Where's my Jetpack?

When I was a kid, I thought the future would be all blinking lights, chrome surfaces, and I'd have some sort of omniscient voice assistant that one day said in a soothing but still somehow vaguely threatening way, “Welcome home, Alex, the future is here and your jetpack and flying car are in the garage”.

But here we are. My voice assistant can turn off the lights and tell me what the weather is, but still hasn't announced the jetpack or flying car. Maybe I need to read the manual.

The future we expect is rarely the one we get.

Our visions of the future tend to reflect what we hope for, or what we fear. Every generation’s imagined future is a mirror for their anxieties and aspirations.

When my grandparents imagined the future, it was about abundance - food, peace, security.

My parents’ generation imagined more freedom - travel, information, choice.

My generation seems to dream of more control - over time, over work, over seeing who's viewed our LinkedIn profiles (Let’s be honest: charging people to alleviate their mild insecurity or feed their narcissism is a disturbingly effective business model).

Unlike past generations who dreamed of more (more money, more stuff, more prestige), my daughter’s generation tends to dream of better - better balance, better values, better systems, and maybe a planet that still has icebergs. (What a bunch of whiners.)

Our ambitions give us visions of utopias. Our anxieties give us visions of dystopian collapse. The truth is usually more complicated, but is shaped by those visions.

So when we talk about strategic planning, we often pretend it’s a planning problem.

It’s not.

It’s an imagination problem.

We think we’re preparing for ‘the future’, half the time we’re we’re building a plan based on a perfectly linear projection of a world that is in no way linear. This leads us to optimise for the past.

The other half of the time, we’re protecting ourselves from a deterministic view of what’s going to happen, based on our aspirations and anxieties, or sold to us by people with vested interests or billable hours targets. As if 'the future' has ever been that predictable. This leads us to surrender to inevitability, and those visions become self-fulfilling.

We keep trying to optimise for what’s likely, when what we need is to prepare for what’s possible.

In the space between the expected future and the experienced one are constant tiny shifts, ones that don’t happen in spreadsheets but in dialogue, context, culture, and - most importantly - the choices we make and actions we take.

Scenario planning shifts us away from linear, business-as-usual thinking and into a kind of rehearsal space - one where we explore futures that are not pre-determined. It’s not about prediction, but about preference, possibility, and provocation.

It doesn’t guarantee jetpacks. But it does stretch our creativity, build resilience, and sharpen decision-making. It helps us make smarter moves today, so we’re better equipped to influence what we can, and respond more effectively to whatever comes next.

And when done well, research shows, scenario planning doesn’t just help develop strategy, it helps us be more strategic.

Frith and Tapinos (2020) found that when we give ourselves space to conduct scenario planning - to challenge their assumptions, make the implicit explicit, and wrestle with uncertainty on purpose… something changes.

We start to think differently. Strategically. Systemically.

Scenario planning isn’t about prediction. It’s about possibility - about stretching our thinking so we can act with purpose, not just react with panic. Not only does it help us plan for the future, it gives us the capacity to imagine it, shape it, and lead into it.

Like it or not, this next generation, they’re right. We need better, not just more. The old systems aren’t working. And the future we build next had better be better - not just more efficient, but more human.

Alex