Seminar - Shaping Tomorrow, Today
In the Beginning was the Future Part 4
By Rick Aman onAn Invitation to Create Your Organization’s Preferred Future Seminar
Over the past three weeks, I have been writing about Futuring—an idea that has shaped much of my thinking about leadership, strategy, and organizational change. I began with the experience of walking into the new Future Tech Building at the College of Eastern Idaho and realizing that I was standing inside something that, years earlier, had existed only as an idea. From there, I explored how leaders can move from imagining a Preferred Future to creating one, and why choosing a future worth pursuing is ultimately a leadership responsibility.
Those articles generated several conversations about a natural next question: How do you actually put Futuring into practice? On Friday, October 2, I will spend a full day exploring that question through Boise State University’s PACE program in a seminar titled Shaping Tomorrow, Today: A Futuring Masterclass for Visionary Leaders. If the ideas I have been writing about have interested you, I would enjoy having you join me.
Begin with the Future, Not the Plan
Futuring begins with a somewhat different way of thinking about strategic planning. Traditional planning often begins with the organization we have today. We examine our mission and values, assess strengths and weaknesses, identify problems, establish goals, and begin moving forward. All of that can be useful, but there is a danger in allowing today’s organization to establish the boundaries of what we can imagine for tomorrow.
Futuring begins farther out. It asks leaders to look three to five years into the future and consider a different question: What organization do we want to become? Once that destination becomes clear, we can work backward to determine what we should begin doing today. Futuring does not replace strategic planning; it changes where the planning begins.
An important part of that process is recognizing that there is never just one future. The Possible Future asks what could happen as technology, demographics, economics, competition, public expectations, and other forces change. The Probable Future asks where our current direction is likely to take us if we continue largely as we are.
But the central question of Futuring comes with the Preferred Future: Of all the futures that might emerge, what future do we intentionally want to help create? That moves leaders from forecasting what might happen toward considering what they want to make possible. We cannot control the future, but neither are we simply passengers waiting for it to arrive.
Centering Purpose: Ikigai for Organizations
Before we can meaningfully answer that question, we need to understand why the organization matters in the first place. One of the frameworks we will use during the October seminar is Ikigai for Organizations, my adaptation of the Japanese concept often associated with purpose and meaning.
For organizations, I center the conversation around four questions: What do we love? What are we good at? What does our community need? What will sustain the organization? The intersection of those questions can help leaders rediscover the purpose at the center of their organization.
I think of this as Centering Purpose. Futuring should not simply produce a bigger or busier organization; it should create one increasingly aligned with why it exists and the difference it is uniquely positioned to make. From there, three simple words become particularly useful: Why, What, and How. Purpose establishes why the organization exists, the Preferred Future describes what it intends to become, and strategy determines how we begin moving toward that destination.
The sequence matters. Leaders naturally want to move quickly to the how—initiatives, budgets, timelines, assignments, and measures. But an organization can be extraordinarily busy without necessarily making meaningful progress. I frequently return to a simple principle in my work with leadership teams: clarity precedes progress. Without clarity about why the organization matters and what future we are trying to create, more activity may simply move us somewhere faster.
AI Gives Leaders a New Futuring Tool
There is another dimension of Futuring that makes this an especially interesting time for leaders: artificial intelligence. Organizations now have access to tools that can dramatically expand their ability to understand the forces changing around them. AI can inform the Futuring process, but organizational purpose—why we exist, what we value, and what future is worth pursuing—remains a human responsibility.
During our day together, we will use AI not to replace leadership judgment, but to strengthen it. AI can help examine demographic and economic trends, develop and challenge a SWOT analysis, conduct a PESTEL environmental scan, identify emerging technologies and disruptions, compare peer organizations, explore scenarios, and test assumptions. Research that once required days can increasingly be explored in minutes, allowing leadership teams to ask more questions and consider more possibilities.
As we work with AI, we will also discuss the AIM framework for prompting: Act As, Information, and Mission—a useful way to give AI the role, context, and task it needs. Better prompt construction can lead to better questions, deeper analysis, and more useful insights.
But there is an important boundary. AI can expand what leaders see, but it cannot decide what leaders should value. It can identify trends, challenge assumptions, and help us imagine different futures. Deciding which future is worth pursuing remains a human responsibility grounded in purpose, values, judgment, wisdom, and leadership.
Futuring Is Ultimately About Leadership
The more I work with Futuring, the less I think of it simply as another planning methodology. It is fundamentally about leadership.
Leaders live under the gravitational pull of the present. There is always a budget issue, staffing problem, operational challenge, new regulation, customer concern, board agenda, or unexpected event requiring attention. Responsible leaders cannot ignore those realities. But if every leadership conversation begins and ends with today’s problems, the present eventually becomes the architect of the future.
Leadership requires managing the organization we have today while also accepting responsibility for the organization that will exist three to five years from now. A Preferred Future gives leaders another vantage point from which to make those decisions. Instead of asking only what problem needs to be solved today, we can also ask: Does this decision move us toward our Preferred Future?
That question becomes particularly powerful when circumstances change, because they inevitably will. Futuring does not provide a detailed map of the next five years, nor should it. Technology will change, new opportunities will emerge, and strategies will need to adapt. A Preferred Future provides a destination that gives those changing strategies direction—and over time, that can become a leadership discipline.
Join Me on Friday, October 2, 2026
If you serve on a governing board, lead a business or nonprofit, work in government or education, or have responsibility for helping an organization navigate what comes next, I invite you to bring that organization with you conceptually. Bring the challenges you are facing, the assumptions you have about where the organization is headed, and the questions that may not yet have good answers. Most importantly, bring a willingness to look beyond the organization as it exists today and imagine what it could become. This will not be a day of abstract discussion about the future, but an opportunity to begin doing the work of shaping one.
Shaping Tomorrow, Today: A Futuring Masterclass for Visionary Leaders will be held Friday, October 2, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. at Boise State University’s Yanke Family Research Park in Boise. The registration fee is $275. I would enjoy having some of my LinkedIn friends and colleagues join me for the day as we move from talking about the future to doing the work of intentionally shaping it.
Learn more and register through Boise State University PACE
Every future begins as an idea. Its real power comes when people see that future together and begin moving toward it. Perhaps that is the question worth leaving with leaders and governing boards: Are you planning from where your organization is today, or are you creating a clear enough picture of the future that people can begin moving toward it together?
Rick Aman, PhD | Aman & Associates – Strategic Futuring & Board Training
rick@rickaman.com | rickaman.com
The future will arrive. The leadership opportunity is to decide how intentionally we will help shape it.