People and organisations are all constantly confronted with choices in the present. The outcomes of these choices are futures. How might we best approach the choices we make today to better inform the future of tomorrow? How might we think about, describe, and visualise our futures and enact them in the present?
As a complementary way in, we offer an approach through a series of five papers titled Feedforward: A Guide to Creating Hopeful Futures to help think about futures as a system. The cybernetic concept we explore is that feedback reacts while feedforward prepares. Together, the two work in a cycle and can foster agency and hope.
This paper introduces Cybernetic Futures, which offers us generative and critical ways of thinking and doing to navigate future actions, informed by the past, by governing in the present, for the hopeful re/imagination of systems.