How To Prepare For What's Next.

How to start.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to talk about what you’re about to become.

Like a lot of people, I did some rage-cleaning in the days after the election. As I went through the last handfuls of my father’s books I found one with a black cover that he’d black-Sharpie-d blacked-out the title on the spine. It was a flat black monolith I hadn’t noticed before. I opened it and realized it was his book on how to do funerals and it had a lifetime of notes in it. So I snapped it closed and put it back on the shelf — like he’d want me to — because I haven’t given up. If you’re still here, then neither have you.

• But let’s take the bark off of this tree: For the 250th anniversary of American democracy we have freely and fairly chosen to try a different form of government. And at the end of this four years we’ll choose whether to continue that different form of government and retire American democracy or to return to it for a long time to come.

• While there’s lots of diagnosis yet to do (and I’ll do more later), it looks to me like just enough voters decided that both parties aided and abetted the 40-years-long facing of the US Government toward companies and wealthy elites and away from the working class (ie. almost all of us) for too long. Trickle-down economics never did. So the bigots and sexists and the disaffected writ large teamed up just enough for Trump to squeak out a win. Out of some voters’ hope that… well…

• And by doing so we fairly and freely chose to make matters far, far, far worse.

Which means we — you and me and we — have moral responsibilities now. We are needed to reckon with the aftermath. And churches: start your engines.

• So if you’re new here, hi. Everybody, meet everybody. We’re all in this together. And we have things to do.

So here we go:

I began my career as a professional futurist for churches and charities. I was a part-time seminary professor along the way. I taught ministers how to anticipate need and how to change. I taught them how to think future and to hope. I taught people how to say things it’s too early to believe.

Now I teach it to everybody.

Here’s what to do first:

You start by creating a Strategy Board or Strategy Wall.

Get the biggest sheet of paper you can find or open a spreadsheet on your computer or — if you work someplace that has a Wall of Whiteboards — get your favorite marker that colors dark enough that you can read it from the moon.

Make five giant columns, left to right:

(1) List of Emerging Trends, Events, Developments, Policies, and Perils

(2) Ramifications and Possible Outcomes (futures) for each

(3) Thus Emerging Needs and/or Opportunities for each

(4) Responses Needed for each

(5) How To Respond (specific plans). (Hint: start with verbs.)

Once you have those columns, work each trend/event/development/policy/peril across — each in it's own row.

Here’s a short, irresponsibly-abbreviated-don’t-rely-on-this-because-it’s-way-undercooked-and-we’re-going-to-do-a-real-one-soon-because-multiple-futures-are-possible-for-each-issue-rather-than-only-one-but-it’s-a-quick-illustration-of-what-ONE-row-could-look-like:

• (1) Policy: Mass deportations of undocumented migrants (and their US citizen family members/aid-ers and abet-ers of ‘illegal migrant crime’) to their country of origin as their country of origin will accept them,

• (2) Ramifications: mass arrests and indefinite detention in processing/sorting centers while US negotiates with their recalcitrant countries of origin resulting in internment camps… migrant refugee flows by the million in every direction within the lower 48… resulting in a self-inflicted humanitarian crisis within the United States…

• (3) Emerging Need: humanitarian and human everything…

• (4) Responses Needed: alerts, legal action, organized relief…

• (5) How to Respond (specific plans): warn… prevent… thwart… expose… convert… protect… find… feed… heal… aid… rescue…

See what I’m doing? See how this works? Sounds simple but 20 minutes from now if you start doing this your imagination will unfold like origami broken open and you’ll never see the world the same way again. You won’t be able to un-see what you find. You will become a changed person.

Now.

Build your column (1). List everything you can think of that might fit in there for the next two to eight years. Start now. Find your friends. You’ll need them. Soon I’ll help you fill out column (2) for each. I’ll show you how.

Next week I’ll give you examples of things I’ve previously given you in Think Future that will help you do (2) for yourself. I’ve been preparing for this possibility for a long time. I’ve pre-built some of the things you will need. Then we’ll start the foresight work — and fast. I’ll show you how I’m building my own Strategy Board.

But start yours now because you’ll need a big, wide structure for everything we’re about to do.

If you start filling it out now — even if it’s haphazard and half-cooked and half-wrong — you’ll become a futurist by the time you get back here next week.

You’ll know because your friends will think you’ve turned weird.

Because you’ll be saying things it’s too early to believe.