Immediate Futures for 2025

And continuing your training as a futurist.

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 jump ahead in your training a bit.

Some thoughts:

First, I’m sad that Jimmy Carter passed away — he was personally kind to some of my friends over the years — but I’m glad he did not die under a Trump sky.

Second, originally I felt semi-obliged to write a Best-of-2024 type of list for this week but I did not want to.

Third, I’m increasingly less dispirited (more heartened?) than I was the day after the election. If all of the races in the 2024 election had truly been a referendum on the Democrats then we would have seen a full national rout and a repudiation of Democrats across the board and at every level and that did not happen.

• Further, I’ve been double-checking my understandings of the underlying structural forces and trajectories in the country — out of self-doubt — but almost all of them still seem valid. The country is still trending blue on blue issues (the country is still becoming less racist, sexist, and bigoted rather than more) it may be trending less toward blue parties but the Democrats still have extremely good chances of recapturing those trend lines. The ‘political realignment’ some commentators claim has happened doesn’t appear to me to be one on the issues or on policy leaning or even particularly on democracy but more merely about party identification.

• As a result, I’m working on a longer list of What Is Still True — sort of a Part 2 to my post on What Must Be True — but it’s taking a while to gel in my head.

Fourth, back to your futurist training, young Jedi.

I continue to jump around within my Strategy Chart or Strategy Wall construction.

• I realize I’m doing this a lot but this is how it’s done: you write until you realize that the problem you have in Column (5) is actually an upstream problem in Column (2).

As a reminder on how to build a Strategy Chart 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 its own row.

So after these past couple of weeks I’ve gone back to make sure I’ve thought through the basics of Column (2) Ramifications enough before I start forecasting on each emerging trend, policy, etc. See, I don’t want to write Column (5) How to Respond without checking whether I’ve got an upstream problem in Column (2).

Here’s why: over the past 2-3 weeks we’ve seen defiance of Trump among the GOP in Congress over whether or not to have a federal government shutdown (Trump lost the fight), and a ‘civil war’ between the Original MAGA and the Billionaire Tech Bro MAGA (I haven’t hit on terms I like yet) over skilled worker immigration visas where it’s becoming increasingly clear (even within MAGA) that they are no longer the united front they thought they were.

• Plus, we’re about to witness a fight — like, starting today/tomorrow — within the GOP over who will become Speaker of the House that will give us even more of a picture of the divisions within the GOP and within MAGA.

Why does this matter? Because I’d been presuming a push-and-pull between Trump/MAGA and the rest of us when instead what’s immediately ahead is a set of fights between the segments of MAGA over the direction of the Trump Administration (and later, if Trump has a major health event, a Vance Administration) that could scuttle, hobble, or self-sabotage the ability of the Administration to implement any of its Column (1) policies to begin with.

See, Democrats fear the incoming Trump Administration will be competent and malevolent. And the MAGA faithful hope the incoming Trump Administration will be competent and benevolent (if only toward them) but the past few weeks suggest maybe we’re gonna get two metric tons of incompetent malevolence sometimes instead.

This gives us four possible futures:

Now, we’ve all been constructing our Strategy Walls/Strategy Boards presuming the Full Fascism scenario is going to take place — if only because that’s what Trump, Vance, and Project 2025 say they’re going to do. And that’s what we all should still plan for because the rest of the scenarios don’t require nearly as much contingency planning.

• Yes, I know I’m using the term fascism too loosely and somewhat unfairly. They won’t be actual fascists but they’ll spiritually rhyme with fascists a lot of the time and I haven’t been able to come up with a simple, intuitive term that would convey that brand of policy, legal, and theological totalitarianism. So afford me a bit of grace here — I’m not actually calling them fascists. I’m just saying nothing rhymes with orange but orange. So, Lord, send me better words.

• Yes, I know the Unicorn scenario looks ridiculous but as futurists we have to include the laughable-but-nevertheless-plausible to be comprehensive and fair because we’re professionals.

• Yes, Face Plant is two words. According to the Google AI thingy. (I’m a writer.)

Anyway, I’d been saving this next part for you for later, but here’s how you begin to plan off of scenarios — or at least one way to do it: you create what I call a 9-Grid. You take your scenario set and place it in the center of a tic-tac-toe board (which is a grid with 9 squares). Here’s what one kinda looks like:

Now.

What I’ve been doing lately — and a lot of people have been doing — has been in that top-center square: revisiting their diagnostic/analytic frames for what happened in this election, where the American electorate really is now and what it wants, what’s ahead for the country, etc. If the stuff in that square is wrong then all your plans will be misguided.

• Here’s an example: One of the critiques of the Harris-Walz campaign was that it was based on joy in the belief that joy would outpace Trump’s darkness but instead it made the Democratic ticket appear as if it was clueless about or didn’t care about the economic difficulties and societal-cultural fears that many Americans face. Put another way, the joy did not address the fears and the problems and so Kamala lost.

• Part of what I was saying in What Must Be True is that most Americans — no matter what side of the aisle they’re on — still believe in America’s most foundational claims and vision even if/when they think our political system has failed us all. And that diagnosis/analytic frame may be more true and accurate than the there-is-no-alternative-to-polarization frame both parties seem to have been operating by. Again, getting this right matters because they’re the conceptual starting places/foundations for your planning for each of the scenarios.

Your Strategy Chart or Strategy Wall is the bottom-center square: they’re your No Matter What Plan. If your diagnostic/analytic frame is built right (or right enough) then your universal plan should work for Full Fascism, for Fizzled Firecracker, and for Face Plant. (It may work less well for Unicorn, but then again if Unicorn happens — and Trump’s approach successfully bears real fruit— it would mean everything we believe about the American Experiment, Christianity, and the side we chose in World War II was completely wrong to begin with.)

So.

This is why thinking like a futurist is so hard. It’s not — it’s never been — just coming up with a cute little list of the Top 10 Trends for 2025. It’s means thinking through and structuring the complicated until the complex becomes simple. That’s why most futures work is done in groups — the future is bigger than any one person’s brain — and why it ain’t quick.

I suspect that in the end I’ll — and we’ll — have two placemat-sized sheets of paper: one with scenarios and a 9-Grid and another with the No Matter What Plan pulled out and fleshed out into a full Strategy Chart. Or a Strategy Wall. I may need a wall.

Anyway, churches, start your engines. And.

Futurists, welcome to the tough stuff.