the story ends.

History reaches us very differently. Decades become chapters. Revolutions become paragraphs. Periods of enormous confusion are eventually given neat names and tidy boundaries. We remember accomplishments more easily than anxieties, outcomes more easily than uncertainty, and surviving institutions more easily than the failed experiments that surrounded them.

As a result, we often compare the high-resolution messiness of today with a low-resolution portrait of yesterday.

And yesterday frequently looks better.

We remember a time when communities seemed stronger, politics more civil, institutions more trustworthy, children safer, work more stable, families more secure, people healthier, leaders wiser, and life somehow more understandable. Some of those memories contain truth. But they are rarely the whole truth.

The danger begins when nostalgia becomes evidence.

The Past Never Felt Like the Past

People living through previous eras did not experience them as stable historical periods. They experienced them as uncertain presents.

The Industrial Revolution did not arrive with a label announcing that humanity had entered the Industrial Revolution. The automobile did not appear with a guarantee that it would reorganize cities. The internet did not arrive with a roadmap showing exactly what commerce, media, politics, or human relationships would become.

People lived through competing technologies, false starts, economic upheavals, wars, political turmoil, social conflict, disease, discrimination, corruption, technological anxiety, and enormous uncertainty about what would happen next.

We know the ending. They did not.

That difference matters enormously because hindsight creates an illusion of inevitability. Historical change looks cleaner after it has happened. We see the path that survived and forget the many paths that disappeared.

Why This Matters in Politics

Historically Imagined Time is especially powerful in politics because political arguments frequently depend on stories about what has been lost.

Return. Restore. Reclaim. Rebuild.

Those are emotionally powerful ideas because they invite us to compare an uncomfortable present with an attractive past. But the critical question is: which past?

A society can remember prosperity while forgetting who did not share in it. It can remember social cohesion while overlooking who was excluded from that community. It can remember stronger institutions without remembering their failures. It can celebrate order without remembering the price some people paid for that order.

The opposite distortion is also possible. We can imagine earlier generations as simply ignorant, unjust, or primitive and assume that because we possess newer technologies and institutions, we must also possess greater wisdom. Progress is real, but history does not guarantee that everything newer is better.

Both nostalgia and superiority can interfere with judgment.

Historically Imagined Time Changes Decisions

Our imagined past quietly establishes the baseline against which we measure the present.

If we believe society used to be much more stable, current instability feels unprecedented. If we believe institutions were once highly competent, today’s failures seem like evidence of collapse. If we imagine workers once remained happily with one employer for forty years, changing expectations about careers can look like declining loyalty rather than changing economic conditions.

Even our understanding of technological change is affected. We say humanity successfully adapted to electricity, automobiles, industrialization, computers, and the internet. That is true at a very high level. But the statement compresses decades of disruption, displaced workers, failed businesses, institutional rebuilding, social conflict, regulation, infrastructure investment, and generational adjustment into the reassuring phrase, “We adapted.”

History did not happen that quickly.

And adaptation was rarely painless.

The Foresight Problem

This is where Historically Imagined Time becomes especially important for anyone trying to think seriously about the future.

We use the past to estimate what is possible next. We ask how quickly technologies will spread, how societies will react, whether institutions can adapt, how long business models will survive, and whether disruption is temporary or structural.

But if our mental model of the past is distorted, our forecast may begin with a distorted baseline.

We may underestimate change because previous transformations appear to have taken decades. We may overestimate change because hindsight makes successful technologies look inevitable. We may assume people will simply adapt because history tells us humanity always has, without asking how long that adaptation took or what it cost.

Good foresight therefore requires more than studying history. It requires examining how we are remembering history.

Before declaring that things were better, worse, more stable, more dangerous, more civilized, or more chaotic in the past, we should ask: better for whom? Compared with when? Measured by what? What have we remembered—and what have we edited out?

Historically Imagined Time reminds us that we do not make decisions only from facts about the present. We also make them from stories about the past.

And sometimes the most dangerous assumption about the future is a past that never quite existed.

Organizations rarely lose contact with reality in one dramatic moment. The separation usually begins while the institution is still functioning, customers are still buying, reports are still being produced, and leaders still appear to be in control.

A weak signal is explained away. An uncomfortable pattern is treated as temporary. A trusted assumption survives one more planning cycle. Each decision may appear reasonable in isolation, yet together they allow a widening distance to form between the organization’s internal picture and the conditions outside it.

That distance is drift.

Drift is especially dangerous during transitions because the old system does not disappear when the new one begins to emerge. Established products may still sell. Familiar expertise may still produce results. Institutional authority may remain intact. The evidence of change appears beside evidence of continuity, giving leaders plausible reasons to delay revising their interpretation.

Foresight often fails in this interval not because leaders have no information, but because the organization cannot grant disruptive information enough meaning to change its course.

Success Can Create Blindness

Success teaches organizations what to notice.

Leaders learn which customers matter, which measures predict performance, which capabilities create advantage, and which problems deserve attention. These lessons become embedded in budgets, incentives, reporting systems, hiring practices, and professional identities.

For a time, this accumulated knowledge creates strength. The organization becomes faster and more confident because it no longer has to reconsider every assumption. Experience narrows the field to what has historically mattered.

The danger appears when the environment changes faster than the institution’s interpretive system. Measures that once revealed reality begin concealing it. Expertise becomes attached to a declining model. Customers who represent the current business dominate attention while emerging customers remain statistically unimportant.

Success then becomes a filter. The organization sees the future mainly through the conditions that produced its past.

This is why strong performance can coexist with growing strategic danger. Results describe what the existing system is still producing. They do not necessarily reveal whether the system remains aligned with what is emerging.

For decades, leaders have been taught to ask familiar questions: How can we increase capability? How can we move faster? How can we become more productive? How can we scale?

Those questions still matter. But they are no longer enough.

As artificial intelligence, automation, digital platforms, and increasingly autonomous systems expand what organizations can do, leaders must ask another question:

What do human systems require in order to remain viable as AI capabilities expand?

Technology can change extraordinarily quickly. Human beings do not change at the same speed.

People can learn new tools, develop new skills, and adapt to unfamiliar conditions. We are remarkably flexible. But the foundations of human functioning remain much more durable. People still need to understand the systems they inhabit. They need meaningful influence over what happens to them. They need connection to others, confidence that they will be treated legitimately, a sense that their work matters, and a recognizable path from who they have been to who they are being asked to become.

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What if we already have the technology to solve some of the world’s hardest problems—and we’re simply failing to use it? In this episode of FOBTV, I sit down with longtime technology pioneer, IDC Research Director, and author Rob Tiffany to discuss his bold new book, Saving the Earth with the Internet of Things. Rob has assembled 100 practical ways IoT can help address many of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals including: food loss, water scarcity, wildfires, deforestation, endangered species, education, and other global challenges.

We also explore the massive AI data center boom, rising pressure on energy and water, unexpected winners in the AI economy, and the second- and third-order consequences of today’s unprecedented infrastructure spending.

This is not a conversation about shiny technology. It is about action. The tools are increasingly available. The problems are visible. The question is: Who is actually going to do something?

In the summer of 1846, a group of American emigrants heading west toward California faced a leadership problem familiar to every modern executive: they were behind schedule.The Donner-Reed Party had left later than was advisable for a journey of roughly 2,500 miles. The route west was already difficult, the calendar mattered, and winter waited somewhere beyond the Sierra Nevada. At Fort Bridger, the emigrants faced a choice. They could remain on the established California Trail or take a newer route promoted by Lansford Hastings. The Hastings Cutoff promised a more direct path toward California. Mountain man James Clyman, who had experience with the country, had warned James Reed to stay on the established trail. The party chose the cutoff. 

The promise was seductive because it appeared to solve their most urgent problem. They had lost time. The cutoff promised to save time.

Instead, the emigrants were forced to hack a wagon road through the Wasatch Mountains. When they reached the Great Salt Lake Desert, they pieced together the remains of a note left by Hastings warning of two days and two nights of hard travel before reaching water. The expected dry crossing of perhaps 35 to 40 miles became a journey of more than 90 miles. Oxen died or disappeared into the desert. Wagons and possessions were abandoned. By the time the party returned to the established California Trail, valuable weeks and enormous reserves of physical capacity had been lost. 

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