Little Futures Season 3
Before the Big Future, endless little futures
Little Futures is a near futures explorers club written by Brian Dell & Tom Critchlow.
Welcome to Little Futures season 3!
Brian and Tom here…
But where have we been?
It’s been five years since Season 2 - a run of riffs and provocations ranging from the organizational (Embodied Futures, Permeable Orgs, Public Futures) to the personal (Permissionless Identities, Cohort Futures, Seamful Futures).
Since then, like many others, we’ve lived through massive shifts. Our worlds have been fundamentally upended. Sleepless nights. Days when even the smallest things have felt out of our control. And we’ve only just begun to come to terms with the fact that there’s no going back to the way things were.
In short: we both had kids (two each!).
Parenthood teaches many lessons about what is required to nurture a world into what we hope will be a good one, but two feel especially relevant to the context we all find ourselves in:
You will never control the conditions (of a moment, a day, a year, an era).
Growth comes in managing your response.
In a world that feels like it’s accelerating, big ideas everywhere, there’s a lot that feels out of our control. But a great deal more that is within arm’s reach. Before the big future, endless little futures…
Season 3 begins next week with the first of a series of 6 emails, sent weekly, alternating between Brian and Tom.
Join the club,
Brian & Tom
Artwork: childh00d - by chatGPT & Me
Background
What are little futures? What is Little Futures? Well…
Big Futures™ are abstract, authoritarian and empty. “Seeing like a futurist,” if you will. These visions are over-polished, technology-obsessed, and disconnected from reality because they are disconnected from people. For organizations, they tend to be more paralyzing than productive. They portend change without agency. They are done to you, not through you.
Little Futures is about bringing the future within arm’s reach. It’s as much about behavior as it is the tools that amplify, dampen, and reshape it. It’s ways of thinking, ways of doing, and, hopefully, useful provocations for businesses and leaders grappling with the futures they need to be building out today.