In the preceding navigation point, we have explored and challenged systems, structures, processes and ways of working. In this fourth and final navigation point, Navigating Interdependence, we arrive at the obvious, even banal, point that, in the end, every structure and every system consists of the same thing: people. Therefore, in our endeavour to create societal change, much of our success comes down to our ability to affect human behaviour and relationships.

As we mess with existing systems in our effort to create new ones, we challenge existing power dynamics and relationships, which often provoke resistance and may lead to conflict. As Leadbeater and Winhall put it: ‘Conflict is an inevitable and important part of transition, and system innovators will not succeed if they are naive about the need to work with the resistance these efforts at change provoke’ (Leadbeater and Winhall, 2020). The messy work of meddling with people – their personal whims, ideas, values, deeply rooted habits and personal idiosyncrasies – is often the hardest, most frustrating, and yet (if you ask us) the most enriching part of the job.

This navigation point, Navigating Interdependence, is about what happens when we move our focus from the analytic gaze of the logics and structure of systems towards the practical interaction and interference with cultures and human behaviour. In our conversations with systems innovator and urban planner Dan Hill, he highlighted the importance of the word cultures: ‘I stress cultures to counterpoint the “systems” word, because systems can immediately sound very technical and problematically technocratic. Obviously, systems aren’t that. In reality, systems can be highly qualitative and complex’ (Hill, 2024a).

It should be clear now that scenario design and futures design can open up and help us claim the opportunity spaces that wicked problems hold. Three or four diverse scenarios, however, do not provide a unified direction to work towards. Instead, they lay the rich and insightful groundwork for guiding a collective journey towards the preferred future.

One might be tempted to criticize that we focus on the wrong things if we focus or work towards preferred futures, thereby neglecting today's massive challenges and the many people already deeply affected by issues today like the effects of climate change. We turn to futures designer Oskar Stokholm Østergaard, whom we have collaborated with for many years, to nuance this:

Others will argue that we desperately need the hope and radical ideas of preferred futures to escape the grip of the slowly collapsing status quo. I’ve found that working with both alternative and preferred futures in combination yields the best results for the transition-inspired work I am doing, especially when coupled with thorough backcasting, an attention to non-linear transition pathways, and a focus on immediate action and experimentation. (Østergaard, 2024a)

Through our experimentation with different corners of futures design, we have realized that driving processes that include a collective exploration of various plausible and possible and even extreme futures enable an essential next step: the convergence around a preferred future that nurtures collective understanding, urgency and hopefulness – and a very important ingredient: directionality.

As a primer to the book's four navigating points, we briefly introduce the five theoretical domains that we base our practice on and refer to throughout the book.

We are practitioners, not academics, and our practice is based on a sometimes haphazard process of piecing together bits of theory, methodology and thinking from across different disciplines and compiling them in a patchwork way of working. The domains we share here are academic fields we keep bumping into that continue to challenge and inspire us so we can convert the thinking into practice. In some academics’ opinion, our way of working and applying theory may come off as a bit messy, as we pragmatically and agnostically apply and adapt to whatever works in the specific context.

We are, however, biased when it comes to the design domain. As two designers, one by education and another by practice, we have a special connection to this domain. It is the offset for our practice and the professional lens from which we explore and gain inspiration from other theoretical domains.

The domains are the following:

• • Design: Design is the intentional process of creating concepts, solutions, objects, systems, or experiences with a specific purpose or function in mind.

• • Mission-oriented innovation: an economic and political new paradigm that puts solving societal challenges at the heart of innovation and collaboration across society.

At a press conference on 11 March 2020, in the Hall of Mirrors at the Danish Prime Minister’s Office, journalists are placed on every other chair as a visual echo of the virus spreading as a wildfire. The atmosphere is solemn and nervous as the prime minister enters the room and opens the meeting. The air feels heavy and thick, even for those of us watching the press conference live from our living rooms. Denmark is shutting down to contain the spread of COVID-19. The number of people infected with the virus has increased more than tenfold in just three days.

As the Danish prime minister talks us through the details and the carefully curated information on how to respond to the virus, she also states something quite unusual and unprecedented in the realm of political leadership:

Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, was not the only political leader to acknowledge the uncertainty and the need for swift action. In our interpretation this signalled a political resolve, a willingness to experiment, to learn and to adapt as our society’s understanding of the accumulating crisis deepened. All over the world, political leaders came forward.

Just before a star is born, there is total chaos.

It starts with a process of star formation in large cold interstellar clouds of gas and dust. Gravity pulls gas and dust together into dense cores, and the temperature and pressure starts to rise.

When the temperature reaches about 10 million degrees Celsius, nuclear fusion begins at the centre of the cloud, marking the birth of a star. The fusion converts hydrogen into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy, and the star begins to emit light.

In this early phase, the star is called a protostar, and as it develops, it stabilizes as a main sequence star (Scientific American, 1999; NASA, 2024).

We started this book quoting Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘One must still have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star’ (Nietzsche, 1977). Nietzsche’s quote connects with the pathfinder’s role and at times inner frustrating sentiment when navigating complexity and chaos to create new paths. The birth of a star stands as a testament to the image of transition we wish to leave you with as we conclude this book.

When we offer navigation points for pathfinders to lean on in the process of transition, we do know that this process is messy. It is confusing. And it is chaotic.

No matter how good a map we may provide, the pathfinder is left to make her own connections and conclusions. As Winhall suggests, the pathfinder must assess what is noise and what is signal, single out the signal and try to build momentum around it (Winhall, 2024).

Why is it so hard to imagine a better future? And, more importantly, what are the consequences if we fail?

According to Professor Geoff Mulgan, we struggle to imagine futures because ‘future imagination involves two distinct steps, each of which is difficult: The first step involves questioning or rejecting the present, resisting to claim to be natural. The second step means constructing a plausible alternative, moving between an awareness of limits and a search for transcendence of those same limits’ (Mulgan, 2022: 35).

It is no exaggeration to say that both of us, on several occasions, felt naive, on the verge of unintelligent, in the many situations where we have presented the idea about a sustainable and better future. Daring to imagine a better world. We have repeatedly encountered resistance or scepticism from others, which, honestly, at times, have made us doubt our own worldview.

This feeling is not unique to us. One of us, Julie, once reached out to her network on LinkedIn to invite people to give their version of how an irresistible, circular society might look and feel 30 years from now. She got this private response in her direct inbox from a business leader within concrete production:

The process of learning is a dynamic interplay between a hypothesis and the concrete interventions you put into the world. Whatever its scope, scale, purpose or context, an experiment consists of three elements that interact in loops:

• • The hypothesis frames the assumptions you have around a given challenge or opportunity.

• • The intervention is the concrete action you set in place to test and learn whether your assumptions are right or wrong.

• • The learning describes the insights you gain from the intervention that triggers new and more qualified hypotheses to be tested through new interventions (thus, a new loop starts).

Hypotheses are what drive experiments and learning and, therefore, enable us to navigate the unknown. A hypothesis is a preliminary explanation or a qualified guess, based on observations, existing knowledge or theories. Hence, your hypotheses are the specific assumptions, ideas and hunches that define how you approach a process. They describe what you think you know, but do not fully know or do not know enough about yet.

When creating your hypothesis, we stress that you, as a pathfinder, need to direct your awareness towards the preferred future that guides your transition process. And then towards the unknowns of this preferred future. In practice, this means collecting all the questions you are trying to answer, being aware of what you know, what you think you know, and what you are unsure of. Make sure to be critical towards your own answers and analysis. Building this expanded consciousness about the unknown and the unknown unknowns can help guide experimentation.

On a warm summer morning in 2024, I (Sara) am biking towards a conference centre outside of Copenhagen to give a presentation and conduct a workshop about the future of healthcare, imagination and how we can tackle wicked problems. I am on my way to meet a group of leaders from a large Danish hospital. On the way, my phone rings. One of the hospital section directors is calling. She wants to inform me that there was an unpleasant incident involving some of her colleagues in one of the wards the day before. A patient, in the process of detoxification, had become highly aggressive and threatened the staff with a knife. Several of the leader's staff are shaken and upset by the violent incident and are afraid to go to work.

She does not want to cancel and prefers to go ahead. She insists the organization needs to focus on the long-term perspective as well as handling the immediate, short-term issues. As she said:

As the section director insists on holding this somewhat uncomfortable tension and paying attention to the long-term change, it also puts things into perspective for me. As much as I pioneer long-term thinking and the importance of focusing on the future, this severe matter affects me. I do not want to belittle their experiences.

Professor, author and former Dutch Minister of Housing, Spatial Planning and Environment Jacqueline Cramer has been a frontrunner in advancing the circular transition in the Netherlands through an approach she refers to as network governance. With network governance, she refers to a way of building coalitions of the willing, where each partner fulfils a specific function and where the alignment through transition brokers, enable both worlds, public and private, to strengthen the positive forces in society (Cramer, 2020).

While her experience and examples relate to the circular economy, they are just as applicable to other systemic challenges in the broad sphere of societal change. In her book How Network Governance Powers the Circular Economy, Cramer shares ten guiding principles for bottom-up circular initiatives that should figure as additions to conventional public governance processes. Cramer describes a focused, iterative process that she has now applied in several areas, for example, the concrete and clothing industry in the Netherlands.

When Cramer describes the coalition of the willing, she points to the importance of including willing and able individuals in systemic change processes representing the sector where changes need to be made.

In Navigating Balance, we uncover the many dilemmas that lie inherent in navigating societal change: Heading towards the future, while interfering with the present. Seeing changes evolve slowly over time but working quickly to create progress. Grasping large complex and abstract problems, while breaking them down into smaller, concrete actions. Impatiently stimulating change yet patiently waiting to understand the bigger picture. Being speculative of what the future might bring, but rational about the challenges we face.

These are examples of the different ways of working – we call them attitudes – that one, as a pathfinder, must be able to embrace and even switch between when working with societal change processes. Navigating in societal transition means placing oneself in the middle of multiple tensions: holding incoherent and sometimes unaligned attitudes that pull us in different and often seemingly opposite directions.

In Figure 4.1 you can see a visual overview of these opposing attitudes, following our elaboration on their inherent dilemmas.

The point here is that neither of these attitudes and ways of working are worse or better than the other. With the navigation point Navigating Balance, we argue that all pathfinders must accept the noisy path of balancing different and opposing attitudes in their work and mindset and it is an absolute prerequisite for progress that we can juggle between them.

Close your eyes. Imagine the future. What do you see?

You will probably have a relatively simple and recognizable image on your retina. Like many of us. Maybe you envision a society roughly like the one we know today but permeated with advanced technology, where the boundaries between humans and tech are blurry, and robots and artificial intelligence services interact as a naturally integrated part of your everyday routines. Or perhaps you envision an apocalyptic world on the verge of collapse? Where everything is chaotic and structures, as we know them, transportation, schools and nursing homes, are all falling apart?

During our many years of working with futures design while proactively developing, exploring and uncovering alternative versions of the future, we have asked hundreds of people this very question. The answers often fall into those two extremes: the same society with more advanced technology or a society that has fallen apart.

Only on very rare occasions do the answers paint a picture of positive alternatives to the society we live in today. It seems that we simply fail to imagine that life can be different from what we already know. That things could be better, life could be bigger, have more value and even a different meaning.

If this is the case, our limitations as to how we address the future have a tremendous impact on our ability to build new pathways out of the crises. We lack tangible images of a different future, and in turn, the opportunity space in which we look for new answers becomes too defined and too narrow. Our incentive to change things disintegrates.