Influential Trajectories

David Bent
May 21, 2024
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Purpose: To create shared commitment to investments and initiatives that drive towards transformative outcomes.

How: Imagine different trajectories from today to a future goal together (informed by latest systems transition theories), test each to see if the pre-conditions for exist, and then invest based on the results.

Key insight: people are more willing to commit to investments and initiatives where they have devised the test of whether to proceed themselves.

Introduction

This page brings together the key information on Influential Trajectories, an approach (currently in a development stage) to accelerate change by creating shared commitment to investments and initiatives that drive towards ambitious outcomes. 

Below you will find the following sections (some of which are currently blank or in rough bullet point format):

*=currently blank [Last updated = 21 May 2024]

Acknowledgment. We are very grateful for the opportunity provided by Sustainable Shipping Initiative, and funding from Lloyd's Register Foundation, for the first pilot use in the State of Sustainable Shipping (SoSS).

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Overview

Would you like to imagine trajectories from today to a better future for your organisation, region, sector or issue? And do that in a way which deepens people’s understanding and connections? All with the aim of accelerating action now?

Influential Trajectories is an approach to create shared commitment to investments and initiatives that drive towards ambitious outcomes. 

Influential Trajectories comes out of David’s work with companies, non-profit organisations and public bodies plus latest academic research on anticipatory governance. In my experience, decision-makers are often looking for insight which helps them understand what is going on, and gives them greater certainty on how they can deliver on their goals.

Famously, ‘making predictions is difficult, especially about the future’. As the name implies, the Influential Trajectories approach is not predicting the future, but influencing it. The core assumption is that tomorrow is emerging from today. If people can have a greater understanding of what is happening, they can act to shape the future towards their preferences.

The four key steps of Influential Trajectories deepen people’s shared understanding of where they want to go, what is happening now, and what they can do now, together or alone.

  1. Imagining useful future milestones. Many organisations will already have a vision they are already aiming for, in which case this step Is not needed.

  2. Crafting candidate trajectories. Drawing on technology road-mapping and latest system transitions theory, we imagine several different ways to reach the future milestones. Each of these trajectories describes what would need to be true in different dimensions, like political, social, technological, and economic.

  3. Testing possibilities with current evidence. Now we can check the status of the different trajectories (stalling, improving, accelerating) and what would make a difference.

  4. Acting for a better future. Knowing the current dynamics of the trajectories allows the organisation to identify the initiatives and investments would make a difference now.

Another of the founding assumptions is that more of the same will not lead to a sustainable future. Therefore, the Influential Trajectories method needs to avoid the same habits of thinking that have created the status quo. So, there are two design principles (drawn from a global, multi-disciplinary academic collaboration called the STEPS Centre):

  • ‘Opening Up’ to different kinds of inputs and unusual methods of analysis.

  • ‘Broadening Out’ recommendations and outputs to be more plural and conditional, reflecting assumptions, circumstances or perspectives embedded in conclusions.

As such, Influential Trajectories is already open to other ways of knowing (indigenous perspectives) that are outside the mainstream orthodoxy. Putting the ‘Opening Up’ and ‘Broadening Out’ into practice should help us avoid merely defaulting to legacy thinking (which often leads to resource extraction and the inequitable sharing of rewards).

The method can be applied, in whole or in part, for different uses (which can overlap):

  • System diagnosis (where a ‘system’ could be a sector, a region or a challenge).

  • Investment decision-making.

  • Crafting an organisational strategy.

  • Creating a shared understanding of a situation across a diverse group.

Frequently Asked Questions

How is it different from other futures methods?

Yes, there are family resemblances to other futures methods, and some of them could be inputs. So, it is a valid question. More specifically:

  • Technology roadmapping:

    • The similarity: agency -- the world will respond to our attempts to shape it (which can drift into a presumption of control, which is obviously a risk for Influential Trajectories).

    • But: tends to be focussed on a single innovation, have rather mechanical view of causality, and rather blind to power, politics, culture and other non-technology factors.

  • Scenario planning:

    • One similarity: a presumption that many futures are possible from here. also, that the outputs could be used for on-going tracking of what is happening now. My experience is that rarely happens in scenario planning, so clearly that is a risk for Influential Trajectories.

    • But tends to focus on the future worlds as destinations rather than the paths to them, and has a presumption that the future doesn't respond to your actions, you just have to prepare to respond.

  • "Imagining". In principle, all futures methods require some creativity. In practice, the quantitative models, and desire for clear, explicit, simple logic can squash out all the space in which imagining might happen.

  • Predicting vs Sensing. In Riel Miller's Futures Literacy language, most futures methods people use are ones where the future is assumed to be a goal to attain, and so narrows human agency to presume the fundamentals of the future are not different to today. The Influential Trajectories is trying to be different: using the later-than-now as a disposable construct that helps us to sensing what is emerging now. This is a hard difference to convey, especially as Influential Trajectories does use future milestones, which look like a goal with which to fix the future.

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Plan and development pipeline

The first pilot is the on the State of Sustainable Shipping, a project of the Sustainable Shipping Initiative, and funding from Lloyd's Register Foundation, as announced here. This will last until the autumn of 2024.

In parallel, I am planning to have other uses, especially in a trip to Aotearoa New Zealand in August 2024.

The development pipeline:

  • Get to the next level of detail for each step. Next step: finish templates which capture the key information for each step.

  • Design short (one day) workshops for each step.

Instructions and materials

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Major changes over time

Name

Currently (May 20924): Imagining Influential Trajectories, or Influential Trajectories.

Previously: Open Protocol (within the SoSS project, see below) or Transformative Pathways.

Rationale: Explained in depth here. Summary:

  • Needed something specific (which rules of ‘Open Protocol). 

  • But Transformative Pathways already taken. 

  • Comes from asking:

    • What if we use the future as a prompt which, because it provides a kind of anchor to our imaginations, helps us make-sense of now and invent novelty? 

    • What if we realise that success for a method like this is not about accurately predicting the future, but helping us to shape the future we would prefer?

    • The phrase is from Riel Miller’s Transforming the Future. 

Commentary (including risks, challenges and reflections)

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Examples (with lessons learnt)

State of Sustainable Shipping (SoSS)

The next paragraphs are from the announcement of Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s funding for the State of Sustainable Shipping. A full case study will be released when it is finished.

The Sustainable Shipping Initiative (SSI) has launched its State of Sustainable Shipping (SoSS) programme, funded by Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a programme that builds on the Roadmap to a Sustainable Shipping Industry, by providing comprehensive and timely insights into progress made against six vision areas: Oceans, Communities, People, Transparency, Finance, and Energy.

The SoSS programme will use a mix of digital, research, and strategic foresight methods to track and challenge the maritime industry’s sustainability performance, accelerating progress by sharing knowledge, identifying transformative pathways, and enabling more effective decision-making by maritime value chain actors.

The programme will amplify the relevance of the Roadmap, which was co-created with industry as a ‘call-to-action’ in response to the complexity of the global challenges faced today. The Roadmap defines tangible milestones to be collectively achieved in the coming decades to build a sustainable maritime sector.

Index of WeekNote entries

All Weeknotes that are tagged with Imagining Influential Trajectories can be viewed by following this link. Here is a summary of what each one says (last updated: 21 May 2024):