Being an Applied Futurist Can Sometimes Make You Feel a Little Weird...
- Christopher Owens
- Aug 25
- 8 min read
“Stories allow us to understand and navigate a strange and alien world. By rehearsing situations, problems, conflicts and emotions in fiction form, we grow more adept at understanding, coping with, and resolving them in real life too.” - John Yorke Into the Woods
Last week, a colleague and fellow futurist chimed in on the group chat with a link to a news story. He added something along the lines of, “Hey, didn’t this come up in one of our Threatcasting workshops a few years ago?” I stared at my phone. Yes; this thing in the news echoed something participants had imagined in the moment. It wasn’t a mirror image of the news, no, but had captured a significant detail — something unique to the story they’d created, something we’d call a flag (a flag is an indicator and a point after which there is no going back; for Threatcasting, flags help us define where we need to identify or build “gates,” or the actions or recommendations to be taken to mitigate the impact of a flag). This wasn’t the first time I’d seen a scenario from a workshop appear in reality. I noticed this with an odd mix of foreboding and another emotion, one that validated the Threatcasting process and our community of applied futurists. Was it pride? Gratification?? Whatever I was feeling in that moment, I’m learning to become more comfortable with it — steeling myself not to flinch when, as Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “the abyss gazes back into you.”
Being an applied futurist means treating strategic thinking and futures modeling as an opportunity to explore what’s plausible, not just probable. It means choosing a strategic thinking model or foresight model – there are a few out there – and applying the outcomes of those processes to an organization or professional domain. Not just creating stories or fearmongering of Black Swan events but working through the potential impacts. More important is examining each scenario and homing in on the flags — the details making the ‘big story’ possible. Let me demonstrate this with three examples.
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Sometime around 2021, though I didn’t know it at the time, I was beginning this journey towards Storycasting; the idea that Threatcasting scenarios might be better illustrated to some audiences if they are presented as fully-developed stories, not just summarized bullets on a PowerPoint slide. The horizon I was given was 2035, meaning my task was to extrapolate contemporary PESTLE trends to 2035 and create a series of multiple plausible futures. To consider, What novel threats or changes can we imagine in 2035? The constraints I was working under limited the length of anything I wrote to “not more than two paragraphs.” However, when I combined trends in media articles, writing from a recent U.S. Army Mad Scientist Blog, and a presentation called Pathogens, Synthetic Biology, and Implications for Future Bioweapons by Gigi Gronvall, I crafted the following future scenario using known trends:
We Don’t Hate Everyone, Just People Like Them
Growing opportunities such as synthetic biology and access to technology allow more people access to laboratories for small scale experimentation. Combined with the lag in international regulations, the future creates a physical and legal space for bio development for nefarious purposes. In 2025, a well-funded small group of people gain access - via purchase or theft - to 30+ years of data from 23andMe and MyAncestry to root out areas where their targets live in large clusters. In the summer of 2035, without any announcement, a synthetically developed and highly resilient virus was placed on countless public surfaces in European cities. Recalling COVID years earlier, national responses are put into place quickly. Mass testing programs quickly discover that some people die within weeks, others get violently sick and recover with mere bedrest, still others contract the strain with no ill effects at all. Spreading globally in mere days, vaccination efforts are slowed as it takes months to unravel why some people are unaffected and what the deceased have in common. By the time the virus is identified and countered, hundreds of thousands die worldwide across political, economic and national boundaries. While anyone can contract and spread it, only the population with the ‘right’ DNA falls victim. And the root cause is as much social as it is biological: Racial bias and xenophobia will never leave the human experience. The hate group successfully kills off their ‘enemy population’ without ever showing their face.
The two paragraphs above received zero interest. At the time, we were still in the throes of COVID lockdowns, daily teleworking, and wearing masks. To one reader, it just felt too attached to the current state. It was ‘not thinking enough about the future.’ I couldn’t really defend it at the time because COVID was the reason Gigi Gronvall was making her presentation in the first place. The future reveals itself regardless of the limits of our imaginations, however.
Look back at those two paragraphs and find where the first sign of trouble appeared. Chronologically, what was the first step that led to that particular future event– the flag? Where do the villains or antagonists take their first steps in their plan? It’s in the theft of data from online databases. Now remember, being an Applied Futurist is NOT predicting the future, it’s deeply understanding trends, new developments, and unimagined threats that the trends could present. Imagine you’d read that vignette in 2021. Nothing had actually occurred. It was all foresight. It was plausible, but not a promise. Then imagine your reaction in 2023 when the following news story broke: 23andMeDataBreach. You might recognize this story (as bad as it sounds in its own context) as merely a flag towards a larger and more grim crisis in 2035.
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A partnership between U.S. Army Cyber Institute and Arizona State University Threatcasting lab conducted a Threatcasting workshop that included roughly forty participants. Participants were, as per the process, given informed perspectives from subject matter experts in various fields> They were then asked to build plausible futures scenarios where public officials and members of the military or law enforcement communities might become increasingly ‘at risk’ in a future where social media and digital databases are embedded in every facet of our lives. Approximately thirty scenarios were created by the cohorts, all with varying approaches and perspectives and depth to each character - protagonists and antagonists alike. The final report included some quick summaries of the most compelling scenarios.
Private Jane’s Secrets
“Future Private Jane is the armorer for a U.S. Army training unit, whose secret life in virtual reality is as thrilling as her days on base are boring. In the metaverse, she can be anyone and everyone -or so she believes, until she learns her own likeness is now the best-selling virtual avatar ‘on the base.’ The unit’s chaplain then misuses footage from the tele-counseling sessions to create evocative videos for sale on the internet. Emotionally devastated by this revelation, she plots revenge, which is her own livestreamed suicide in the armory during inspection. In the public uproar following, her entire unit, from the command staff down to her squad mates is deemed temporarily unfit to serve.”
In the deeper details of this scenario, workshop participants extrapolated trends and built them into the background of the future story: virtual personas and social relationships influence and disrupt the health and stability of our physical lives. A future where virtual living can provide more joy or pain than the ‘real world.’ Participants also considered a future where mental health issues are no longer stigmatized, but are part of the natural discourse around societal pressures and human health. Our current reality where social media ‘likes’ are not only personal status but commodified, a minuscule but deeply twisted behavior emerges as fashionable in the near future. Teens and twenty-somethings promote their own premeditated suicides as a last act of digital fame aspire to getting more views of their last social media posting than their peers. A dark future indeed. One with complex sub-themes and combined and intertwined trends. So much so that some of the darker details were left out of the final report. However, a week before our group of Threatcasters presented our work at a conference in Austin Texas, the headlines once again gave us reason to shudder: Air Force Airman Live Self Immolation. Again, not a mirror image of what the Threatcasting workshop participants created, but a compelling flag is buried within it. A one-off? Maybe. Months later, however, there was a sad confirmation that people do emulate others when the same flag appeared in New York City.
By 2023, I was well on my way to explore the deeper possibilities of Storycasting. Again, from the Threatcasting workshops, complex scenarios are created using not just the participant’s imaginations – though that is important – but also a firm grasp of how evolving technologies may develop with unintended consequences. I was convinced that the scenarios crafted in these workshops begged to be developed into something more compelling. I took one such scenario and built a fictitious news article. If for no other reason than to discover if the Threatcasting process inherently builds ‘scripts’ of compelling stories. Here is one of the early experiments written in the form of a fictitious news article from 2030.
The story was complex, for sure. It imagined the possibilities of deepfake technology and it explored the potential in our increased reliance on social media to understand our world in every moment. The participants also leveraged – as the Threatcasting methodology pushes them to do – the changes that Speed, Scope, and Scale provide when imagining potential futures. In this story, speed is the changing factor. The speed at which the adversary or bad actor was able to spread the disinformation. This speed is what caused confusion and fear without leaving the time needed to determine if it was even real.
Do not Aim for Complete Accuracy In Your Future Scenarios, but Rather Elements Seen as Flags Leading to the most Plausible and Compelling Futures.
Returning to the text from my colleague earlier last week. Yes, once again, we were seeing something in the news that caused us to pause and ask, “is this something we’ve seen before?” Threatcasting is an intellectual or academic exercise that intentionally avoids prediction. Fundamentally, it is about exploring the plausible in a systematic way. With rigor and repeatability. Being intentionally predictive tricks us into building a future we want and therefore can lead to misguided strategies and decisions. It also ‘shows the math’ used to build scenarios rather than just presenting imaginative thinking. Complex socio-economic dynamics and technological advancements are, I think, key drivers in understanding what the future might present.
Threatcasting values those things. It values human-centered design.
In the three examples above – though there are certainly more - shows how fostering a mindset that focuses on plausibility, and the smaller changes that develop into that plausibility, we are provided the early indicators of change rather than trying to be ‘right’ about the future. The flags in Threatcasting become bite-sized influences that we can point to with more certainty. This is what sets Threatcasting apart from other methodologies. Participants – and the organizations they represent – look for likelihood. They look for incremental changes that suggest – not promise – a shift is coming. Those flags however, can make you feel uneasy. That’s also a sign that you’re being a true Applied Futurist.