Summary
Tacit futures are the expectations about the future that people carry without ever stating them. The term is the futurist Joy Green’s. In an April 2024 post she defined them as “unvoiced, implicit and often unconscious assumptions, expectations and stories about the future, that colour our experience of the present, and affect our actions and beliefs about what is possible”.
Most, she argues, are ‘zombie’ futures: expectations that the shocks of 2008, 2016, 2020 and after should have killed off, but which “still keep lurching doggedly on”. Institutions stay trapped in them, and so do the changemakers who work with those institutions, until the assumptions are surfaced and let go.
Rationale
Joy took part in our studios. Her zombie futures suggest one reason why, as Part 1 warns, well-intentioned efforts get “pulled back towards familiar ways of seeing and relating”: the old expectations never died.