Trista Harris’s book, “Future Good: How to Use Futurism to Save the World,” kicks off with a line from a John Legend song: “We’re the generation that can’t afford to wait. The future started yesterday, and we’re already late.”
The lyrics reflect Harris’s sense of urgency, and her conviction that looking forward can both inform the present and chart a better path to the future. Harris, who calls herself a “philanthropic futurist,” has spent most of her career in the nonprofit world: she was president of the Minnesota Council of Foundations, and the executive director of the Headwaters Foundation for Justice. After she began exploring futurism, she studied and became certified in strategic foresight by Oxford University and The Institute for the Future.
Futurism may sound a little out there at first, but it’s not about reading tea leaves or gazing into a crystal ball. As Harris writes in her book, “The goal of futurism is to improve the future through better decision-making… Futurists are not creating an exact model of the future. We are using trends to determine what is possible, probable, and preferable in the future… Futurists use foresight, which is the ability to recognize patterns in the present and at the same time think about how those patterns will impact the future.”
The U.S. government — particularly the military — and many in the private sector incorporate futurism in their planning. But when Harris first began to explore the field, she found that she was one of the few people from the nonprofit and foundation world. “Starting my journey into futurism was intimidating,” she writes. “In most spaces, I was the only woman, the only person of color, and the only person under fifty. For a long time, I was also the only person from the social sector.”
The more Harris learned about futurism, the more convinced she became that it could benefit her work and the sector as a whole. The organization she created, FutureGood, works with foundations and nonprofits, helping them employ futurism tools to shape their organizations’ paths. FutureGood consults with organizations one-on-one, and it also offers retreats for foundation and philanthropic representatives. The organization recently introduced two new initiatives: FutureGood Studio, a three-month, online program to teach futurism to social sector professionals, and Field Trips to the Future, which FutureGood curates for individual foundations to help grantees working on particular topics apply a futurism lens to that work.
We sat down with Trista Harris recently to find out more about futurism and how its tools can help organizations anticipate and influence what comes next. Bonus: after we spoke, Harris released her philanthropy predictions for 2023. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you first become interested in futurism?
I’ve worked in the social sector since I was a teenager, first on the nonprofit side and then on the foundation side as a program officer, and then running a foundation and then running an association of foundations. So I love the social sector. Back in 2008, I was running the Headwaters Foundation for Justice — it was my first time running an organization. I was probably 29 at the time, so really young in this big job. And a couple of months into the job, the stock market collapsed. Our endowment lost 30% to 50% of its value. Our grantees were working on really big issues, and suddenly we didn't have dollars to give them.
During that time I stumbled on a book about futurism. I think the premise of the book was how to use futurism in times of volatility. I read it from front to back and realized that these tools would be really useful for our grantees. It was about helping them envision the future they were trying to create after this moment of crisis. It was also about creating a shared picture of the situation, and if there are fewer resources, organizations are going to have to work together to meet their missions. Our role was to help them think about how to do that.
In the year and a half after that, our grantees had 10 legislative wins, including alternative teacher certification to diversify our teaching force in Minnesota, a Homeowners Bill of Rights to deal with the mortgage foreclosure crisis, and marriage equity. It made clear to me that these tools can be so powerful in the hands of people trying to make the world a better place.
After that I wanted to find the “futurism association” that was going to help me learn how to use these tools in the nonprofit sector, but it turned out that it doesn’t exist.
So you created FutureGood. Can you describe how FutureGood works with organizations?
You can use futurism in a lot of different ways. There is forecasting, which people are probably most familiar with. That means, if you look at something like demographics, you make assumptions based on where we are right now, about what's going to happen next.
The type of work that FutureGood does is backcasting. That is, helping organizations look 20 to 50 years in the future to answer the question: If we were 100% successful meeting our mission, and if money wasn't an issue and alignment wasn't an issue and outside public policy wasn't an issue, what would the thing we care about look like in our ideal future? And then, what would we have to look like organizationally to make that future possible?
We lead organizations through a process to get really clear about what that future looks like. And then you work backwards, and you say, what are we already doing that leads to that future? And what are we doing that's never going to get us there and that we should stop doing?
There's a little trick to using 50 years: It's so far in the future that you get really hopeful about what's possible. It's also about legacy, so you're not responsible for doing that work. In normal strategic planning, you’re talking about what you are golng to do next year. And people are really busy, so they tend to think small about what is possible. When you say 50 years, it gives people this space to imagine something different. And then we work backwards and they develop a three year plan to start to get them toward that ideal future. For many organizations, it might take two to five years to get to that ideal future. So it doesn't really take 50 years, but you need a long enough runway so that you can imagine something significantly different than where you are right now.
The other thing that is really important: we develop a list of what the organization will stop doing. Everybody's already very busy and if it is all about, “Here's the new things that you need to do,” then everybody is already exhausted. So you have to think about what you are taking off the plate to create room to build something completely different.
There is a little bit of magic in creating a shared vision of the future. Normally within an organization everybody is working really hard, but they're working just a little bit toward different futures. Everyone has a different picture in their head: often the board and staff have different views, frontline staff and the leadership team have different views. When you start to align those views of the future, everybody's work starts to support each other’s.
You know, change is difficult and in many strategy processes, people are most comfortable with the devil they know, and they say, “I'd rather stick with the way we've been doing things.” But what happens in our process, the picture of the future is so clear that the present starts to feel uncomfortable, because the hard work that you're doing isn't actually getting you to the goal you're excited about. And so you're willing to try new things, you're willing to let go of some longstanding programs, you're willing to do the work, because you're really excited to get to that new place.
Can you talk about your own experience using some of these tools when the pandemic hit?
Back in 2016, I began raising the possibility of a global pandemic in my presentations — I showed a slide of people at an airport wearing masks. There are a million reasons why global pandemics are much more likely now, but cheap, global airfare and interfering in natural areas are two of the reasons.
What that view of the future allowed me to do when the pandemic first started was to take it seriously and to understand that it was a significant issue that was definitely going to impact supply chains, for example. And to start to think about, do we have food in the house? How do we get access to masks? And I moved a bunch of my January [2020] meetings to virtual. I was able to be really thoughtful about what might have to change in my business if we were going into a global pandemic.
Then when we had the lockdowns in the United States, probably a week or two later, I gave a free training for nonprofit organizations about how to use scenario planning during the pandemic to understand ways that COVID could impact organizations and the communities they care about. A good friend who is also a consultant called me when she got the invitation to the training, and she said, “How are you not crying on your office floor right now? Instead you're out creating programs!” I for sure cried on my office floor during that first week, but then was able to quickly pivot to, “What skills can I use in this moment to help with the issue of our time?”
So what futurism gives you is just a little bit more mental space, because you've already considered the bad things and good things that can happen, and you have an idea of what strategy you will take if that future comes true. There are not an infinite number of futures, there's probably four or five possibilities. And so if you know what those possibilities are for your work or for your institution, you can start to develop plans before they actually happen.
Can you point to a philanthropic organization that is using futurism in an effective way?
Yes, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has a team called Pioneering Ideas for an Equitable Future that does amazing work. I’m biased because I was a futurist in residence there for three years, but I really like their approach. The team is focused on helping the foundation understand what 10 years from now will look like for their grantmaking. So they make grants and investments with the idea, “Let's test ideas that will serve us well in the future. And let's help other folks on the foundation understand what's coming next.”
As you know, Robert Wood Johnson is a health foundation. In the beginning of the pandemic, there was this very quick effort from Pioneer team members to think about previous grantees that were doing work that would be useful during the pandemic. For example, they had previously supported an organization that did contact tracing work around STDs and developed some technology around that, so Robert Wood Johnson reached out to them about contact tracing for COVID. So it's about understanding how to transform what we've learned in the past and adapting it to present needs.
I wish every single foundation in the country had a Pioneer-type program, a group of people focused not just on the short-term future but on the long-term future. Because most foundations exist in perpetuity. If you're going to exist forever, you have a responsibility to the future and you should be getting ready for that now, not later.
It’s hard not to be pessimistic about the future, given global conflict, the spread of bigotry and authoritarianism around the globe, poverty and environmental degradation, and so many other pressing problems. As a futurist, what is your perspective?
I’m positive about the long-term future because I think we can do better. And I think we all want to do better. So I think we can move to a beautiful, equitable future where people thrive and where we use technology to free humans from really repetitive or dangerous work. You know, in the Industrial Revolution we moved from working 80 hours a week to 40 hours a week. I think with the technological revolution we could probably move from 40 hours a week to 20 hours a week, and spend that extra time being good human beings and family members and neighbors and all of the things that humans are really great at. And so I'm excited about what that future can look like. But I think we have to have conversations as a society about how we want something different and want something better, as opposed to our current frame right now, which is how to make things 5% less terrible.
I think that many people have this view that the future is something that just happens to us, and usually that it's a bad thing. The planet is going to get too hot, or there won't be enough water, or cities will fall apart. It’s a view of a dystopian future, mostly because of our popular media. It's more interesting to talk about a dystopian future and so “Hunger Games” and that sort of stuff is popular. In that view of the future, you're just waiting for the bad thing to happen.
What we’re trying to get across is that the future doesn't happen to you; you create it with the decisions that you make today. So if you want the future to be different, you have to do different things in this moment for that to happen. And as a social sector, we have a responsibility to do those things. That's why we exist: every single nonprofit that I know of is trying to build a more beautiful future. And using these tools can help them get clear about what that future can look like.