The Power of Prospection: Imagining and Planning Better Futures
What can thinking about the future do for our personal and collective well-being?
Some of us may hold the belief that “I’m not much of a planner”. Having seen myself as a free spirit in my younger years, that’s the story I told myself.
However, after using different self-awareness resources, and recognizing my desire for a sense of control and certainty, I started to acknowledge that I actually do plan. Quite a lot actually. Because work requires me to. But I didn’t see myself as necessarily motivated by it.
Lately though, learning more about prospection, which is probably one of the newer terms I’ve come across through my recent readings, I’m beginning to think that I’ve been motivated by planning and future-thinking all along. Just maybe not in the ways I previously thought.
I hope this article helps you harness the power of prospection to live a more meaningful life, not just in the imagined future, but in this present moment.
I. Why does prospection matter?
“The capacity for forward-thinking, known as prospection, allows us to mentally explore potential outcomes, plan for success, and navigate life's challenges with purpose.”1
In a VUCA world with wicked problems, our ability to imagine better futures and set goals to work towards them becomes more important than ever — with implications on growth, decision-making and overall personal and collective well-being.
It has been so central to our evolution as a species that the combined disciplines of psychology, philosophy and neuroscience came together to say that the defining feature of humans is our ability to envision and plan for the future.2 It was an evolutionary advantage when we began to practice agriculture — understanding biological cycles, planning and harnessing its power. And today, while much about our future remains uncertain, we use what we know from the past and present to better navigate towards the best possible tomorrow.
Better prospectors were found to:3
Be 21% more productive at work
Experience 25% greater life satisfaction overall
Lead teams in a way that results in:
19% higher engagement
18% higher team innovation scores
25% higher team agility, as measured with a cognitive agility scale
Spend 159% more time planning at work than less prospective peers
Be more committed to their employers — and 33% less likely to quit
Going back to the above definition of prospection, it combines optimism, agency (also known in the psych world as self-efficacy), and resilience when we are anchored by a sense of meaning and purpose in the face of adversity.
The good news is that there are ways to become better at prospecting. It’s a skill we can practice and develop. A helpful first step is to understand it more, and then also to notice our own thought patterns so we can catch ourselves and gently, mindfully adjust according to what the situation needs.
II. Two Phases: Imagining and Planning
One of the ideas that I found striking in learning about prospection — and made me realize that I actually really enjoy thinking about the future — are the two phases involved in it. And some of us are more inspired or moved by one phase than another. Consider which one you favor when you think about the future as you read the below descriptions:
Phase one
Fast, sweeping, and optimistic; lasts seconds to minutes
More exploratory, imaginative, generative
Involves the Default Mode Network (DMN)4
Our thoughts focus on:
“What do I want the future to be?”
“What hopeful outcome might lie ahead?”
Phase two
Sets in quickly after phase one; much slower in quality
More specific, deliberative, and realistic (even pessimistic) assessment of ideas generated in phase one
Involves cognitive functions such as planning, critical thinking, and understanding the consequences of our actions
Our thoughts focus on:
“How will I get there?”
We feel meaning and excitement, but also fear and anxiety, from thoughts about the future. We project optimism about what’s to come, but make risk-averse decisions. So while it can be exciting to dream about our desired future, it’s frightening to think about what it will take to get us there — and this can often steer us into the path of perceived safety in our status quo vs. in an uncertain future.
The two-phase model suggests that we differ in our natural strengths as prospectors. And there are ways to build our muscles in each phase. Did you notice which phase you gravitated towards?
III. Building prospection muscle
With more awareness about our own preferences when it comes to these two phases, we can then balance it out by having a healthy amount of muscle mass in both phases. I wouldn’t want to be that person at the gym who looks like all they ever did was either leg day or arm day, and not a more balanced combination of both. ;)
As you read the below practices, try to acknowledge which phase you recognize your strength in, and by all means, use that strength in your meetings with your team. At the same time, we can also work on developing our consciousness on when we need to reign it in with one phase, and bring out more of the practices that are helpful for the other phase too.
Phase one
For this phase, it’s about building the capacity to dream, imagine, envision, and being open to possibility, and failure. Allowing ourselves to more vividly imagine the future at this phase allows us to better emotionally and logistically prepare for what is to come.
At the risk of oversimplifying an otherwise lengthy discussion, some practices we can try here should have the objective of activating our DMN, and increasing:
Openness to experience
Capacity for scenario planning5
If you are someone who has the tendency to imagine the worst case scenario, or all the ways things could go wrong, also consider asking yourself, “What might happen if things could go well?” and “What do I / we stand to learn and gain from pursuing this idea or project?”. Notice what opens up for you.
Phase two
For this phase, it’s about building the capacity to carefully, deliberately evaluate potential futures in order to inform our present action. And we have a number of core brain functions that handicap us in this phase. So it helps to be aware of them, and to embed practices to manage them. So here are some things we may want to acknowledge:
We tend to underestimate the time and cost required by a future task (a.k.a. the planning fallacy).6
This can be managed by planning for contingencies, setbacks, obstacles, and adding buffers in time and cost in anticipation of that.
We tend to inaccurately assess the potential for harm for any product we ourselves create (a.k.a. innovator’s bias).7
This can be managed by imagining the worst case scenario for your innovation. Research from BetterUp labs found that priming owners of innovations in this way brought them back down to earth, and helped them correct their overly optimistic ratings without dampening their enthusiasm.
Think of all the messiahnic, narcissistic tech innovators or entrepreneurs you know.8 It feels very satisfying to me — the idea of grounding them a bit, or a lot.
IV. Grounding Prospection in Purpose
I’m still trying to understand my feelings about the impact of prospection in my personal life and my desire to be in the here and now, as well as my feelings about how it has negatively impacted humanity when harnessed by megalomaniacs. And I think that’s where the purpose or intention of the prospection becomes central in its power.
It then becomes worthwhile to ask one’s self:
In what ways can our powers of prospection be generative?
How might I use it in service of personal and collective well-being and humanity?
How might I remind myself about our shared humanity as I carry out plans towards that envisioned future?
And if I think about those questions, it becomes clear to me that being mindful of the future also helps us show up better for ourselves and for each other in the present.
This is why I believe humans endeavor to educate the youth, to nourish and heal one another, to conserve our planet’s finite resources, to address injustice, poverty, climate change. Hope for a more mindful, equitable and livable future gives me more resourcefulness and will to look for ways to create positive impact in the present.
And while I work towards that future society and that desired version of myself, it doesn’t have to mean mean that I can’t also appreciate what I have in the here and now, and in fact, recognizing that what I have now may not exist in the future allows me not to take it for granted today.
Kellerman, G. R. & Seligman, M. (2023). Tomorrowmind. Atria Books.
In 2013 book Homo Prospectus by psychologists Martin Seligman and Roy Baumeister, philosopher Peter Railton, and neuroscientist Chandra Sripada
Also from Tomorrowmind. :) It’s a good book!
“Mind-wandering is a feature, not a bug.” When we aren’t actively task-focused, our brains switch into a different mode of thinking — one so vital that it is our default; it is the activity our brain jumps to in every free moment. This is called the Default Mode Network (DMN).
Think about the times that maybe you were in the shower (or on the toilet), washing the dishes, doing random things around the house, and suddenly, an idea comes to you. It is often in those moments, when our brain is in this mode, that we get out best ideas.
First developed futurist Herman Kahn for the think tank RAND in the 1950s, scenario planning guides groups to envision widely divergent futures (phase one), and then asks them to work backwards toward plans for preparation (phase two).
The planning fallacy was first described by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979.
In 2021, BetterUp Labs researcher Andrew Reece and his team proposed this type of bias, which specifically hampers our ability to accurately prospect about a novel product’s potential for harm.
Imagine if the folks at Facebook did the same about their Open Graph innovation that enabled Cambridge Analytica to impact democratic elections across the world.