Introduction: Building Better Futures

Summary

Why we created this book

In the classical Greek myth, when Pandora opened the jar, releasing death and all the other challenges of human life, she closed it again as quickly as she could, trapping inside it one remaining human attribute – hope.

The world today is full of so many large, complex, socially messy, and interconnected challenges that solving them often seems hopeless. News reports are full of fear of the future – a return to nuclear war; the unravelling of Europe; a crisis within democracy; global warming; water wars; a ‘globesity’ pandemic in some parts of the world, and food and water shortages in others; the rise of robots and the demise of decently paid jobs.

Contemporary life is objectively risky and unpredictable – but life has always been risky and unpredictable. What's new is the ‘deep problem’ of uncertainty. Uncertainty used to be thought of as a problem that could be solved with more data. But even with exponentially more data, we now have new issues of emergence, ambiguity, and interconnectedness so that we cannot easily reduce global challenges into quantifiable and manageable global risks.

But uncertainty can be a social resource – it can animate new ways of knowing and being, and it can be used to negotiate insecurity and to create new relationships. Uncertainty and hope are part of the evolutionary advantage of our entire species. Progress emerges not just from our ability to observe the world around us but from our capacity to organize imagination and create new and better future possibilities.

To face global challenges many of us – not just official leaders – must work together. Even though we can arm ourselves with more and better data, without hope, we cannot begin to address these challenges. If we abandon hope in the face of uncertainty, we risk the future of humanity.

We created this book to offer hope in relation to many of the major challenges facing societies. We weren't interested in offering theoretical fixes or idealistic, ungrounded, wishful thinking. We wanted hope to arise from people who were actively working with these challenges – realistic hope.