Almost every day we wake up to something seemingly unimaginable becoming reality: the highest documented temperatures in human history, wars breaking out in the middle of Europe, artificial intelligence "eating" people's jobs, a realignment of global alliances and ideologies. As someone jokingly put it, "If dragons start descending, no one would be surprised."

As chaotic as these events appear, most of today’s realities were yesterday’s forecasts. Yet despite having access to these forecasts, organizations consistently fail to act on them. What prevents organizations from imagining and preparing for radically different futures? We see three reasons.

First, the biases of today limit our views of what is possible in the future. It’s human nature to see current arrangements as inevitable, even pre-ordained. It is hard to imagine, for example, how we could sustain livelihoods in ways other than wage work. If we look at the totality of human experience, however, it is only in the last 100 years that wage work has been the dominant mode of making a living. Yet we find it nearly impossible to imagine a different system — one that could support daily life while also providing purpose, social connections, and well-being.

Second, diving into radically different futures is often difficult because of what we call the “forbidden futures” phenomenon — the reluctance of groups to seriously consider possibilities they don’t like. It may seem that by articulating an undesirable scenario we are wishing it into being or endorsing it. But we don’t live in a Harry Potter universe where we can conjure up reality. By avoiding deeply unsettling possibilities we undermine, rather than strengthen, organizational resilience. How many governments and organizations carefully played out a major pandemic scenario that shut down offices and upended supply chains, even though experts warned about the high likelihood of such an event for decades? How many are playing out a bird flu pandemic scenario today?

Third, behind the reluctance to confront radically different futures lies another impediment — legacy structures and vested interests in the status quo. It is natural for people to protect their interests, budgets, theories of change, or departments from obsolescence or restructuring. But it is also an impediment to building robust future-facing strategies.

In times of chaos, organizations are forced to confront and overcome these three challenges while operating in two distinct modes simultaneously: short-term crisis response and long-term building. Doing so successfully requires mastering two critical skills — improvisation and imagination. Improvisation enables immediate survival by helping organizations adapt quickly to unexpected crises, but it’s reactive and short-term. For sustainable success in a post-chaos world — and to see the opportunities that arise during periods of volatility — organizations need imagination to envision and build toward radically different futures.

Here are some futures mindsets and tools that can help do both:

  1. Look to the past for patterns and signals of change:
    Writer L.P. Hartley once said that "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there." That's why effective futurists look backward as well as forward; the past holds as many clues as the present about wildly innovative solutions to harsh problems. Good foresight begins with examining history — what decisions have led us to where we are today? What patterns tend to repeat over and over? What values and policies shaped people’s lives? As Dr. Maisha Winn of Stanford’s Futuring for Equity Lab says, “I think about history as an opportunity to learn about the actions and activities of people that we may want to tap into” for lessons in liberation, ingenuity, and strategy. Analyses of the past, along with scanning for signals of the future, expand the repertoire of possibilities we can imagine. With expanded vision we can build more robust long-term strategies and more agile short-term crisis responses.

  2. Identify, then challenge your assumptions:
    One of our favorite strategic tools for challenging core assumptions comes from IFTF Director of Game Research & Development Jane McGonigal’s book Imaginable. The process is simple. Take any fact about the present, imagine its opposite ten years from now, then tell a story about how we got there. For example, today nonprofit organizations are funded primarily by philanthropies. Imagine a future in which philanthropies are funded by nonprofit organizations, then work backwards to create a plausible narrative about how we arrived at that world. Now do it at least ten more times. The more you practice, the easier it gets to move beyond forbidden futures and imagine wildly different paths to new possibilities and also see that some of the possibilities are not as impossible as they seem.

  3. Overcome today’s turf battles through a shared vision of the future:
    Improvisation and imagination take courage, and courage requires trust. We often say that the future can make tough conversations easier because it brings diverse stakeholders into a conversation of imagination and prioritization. More often than we’d like to admit, true organizational change is hampered by commitments to legacy infrastructure and an unwillingness to let go of the status quo. Structured, facilitated foresight processes take a group — which may include members who can't agree on current priorities — on a collective journey of envisioning possible futures, then aligning on the one they want to build together. Done well, they create a permission structure for talking about the values behind difficult strategic choices. Start with a shared future and use it to evaluate your strategies and actions.

  4. Engender agency:
    Foresight works best when it includes the whole team. The best foresight is built from the ground up, drawing from observations and insights of people across the organization and its stakeholders. “Signals swarms” invite large numbers of people to contribute their expert views on the key changes happening around them. Ethnographic foresight brings in voices from the front lines of the future today — low-income families managing extreme temperatures, patients vibecoding genAI tools to manage their health, or teenage girls (always innovators) crafting their identities on emerging social media platforms. This participatory approach mitigates bias, engages those resistant to change, and creates a welcome space to voice forbidden futures. It helps develop better futures visions, but it also helps organizations respond with agility during crises.

Experts have suggested different terms to describe this period we are living through — the end of history, political realignment, digital transformation, climate apocalypse. No matter what we call it, we are witnessing profound transformations in the fundamental structures of society. In these chaotic times we need to bring the long view back as a part of strategy lest we doom ourselves to endless improvised responses to an external world that seems out of our control. We need to marry improvisation and imagination to move beyond chaos.

Marina Gorbis is executive director of IFTF. Lyn Jeffery is Foresight Essentials director of IFTF.