You Can’t Plan for One Future Anymore

By Eileen Lawless

Storytelling is one of the oldest ways we make sense of the world. In social impact work, we use stories to explain what we have done and what we hope to build next. Perhaps that is why storytelling resonates so deeply with us as humans; stories are not just how we memorialize the past, they are how we carry possibility forward.

What is harder, and often more uncomfortable, is holding more than one possible future in mind at the same time. Many of us first encountered that idea in those “choose your own adventure” books, where the story changed depending on the choices made along the way. Real life is less tidy, and you can't exactly ask your funders and donors to choose their own adventure, but the underlying idea is similar. More than one future can be plausible at once.

Across different fields, people have developed ways of working intentionally with multiple futures, for a variety of reasons.

In finance, thinking in scenarios is standard practice. Stress testing and modeling different conditions are built into decision-making because the assumption is simple: the future will shift, and leaders need to be ready for more than one outcome.

In public policy and international development, futures thinking has increasingly been formalized as strategic foresight. The OECD has written extensively about anticipatory governance and the value of testing policies against multiple long-term scenarios. The United Nations Development Programme has invested in foresight approaches to help teams navigate complex and rapidly changing environments. UK, Australian, US, and other development agencies have used structured approaches to possible futures as a way to reassess assumptions and adapt as contexts evolve. Philanthropic institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation have also shared scenario-based work that explores how global systems might unfold in different directions.

Many domestic nonprofits have used similar approaches, even if they did not label it “futures thinking.” During COVID and other crisis periods, organizations across the United States mapped best-, worst-, and middle-case scenarios to assess funding stability, staffing implications, and program continuity. At the same time, U.S.-based nonprofit think tanks such as the Institute for the Future have long focused on helping organizations anticipate alternative pathways and emerging shifts.

In social change spaces, practitioners such as Adam Kahane and REOS Partners have used scenarios in a different but related way. The purpose is not only planning. It is helping people working on difficult problems to imagine futures they may not yet agree on, or may not even believe are possible. The value lies as much in the shared thinking as in the scenarios themselves.

What strikes me across all of these traditions is that the goal is rarely prediction. It is preparation, perspective, and possibility.

The real value of working with multiple futures is not just better plans, but better decisions that emerge when people across titles and silos make time to think together and imagine what might be possible.

No single person, regardless of title, sees the whole landscape. Thinking in multiple futures works best when different perspectives are in the room. Leaders bring essential insight, but so do people closer to implementation, partners outside the organization, and those who experience the work differently. Making space for that collective thinking is not always easy, especially when time and funding feel tight. Yet teams that pause to think together often move faster and with greater clarity later.

This kind of thinking also does something else. Strategic plans and outcomes frameworks ask us to focus on what is actionable, which is necessary and important. But when we only allow ourselves to imagine futures that fit neatly inside current plans, we may narrow our sense of what change could look like. Even brief moments of exploring multiple futures can widen the aperture, helping teams see risks more clearly and possibilities more fully.

Facilitating this kind of shared futures thinking is one of my favorite types of work. I get to help organizations bring people across titles and silos into the room to explore multiple futures together and turn that thinking into clearer decisions. In the process, teams often rediscover a sense of possibility, realizing that the future is not just a table of outcomes to deliver, but a field of possibilities still open to influence.

And perhaps that is the real invitation here. The future is not a story we simply inherit. It is one we continue to write together.