Three steps to discovering and building new possible futures

1. Questioning the future we take for granted

When we think about our future, we tend to start from what we know: our profession, our current capabilities, our circumstances, and the opportunities we think we have at our fingertips. Even when we try to anticipate technological changes, we tend to imagine modified versions of our present.

But the future is not an inevitable prolongation of our current situation. There are different possible scenarios and our expectations may be conditioned by assumptions that we have never questioned.

The first practice is to use AI to explore alternative futures that challenge our usual way of imagining what’s coming.

We can start by describing our experience, our interests, and what we consider important. Instead of just asking how to protect our current work, we can start a different dialogue:

Here’s where I am today: (describe your experience, your capabilities, and your personal and professional aspirations). Help me explore three different and plausible futures for my life and my ways of contributing over the next five years. Question the assumptions I’m taking for granted, identify what human needs might appear, and what new opportunities might arise. I don’t want predictions, but scenarios that broaden my thinking.

AI can propose perspectives that we hadn’t considered, but we don’t have to accept them. We can question its hypotheses, ask for evidence, explore contrary scenarios, and distinguish trends backed by facts from speculations about the future.

The important thing is not to guess which of these scenarios will come true, but to recognize that our future could unfold in very different ways than we imagined.

Sometimes, expanding our possibilities begins by questioning the future we thought was inevitable.

2. Discover new possibilities to contribute

Once we have explored different futures, a much more personal question comes: what role might we play in those futures?

The opportunity for Symbiotic Intelligence is not simply to identify new professions or activities, but to discover human needs that we had not yet considered and explore how our expertise, our interests and the capabilities of AI could help us respond to them in different ways.

The knowledge we have accumulated, the relationships we have built and what we consider important can become the starting point for discovering possibilities that were previously outside our horizon.

The second practice involves developing a generative dialogue with AI to explore new needs, imagine ways to respond to them, and discover what contributions we would like to make possible.

But there’s a fundamental difference between asking AI for a list of opportunities and developing a discovery process with it. In the first case, we receive alternatives that we can accept or reject. In the second, we question proposals, bring our expertise to the table, explore unexpected connections, and reframe our questions as new perspectives emerge.

We can continue the previous conversation with this proposal:

From the scenarios we’ve explored, help me uncover human needs that might arise or become more important and that we’re not sufficiently addressing today. Let’s explore how my experience, interests, and values, combined with the capabilities of AI, could help respond to them in new ways. Don’t just propose professions or activities. Challenge my assumptions, come up with unexpected connections, and let’s transform the proposals together until we discover possibilities that we hadn’t initially considered.

The really interesting thing can start when a proposal surprises us or even seems wrong. Instead of immediately dismissing it, we can ask ourselves why we are not convinced, what we are assuming, and if there is any valuable possibility behind a seemingly unrealistic idea.

Interaction becomes generative when the inputs of one intelligence transform the questions of the other. We may start by exploring a familiar activity and end up discovering a different need, a new way of approaching it, or even a purpose that was not previously part of our aspirations.

We don’t need to discover an unprecedented activity for the whole of society. A possibility can be profoundly new and transformative for us, even if other people are already exploring it.

True progress is not only about discovering new things that we can do, but also about recognizing new things that are worth trying to make possible.

3. Experiment today with our possible futures

Imagining a different future can be inspiring, but our human agency doesn’t expand just by discovering new alternatives. We also need to check which ones make sense and develop the skills to put them into practice.

There is no need to abandon our profession or undertake a big project. We can start by trying a new activity, offering a different service, participating in a community initiative, developing a personal project or exploring a responsibility that was previously out of our reach.

The third practice is to use AI to design small experiences that allow us to start living a part of the future we have imagined.

We can choose one of the possibilities that arose during our collaboration and ask ourselves how to experiment with it using the available resources:

I want to explore this new possibility of contribution: [describe it]. Help me design a two-week experience to test in my environment or with real people. What activity could I do, what skills do I need to develop, how would I check if it adds value and what other opportunities could arise from this experience?

AI can help us organize the experiment, access knowledge that we do not yet have and prepare the activities. But it will be our interaction with reality and with the people involved that will allow us to understand its true value.

We may discover a promising opportunity, we may need to change our approach, or the initiative may be meaningless. In either case, we may learn something that broadens our understanding and helps us decide which way forward.

And here comes an especially interesting feature of Symbiotic Intelligence: what we learn by experiencing can lead us to question our assumptions again, discover unexpected needs, and explore other paths that we hadn’t even considered before.

We are not, therefore, facing a rigid sequence of three steps, but rather a continuous process of discovery, learning and action.

When I had to discover my own possible futures

Looking back, I recognize two fundamental moments in my life when I had to ask myself a question very similar to the one I propose in this article: what did I want to do with my experience and my abilities in the next stage of my life?

The first came when I decided to close my time at Sun Microsystems, where I held the position of Vice President of Operations for EMEA. After so many years dedicated to leadership and technology, the most natural thing to do would have been to continue my management career in another great company. But I discovered that my purpose was deeply related to two of my great passions: helping people discover and develop their best version and using technology as a catalyst for change capable of transforming their lives.

That reflection led me to found Cabrera Management Consultants, my own consulting firm, with the mission of helping companies understand the transformative power of technology and turn disruption into an opportunity for growth. It was not about abandoning my previous experience, but about discovering a different way of putting it at the service of what really mattered to me.

Years later, when it was time for me to retire, I was faced with a similar decision again. I could continue to be involved in the business world by serving on boards of directors or developing advisory activities, as many former managers do. These were reasonable and well-known possibilities, but I wondered if there weren’t other ways to contribute that I hadn’t yet considered.

And I chose writing.

I discovered in writing a new space from which to share my experiences, explore my concerns and establish a dialogue with people I would hardly have reached from my previous professional responsibilities. I started with The seven mentalities, where I shared my vision of leadership and personal development. Later, the concerns that some readers told me led me to explore an area that I had never imagined addressing as a writer: anxiety and our way of dealing with uncertainty. This is how it was born Get vaccinated against anxiety. And, more recently, I decided to recover and share the memories, experiences, and learnings from my years at Sun Microsystems at The company that saw the future.

Today I recognize that, in both transitions, I questioned the seemingly natural continuity of my trajectory, explored other possibilities of contribution, and decided to put them into practice. I had not formulated those steps as a method then, but I can recognize them now in my own experience.

What seems most significant to me is that none of those decisions required giving up what I had learned. It was precisely my previous experience that allowed me to discover new ways of contributing, some of which I would never have imagined at the beginning of my professional career.

Symbiotic Intelligence today offers us the opportunity to enrich that exploration process. We can use AI to test our assumptions, discover needs and connections we hadn’t considered, and experience different paths before committing to big decisions.

Because our future does not have to be limited to a prolongation of what we have been until now.

The future is not only anticipated: it is also built

We can use AI to anticipate change, increase our productivity, or develop new skills. But its most transformative opportunity may lie in helping us discover possibilities that are not yet part of our way of imagining the world.

That doesn’t mean that all possibilities are valuable or that we can automatically turn them into reality. We need to contrast them with our values, our circumstances, and the needs of other people, while always retaining the freedom to decide which ones are worth our effort.

Expanding our human agency is not only about being better able to achieve what we want, but also about discovering new possibilities that expand our freedom to choose what we want to become.

The evolution towards intelligent agents capable of planning and executing actions with increasing autonomy will open up new opportunities to transform these possibilities into realities. We will explore this new dimension in our next article.

Perhaps the future we seek is not waiting for us to discover where artificial intelligence will leave us. Perhaps we can start building it by exploring the new possibilities that arise from our collaboration with it.