Designing the Future: How Balanced Design Leadership Can Drive Desirable Futures

Abstract: Without ideas and scenarios about the future, there can be no conversation about what the future might look like, let alone how to get there. Design plays an essential role in the creation of tangible visions of the future through the visualization of scenarios that promote dialogue among stakeholders and foster collaboration and motivation to implement future scenarios. A foundation for future-oriented thinking can be achieved when a common purpose is defined and shared by its stakeholders along with sensemaking to ensure the relevancy and meaningfulness of future scenarios. This study recognized and described the following four building blocks for designing futures: enabling the team and project, establishing future scenarios, evaluating desirable futures, and exciting people’s motivation to achieve that future. Additionally, the authors identified the following two core activities: imagining futures and leading futures, which, combined, result in designing futures. Thinking about the future will be a catalyst for rethinking the future.

Practical Implications: The practical implications of this study highlight the complex and often conflicting interests of designing futures that require effective design leadership through balancing design leadership behaviors. Understanding the dimensions and mechanisms that drive organizations into the future is critical to successfully designing desirable futures and inspiring key stakeholders to take responsibility for these futures. The authors recommend that the future scope of this research be to investigate the impact of organizational characteristics that go beyond for-profit only and the role and impact of artificial intelligence in designing futures

Keywords: Common purpose; Designing futures; Design leadership; Future scenarios; Motivation; Sensemaking.