The fourth way: design thinking meets futures thinking | anna roumiantseva | pulse | linked in

23/10/16, 1)11 PMThe Fourth Way: Design Thinking Meets Futures Thinking | Anna Roumiantseva | Pulse | LinkedIn
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The Fourth Way: Design Thinking Meets
Futures Thinking
Published on October 19, 2016
(in collaboration with Dave Weissburg at Fidelity Labs)
They say “hindsight is 20/20”. If only you knew then what you know now, you would
have sold that stock, ended that relationship, or taken that job offer in a snap. Of course
the tricky part is being able to make those decisions in the present, but how do you do
that without knowing what’s lurking around the corner? I want to argue that by making
Futures Thinking a standard part of your thought process – both in your business and
personal lives – you’ll be able to make better decisions in the face of uncertainty.
As a design strategist, I have helped design dozens of products and services. The
process is always pretty similar – we invest a lot of time upfront to understand our
users, generate insights about their needs, create and test a wide range of solutions to
satisfy those needs, and then build a business model to bring the winning one(s) to
market. It’s a process that is extremely well-suited to do what it was intended to do –
creatively solve problems that our audience is facing today in a user-centric way.
However, it doesn’t take into account that our users are evolving every day – much like
you and I. I never thought twice about this until I did a project in partnership with the
Institute for the Future this past summer and learned their Futures Thinking
methodology. Rather than trying to predict the future, their methods help you create
multiple possible scenarios for what the future might look like. They call it forecasting.
As a result, like a weather forecast, you are able to prepare for a broad range of likely
things on the horizon and take advantage of impactful opportunities while minimizing
surprises. So how do Futures Thinking and Design Thinking compare and perhaps
complement each other? And how can we use the two in tandem to get to better
outcomes?
The two processes have some stark differences:
1.) The mix of diverging and converging: While both processes require a series of
diverging and converging steps, Design Thinking ultimately converges to a
Anna Roumiantseva
Design Strategist & MBA Candidate at UC Berkeley Haas
Following
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concrete concept that is tested, finalized, and brought to market. Futures Thinking,
on the other hand, yields a series of scenarios, which are meant to illustrate
multiple options for what the future might be without defining an exact prediction.
We can then design product concepts for any one of these future scenarios,
meaning that the end-point of the Futures Thinking process can be seen as the
starting point for the Design Thinking process – one can feed into the other.
2.) The goals and mindsets, which lead to very different outputs: Design Thinking
aims to inspire us to create. The goals are products, services, and experiences for
today’s world. It helps get to this goal and deal with its inherent ambiguity by
relying on a mindset of optimistic confidence that we will ultimately get to the
desired outcome. Futures Thinking, on the other hand, aims to inspire. The goal is
to think bigger about opportunities we may (or may not) have in the coming
years. It aims to inform organizational strategy for tomorrow and make it more
robust for the uncertainty that lies ahead. At its core, the process embraces the
inherent uncertainty that comes with this, fostering a mindset of pragmatic
humility.

3.) The timeline: Design Thinking focuses on creating for today’s world and the
immediate future. As a result, the inspiration stage is usually focused on
investigating the present and the immediate past only (a few years back). Futures
Thinking aims to illuminate possibilities 10-15 years down the road. As a result, it
requires us to look 10-15 years back in time to understand history in order to be
able to trace the trajectory of what the implications of the past might be on the
future.
4.) The system: Design Thinking, given its more immediate nature, generally only
focuses on the more immediate factors relevant to the organization today – the
people we’re designing for, our technological constraints, and our business needs.
Given its more long-term nature, Futures Thinking embraces a much more
systemic approach. On top of looking at the factors immediately relevant to
today’s organizational context, it takes into account greater macro factors that
may shape the organizational context in the coming years.
However, Futures Thinking also has some undeniable similarities to the Design
Thinking.
1.) Inspirational Edges: Both processes look to the fringes as a source of
inspiration. In Design Thinking this is done by looking at lead and lag users to
expose user needs and analogous systems to show opportunity areas. In Futures
Thinking this is done by looking at weak signals of change observed in today’s

world and extrapolating what they might become in ten to fifteen years.
2.) People and Experiences: Both processes rely on personas and prototypes to
bring abstract concepts to life. In Design Thinking this helps make user needs and
product ideas tangible – this helps potential users react to concepts and provide
useful feedback. In Futures Thinking this helps make abstract scenarios for what
life might be like in the future tangible by putting real items from those worlds in
front of business stakeholders.
We could discuss these (and other) similarities and differences for days, but the point is
that both processes are valuable in their own right. One of my favorite quotes by Daniel
Egger states, “The present creates value so that the future can exist... and the future
offers a strategic north and new possible opportunities.” We need to be looking at both
to optimize for success and ﬁnd the alignment between the present and the future.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-believe-ina-differentinnovation-lab-
daniel-egger
The greater question for us as design practitioners, then, is: what do we do about all of
this? Can using Future Thinking in our design process beneﬁt us? What will it help us
accomplish?
I think that the ultimate beneﬁt of blending the two methodologies is to design products
that are more future-proof. Rather than designing something that today’s user will buy
today, it helps us better understand what that user might want and need in the future and
evolve with him/her. It’s kind of like starting a college savings plan for your newborn. It
helps design for longer-lasting relationships with our users – a relationship based on our
products and services rather than merely on our brand.

So how do we do it? One option is to commit to Future Thinking and engage in it
regularly in parallel with our Design Thinking process – to always have an up-to-date
set of possible scenarios for what our future will be 10-15 years from now and align our
design initiatives with these visions. This is great, but we’re not all ready to take that
leap yet. So in the meantime we can borrow some exercises from the Futures Thinking
process and integrate them into our Design Thinking initiatives so start getting steeped
in the methodology.
o Looking Back to Look Forward: In Design Thinking we are guided heavily by
stories from our users – these are data points about the past. This Futures
Thinking exercise can help connect the data points to uncover trajectories. It can
help us understand users on a deeper level by seeing how their realities and
behaviors have evolved (and how they might continue to evolve). It prompts us to
ask questions like: What have been some of the most important trends in the
domain/industry we’re designing in and which of them have most affected our
user groups? How did these trends change user behaviors/preferences and what
were the drivers behind these trends? What might be the next step for these trends
if we were to extrapolate them into the future?
o Collecting and Clustering Signals: In Design Thinking look to “tail” users and
analogous systems for insights and inspiration. This Futures Thinking exercise can
help see how else we might look at what is happening at the “fringes” of our
organizational context (in areas that might seem irrelevant at first) to better
understand potential opportunity areas. It prompts us to ask questions like: What
are some of the most creative, exciting, unusual things happening in the world at
large today? What is driving these things to develop? Why are these interesting
and what implications might they have in the future? How might they apply to the
domain we’re designing in?
o Forecasting Two Curves: In Design Thinking we think about how insights from
extreme users can translate to more mainstream user groups. This Futures
Thinking exercise provides a structured approach to envision how seeds of change
from today’s fringes might make their way into the mainstream and how,
conversely, the elements from today’s mainstream might fall to obsolescence. It
prompts us to ask questions like: What innovations might stem from today’s
signals of change if/when they become mainstream? What needs to happen for the
shift to occur and what might the transition look like? What elements of the
domain we’re designing for & our user lives will be most transformed as a result?
Which parts of today’s mainstream will still be around and which will go away?
o Revealing Unexpected Possibilities: In Design Thinking we generate a lot of
observations, insights, and ideas throughout the divergent stages of the process.
This Futures Thinking exercise provides a new “mash-up” framework to help make
sense of these diverse elements and uncover new opportunity areas. It requires us
to generate a lot (at least 50-100) signals of change that you’re seeing in today’s

Report this
world. These can be news stories, emerging startups, or anything else concrete
that you think might have implications for the future. It then prompts us to think
about what interesting opportunities could exist at the intersection of various
combinations of 2-3 of these signals. It prompts us to ask questions like: Which
insights do we find the most intriguing (even if they appear completely unrelated)?
What kinds of user needs could exist at the intersection of these insights if you
combined them? Which user needs seem to be the most critical? What kinds of new
products and experiences could exist to fill the intersection of these needs?
Futures Thinking can often seem nebulous and uncomfortable – much like Design
Thinking did back when you were less familiar with it. I hope that this overview peaked
your interest and made you see the value behind it. I also hope that it made you want to
explore how Future Thinking might make you a better designer and strategist. Finally, I
hope that this is just the beginning of a movement to bring the two disciplines closer
together over the coming years and the start of a conversation around how we do so.
Anna Roumiantseva
Design Strategist & MBA Candidate at UC Berkeley Haas
1 post
Leave your thoughts here…
Like Reply
Jeﬀ Champagne
Immersed Emerging Technologies Development Adviser
Brilliant and concise. Thank you for sharing this refreshing perspective on innovation and de-
sign strategy.
1d
Like Reply
Jacques Barcia
Futurist at Dream Machine Futures Studio / Tech Trends Consultant at Porto Digital
Very cool, Anna. My own research goes the same direction. I beg to disagree with the futures
thinking diagram. Futures thinking and design thinking run parallel to each other. In a futures
project you diverge as much as in a design project looking first for signals (ok, the first step real-
ly is to frame the question, just as in design). A collection of signals can converge… See more
22h
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