Who gets to create the future?

Creating the future does not just happen in Silicon Valley

I’ve noticed that in certain circles, there’s an assumption that the *future* is the sole purview of Silicon Valley (... as if the path to the future is paved in apps!). Of course, there’s no question that technology plays a sizable role in this arena, but as someone who has spent the past 24 years leading global nonprofits, I can attest: We are in a constant state of strategically anticipating and planning our collective futures. 

A recent article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, “Using strategic foresight to create the future we want,” suggests that futures thinking is a newer idea for the nonprofit sector to explore; that both NGOs and philanthropy as a sector are latecomers to this approach. Semantics aside (we may not talk in terms of “futures thinking”), imagining and then creating a better future is why many of us choose to work in this sector in the first place. At USA for UNHCR (U4U), for example — the U.S. fundraising arm of UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency , where I serve as CEO — so much of what we do is envision the future, and then anticipate ways to meet basic needs and end persecution and violence, so that the situations creating current crises don’t persist. 

Of course, funders are not always willing to invest in NGOs’ efforts at building long-term, systemic change, which I suppose we could describe as a limit to the sector’s capacity for futures thinking. Case in point: Some Rohingya refugees have been in camps in Bangladesh for more than 30 years, but there is less interest in funding protection efforts now than when their crisis was considered “acute.” This is a trend we’re seeing in our sector: refugee crises rarely resolve within six to nine months, and UNHCR is calling our response one of sustainable programming that pivots to long-term and durable solutions- “long-term” as in the future, and “durable” as in lasting beyond tomorrow’s horizon.  

Power dynamics and catalyzing change

"The spaces for imagining potential futures and sharing them widely have been unevenly distributed,” suggests Marina Gorbis , executive director of the Institute for the Future and the author of the SSIR article. She goes on to say: 

“They are a way of life in Silicon Valley and other pockets of power where many feel like they are inventing the future and where conversations are peppered with words like transformation, disruption, innovation, and exponential growth. Simultaneously, large swaths of the population feel like they are powerless victims of the future."

I especially appreciate this last point. Creating our collective future is not and cannot be the unique purview of an elite group. As far as transformation, I’m reminded of an episode of the Masters of Scale podcast I recently listened to, “Why the future needs refounders”; in it, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman describes the idea of “re-founding”:

“Re-founding means joining an organization not only as a new leader, but as a catalyst for evolving its culture, roadmap, and strategy. It means honoring the valuable building blocks of the business, while breathing new life into its everyday work and inspiring teams to take risks.”

As Hoffman observes, given the pace of technological change (and, I would add, climate and societal change), organizations increasingly benefit from a CEO with a “re-founding mindset”: “‘Hey, we just continue to run the way that we were running 30 years ago’ seems much less likely to be the right answer,” he says, and I agree. “Re-founding” is what I was essentially hired to do at U4U. They may not have used this terminology, but the expectation was that I help evolve the organization while staying true to its core values; that I lead us into the future.

Innovation within guardrails

At U4U, our board just approved a strategic plan that positions us to create a better future for the 122+ million forcibly displaced and stateless people who fall within UNHCR’s mandate. The process itself centered a kind of re-founding; we worked within a set of parameters to imagine the best future possible for refugees and displaced people, knowing that some things, such as our fundamental mission, would not change. While inventing within constraints might sound limiting, or creatively stifling, I find it to be quite powerful to set boundaries and regenerate within those boundaries (speaking of boundary setting, if you haven’t read Set Boundaries, Find Peace by Nedra Glover Tawwab, I highly recommend it).

There are companies in the private sector that exist to innovate and advance technology, that can afford to fail often — in fact, it’s their business model. We in the nonprofit sector are not that. But we still often bring an innovation lens to our work, albeit with some guardrails and a much smaller budget. U4U’s innovation lab, The Hive (with its stellar advisory board), is a wonderful example of this. Founded in 2015, The Hive’s mission is to engage with the American public to raise awareness about refugees and design solutions that address their needs through technology and the data science process. 

Noting machine learning tools that can survey vast quantities of written material, for example, The Hive team thought of our dire need for pro bono attorneys equipped to support asylum cases. Now we’re applying technology to conduct text analyses of case law, making it easier for lawyers new to this area to contribute their time. 

Turning the disrupted into disruptors

At U4U, we take innovation seriously, within parameters, because we believe there’s so much in the larger innovation space to harness to make people’s lives better. Going back to what Marina Gorbis of Institute for the Future said about the power gap between those who feel empowered to invent the future, and those who feel like helpless victims of it, I find myself thinking about the idea of disruption.

The lives of those we serve at U4U, the 122+ million people worldwide forced to flee violence and persecution — they have been literally disrupted. To me, the most interesting kind of “futures thinking” is one that involves these humans, their security ripped away from them, in driving the disruption that will make their future bright.