This is about making future look simple; or about inventing it.

The statistician will scoff at my naive, innumerate device, a five-year’s forecasting examples; he knows much better. However, with or without mathematics, when you look at the past and it has an air of something you saw before, or you look at the present and the scenery feels familiar it is normal to guess that maybe, the future will follow the trend. The challenge is to give bold form to this trend, in a way that leads to understanding and to action. I found often useful to hint the future in a simple image; this gives confidence and focus in high moments; but you must avoid believing in such metaphors, better keep your eyes open; change happens.
 
The precision of such shapes of the future is doubtful, while you guess keep your eyes open for correction; that however does not matter so much; their role is to give meaning and organise for a while; simple means helping to important ends.
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As I am a visual person, I use visual shapes which I describe here. There are no doubt other shapes I do not represent. Auditive people will observe shapes essential in music, with the same guiding value; some individuals recognise shapes in their own movement, be it action or dance or in touching things. I met people who think amazingly, understand and solve problems with their hands; they too seem to know what will happen. And of course, the masters of words find forms in the constructions of language spinning logic to deduce from the past what will be in the future. I am certain that the mathematicians, those mysterious wizards who know how the universe must be see wonderfully useful shapes which we could apply if they deigned to explain us. These are shapes I know that I do not know but there are certainly other forms beyond my horizon, which I ignore.
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Here are a few examples from endlessly many; if you use the principle with intuition and common sense you will no doubt build your own:

Here are a few examples from endlessly many; if you use the principle with intuition and common sense you will no doubt build your own:

Something that went on and on, right ahead may keep following a straight line. Or suddenly stop, if there is some foreseeable or unforeseeable reason for it; that is a future which has a shape of a line. Dare to draw consequences and also to consider what will alter the line if that is needed.
 
"What was before will be again, and what is was before…there is
nothing new under the sun." Ecclesiastes 1:9-11.

If the straight line of no surprise is supported by some effort to keep course and some important change is in view you can bet that after any notable event there will be a dip and not a rise; accordingly you are well advised to provide reserves for that gap.
With this image you can explain things normal and avoid panic. Do you see the usefulness of foreseeing a future which has the shape of a dip-curve?
 

If instead of mere effort to maintain the statu-quo, there is some pressure building up beneath the line, or if – which is similar – the line is just too silent, with no blips and no feedback, you have good reason to be prudent for some outburst.
This may be a future heading for an explosion.
 

For some things, as you see them weaken constantly, you know that they will fade out like Snow-white’s mother ever thinner in her bed until she disappeared - to wane and disappear. This is a decline future in form of a slope. You draw it in front of a large audience and it says the whole story in one second:

One of my favourite shapes to consider is symmetry; it helps a lot to know that where there is a wing there is a second one, where there is a right hand there is a left hand too;
you reckon the whole from seeing a part; you see the ears and you know there will be a whole donkey under them.


When people only see the part, show them the whole.
 

The bell-shaped curve of the unexceptional is how normal things happen in crowds – we are born, we grow, we peak, we age down and die, and so do careers, projects, institutions, nations and species; observe that I look at this line as a journey. Elementary and well studied.

Few people rise above the segment where they are now – which looks like a line. When needed, only when needed, show the bigger picture, dust to dust.

Exponential growth: something is beyond expectations or out of control like human population growth, viruses, a Ponzi scheme or nuclear chain reaction.

Most of the time you wish this to happen to evil enemies: to grow until they burst, as we all know, don’t we, that when you want to diminish something you must first grow it.
 

The S-shaped curve, the curse of success, shows pointedly what lies ahead when you seem to be about to conquer the world; “carpe diem!” it says and also prepare now for the time when growth will be exhausted and the niche filled to the brim.


Prepare to retire or invent transition now, find the next world to conquer.
 

Yet other things, some of which we use to only see in limited segments, belong to wider shapes of cycles as we all know;

Some are circles, revolutions which mean going all the way to come back where all things started; seasons;

it is time to draw the conclusion that the same will come to pass again and again; a good image inviting to do better next time or to step out of form if needed.
 

Some cycles are spirals, opening into endlessness circling forever higher; there is much learning possible from the previous lower levels; this reminds History to me, always higher, “progress” and still, always similar.
 

There are environments where you observe the tendency to scatter, for better or for worse;
it is useful to imagine a viral tendency of populations, to spread until they conquer in S-shape the whole space available... or they cool down in dispersed energy:

Disorder and chaos are forms worth considering, with uncertainty and with lack of control but with potential too; there will be dragons, danger, but also place and opportunity for something else. Disorder is the best place to hide and the richest place to seek things.
 
Formlessness is a form, the mother of all forms.

In my mind, one of the mightiest shapes in helping to understand and plan the future is the Taoist metaphor of water, stagnant and flowing; water will go through all the forms, evaporate, rain, freeze, soak or stagnate, will take any form of the recipients it encounters and wait... but every time there is a chance it will flow downwards, where it belongs; beautiful strategy for the resilient ones through unfavourable times.



“In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than water.
Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can surpass it.” (Tao Te Ching, 78)