The future is no longer what it used to be.

Why strategic dialogues are just right for your own vision.

In an annual strategically focussed large group meeting of an automotive supplier, one customer said that they "couldn't be better off at the site if it wasn't for the future." Of course, he only meant the prospects for the future, but how did this future become the one that drives us?

This bon mot is a welcome occasion,

• to write something about the future as a space for thought and reflection,
• about our jointly created reality and
• why visions are highly gratifying!

"I want visions", said the young French President Macron recently in his speech at Frankfurt University. And the next day, Germany wrote incessantly about Helmut Schmidt and his dysfunctional relationship with vision. The story is still open as to who should actually go to the doctor.

But it is only beyond these initial reflexes that things become really interesting: because visions are also a socio-cultural performancewhich have grown into a postmodern category of thought and reflection. The vision of the future itself is a topic of conversation that our "intersubjective reality" helps to formulate. And this so-called third reality interacts with our innermost desires, thoughts and feelings and guides our individual and collective actions. This needs to be explained.

1. how footprints from the future show us the way

Vision work, whether in teams or individually, deals with the common images from the The future.

The social ability of humans to create an intersubjective reality and to grant it influence is unique among living beings. Of course, there is also an objective reality and a subjective reality.

Vision work, as we can use it today to organise our social actions hundreds, hundreds of thousands, heck, millions of times over, to make plans and decisions, is from Two framework conditionsembedded:

• the third, so-called "intersubjective" reality and 
• the "future" as a category of thought and reflection.

a) The intersubjective reality

Intersubjective reality is the reality we humans experience in interactions and communication networks. invented reality. The participants believe in this reality together, even though it is objectively invented. It is not tangible and can only be grasped if it is recognised. The acceptance of many, also known as faith, sometimes moves mountains, but at least has a constant influence on our actions, thoughts and feelings. As soon as this belief were to fade, this intersubjective reality would also weaken and lose its power. It would perish and become history, as far as we remember it.

Intersubjective is neither objective nor subjective. 

Objective things exist regardless of whether people believe in them or not. A tree exists, even if nobody believes in it. The earth is also real, it exists even if no one were there to see and enjoy it.

Subjective, on the other hand, are existences that depend on the beliefs of individuals. Children believe in Father Christmas or imagine an "invisible friend". The meaning of these existences dies as soon as the child no longer believes in them. Sometimes this also applies to sensations, feelings, interpretations and other phenomena that we cannot measure methodically, but are convinced of the reality of as those affected.

In contrast, intersubjective realities are not dependent on the beliefs of individuals, but on the communicative network as such. This includes such important things as our gods and religions or our states and laws, our democracy and our money, all social norms to which we ascribe (in)value and existence. They all have this value and their existence because we collectively believe in them, consider them to be real, primordially human, unshakeable and universal. However, all these phenomena, whose value depends on a social network believing in them, talking about them and attributing meanings to them, are mere inventions, not objectively real, but influential in real terms. They are intersubjective, action-guiding, reality-shaping. This makes them significant, even for those who attribute a different meaning to them.

Although a banknote exists objectively as a piece of paper, it derives its value from the collective Belief in the value of money - and this value fluctuates with it. This is clearly recognisable on the stock market and in the exchange rate. We know how existentially shattering the feeling is when money no longer corresponds to the value that was once assigned to it. Money is a matter of faith for many. Without this collective belief, this common interest and trust in money, it would be worth nothing. Money is a matter of trust and the only medium that manages to generate commitment, trust and co-operation across all classes, races, age groups, genders and origins. Nothing else can do that. But that's not the point here. This is about something else. Namely that money is an invention, a socially generated invention that creates opportunities for co-operation, communication and creativity.

States, companies and brands are also intersubjective realities, as are cities and villages, but not their streets, houses, rivers, forests and bushes. These are objectively real. But that there is a city that is objectively real is nonsense. Cities are inventions that are given effect, geographical boundaries and meaning in the communication about them. In the same way, an organisation only exists in social communication between people. This "fact" was the reason for the great sociologist and organisation expert Niklas Luhmann to formulate that Social systems consist of communications, but not of people. There are not many ideas from the 20th century that were more helpful in understanding our social world.

Difficulties with the third reality 

It is often not easy to believe that our social reality is largely based on inventions and is not (objectively) real. Human rights are real, they do exist, they are declared to be objective and unchangeable, aren't they? No, there are indeed books in which they are objectively written down, in which we can read them, but that does not mean that their value is objective, that their significance is unalterable. They are written in letters on paper, just like the party programme of the AfD. And nothing would change even if we were to carve them in stone.

Why do we find this so difficult to recognise and accept in our everyday lives? In any case, the consequences would be that their fragility would be clearer and their social existence would depend on our interpersonal commitment.

Three factors can be identified:

• Our interactively and intersubjectively invented order is firmly interwoven with our material world, our companies "have" offices, bank accounts, vehicles, employees; we wear work clothes and buy books and computers that we need for our work. Postmen visit our company and bring tangible letters and parcels to us. Our customers and government personnel contact us and address us at our company functions. The invented order moves the material, objective world, things and people. There are prosecutors and police officers who have to defend our human rights with batons, prison keys and other objectively real objects in order to maintain their power. People believe in human rights and act and interact accordingly – or not. The intersubjective world is deeply intertwined with the material world.

• Our intersubjective reality also interacts almost indissolubly with our subjective desires. We may listen deeply into ourselves and question our hearts, but what comes out is not something detached from intersubjective reality. Rather, "our heart is a double agent" (Harari) whose instructions come from the myths and legends of society. The intersubjective world is deeply interwoven with our subjective worlds.

• The fact that the inventions of the third reality are not so easily accepted as mere inventions and permeated has ultimately exactly with this that these inventions are intersubjective. One's own belief or rejection of it does not change much and certainly not immediately anything about the third reality. There are many other people who are in favour of the effectiveness of intersubjective reality. The intersubjective world is intersubjective and the individual subject is rarely an absolute dictator.

The importance of the third reality

And yet, what has been labelled here as the third reality is what fundamentally distinguishes us from other living beings. There are other creatures that are stronger than us, bigger, faster, stronger, braver and more adaptable. So what is it that made us rulers of the world? Exactly that, the ability to form intersubjective realities. So it's not human language or our biologically unique oppositional thumb, nor our upright gait or our bare skin that makes us unique enduring endurers among living beings; it's the Ability to build huge social order systems based on ideas and beliefs.

We humans do this all the time, we create social norms and reflect on them, we can hardly live in community without them; social communities, states, churches, money or rights in general are evidence of this. These are the rights with which your company earns money, for example, is entered in the commercial register and on the basis of which contracts are concluded or a parcel is simply delivered: they are merely a social reality based on interactions that demand and create trust. But things could be very different.

Interim conclusion: Like other living beings, we humans also have a perceptible environment (1st reality: external world), we can feel its influences and develop emotions and feelings (2nd reality: internal world) and we can talk about things, reflect and create (narrative) worlds that do not exist outside of our communication (3rd reality: social fictions).

And when we interact in such a unique way and think up things that have such a great influence on our future thoughts, feelings and actions, it is only natural to include the future as such in our space of thought, feeling and reflection. This is not a matter of course and is not yet very old in socio-historical terms; and even if this fact seems obvious in retrospect, it is nevertheless a social achievement of enormous quality.

b) The future as a category of thought and reflection

A look at history makes it seem as natural as it is astonishing: The future is in our hands. For us postmodern people, the future is no longer a time-space whose events are in "God's hands" or predetermined. Many in the wake of Freud still emphasised and interpreted the imprints of the past as so significant that it was almost impossible to distinguish between explanations and excuses.

However, it is now more true than ever that the future will be shaped by us and this assumption is becoming more pronounced in the course of the digital transformation. Although we are becoming increasingly fearful that robots and artificial intelligence could snatch it out of our hands, it is becoming dramatically apparent that this does not have to be the worst development - at least for our descendants. Is the trend actually heading in the direction of a decline in our belief in the imprints of the past and the idea that the future is open? The developments in the digital transformation of social life are showing signs of this.

Even death is no longer safe from our abilities.

Our inconsistency in thinking about the future 

Even if we believe the future is in our hands, it is still contradictory in our world of language and thought. On the one hand, we assume that we are moulded and that our experiences (pre-)determine our future. Tomorrow as a consequence of yesterday, history as a predictive possibility, historians as prophets. We very often believe this.

On the other hand, we talk about the future being open, coming straight at us, so to speak, and that we have to pass through this (time) space. The future as an open space. We walk through it like museum visitors and can decide how we look at it, how long, how intensively and therefore how the future can be shaped. Hence the concept of progress.

• But the ideas about the future are not that bipolar. The matter of what lies ahead is more complex, downright paradoxical. How could it be otherwise, there are said to be primitive peoples who Past not "behind us" but as lying in front of you? To make a long story short: For them, the past is visible because it has been lived and must therefore be in front of them, because that is the only thing that is recognisable to us humans with our eyes. So the future is also consistently behind them? They wave behind their backs over their shoulders when they refer to the future. Our concept of progress, which leaves the past behind, is not so easy to grasp, it is straightforwardly "regressive".
• With the Looking to the future is just as important. For some people, developing visions and thus images of their own future are the reason for an urgent visit to the doctor or merely a childish gimmick. Both miss the point. Looking into the future is a powerful tool for developing categories, yardsticks and starting points for present action so that what really needs to be done is done. Looking into the future is preparatory action for decision-making.

On the one hand, this generally requires the idea that we can shape our lives and, on the other, that we can correct the paths we have taken and the decisions we have made. This may come at a price, but the aim is to achieve what we are striving for.

This sometimes requires visionary power. Because in view of our social inventions of individual imprints and social structures, the outlook into the future is always bound to the present. This is why historical remembrance is always necessary and a mirror of the present.

History reflects the present, not the past. 

And so intersubjective realities meet visions that influence each other.

And that is why strategic vision work is extremely important for the present of our organisations and actions. They are not "big goals", nor are they simply guiding stars that twinkle in the distance and illuminate the path ahead. They serve not only as orientation for tomorrow, but above all for the here and now. Today, the much-vaunted "acting in the present" also finds its expression in interactions with yesterday and tomorrow.

• Who else could we be?
• What other life could we lead?
• What excites us in our lives?
• What experiences are helpful for us?

If you have visions, please don't go to the doctor, but into the dialogue, create social realities! Or join us in your own strategic dialogue on your company and group task.

Tell us about your experiences and concerns, we look forward to hearing from you!