Dr Craig Wing on writing ‘Four Future Seasons’

Reflect, for a moment, on the week that’s passed: The political theatre, denials and celebrations. What connects these seemingly unrelated events is an anxious craving to know the future. Not for prediction, but for orientation. For clarity in a time of growing complexity, to “keep your head when all about you are losing theirs”, as Rudyard Kipling said.

This hunger led me to write Four Future Seasons, rooted in my PhD research and shaped by two decades of helping organisations, governments and individuals navigate change. It’s not another book about the “what” of the future but  rather “how” to future.

Many of our current tools are outdated, built for a world of certainties and steady progress. But we live in a world of contradictions, false starts and accelerating unknowns. In this era of postalgia, the belief that tomorrow will be better, we’ve become vulnerable to charlatans. Pundits who claim to know the future based on a trending clip or an AI-generated report. What they’re offering isn’t insight — it’s marketing.

Four Future Seasons offers something different: a means to approach the future as a spectrum of possibilities, drawing on three frameworks.

The first is the Johari Window, a tool for understanding what is known and unknown about ourselves and others. The second is Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous taxonomy of known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, repurposed here as a surprisingly useful model for navigating uncertainty. The third comes from my travels through Japan, where I encountered the Shiki Sansui Zhu, four-season landscape that embodies impermanence, reflection and change through design.

From these I developed the Four Future Seasons model:

• Summer futures are clear and data-rich. We feel confident extrapolating from past trends, but this season can lull us into false certainty.
• Winter futures are packed with the unknown. Data fails us. Precedent disappears. We must stay agile and open, navigating by entrepreneurial instinct as much as insight.
• Autumn futures are transitional. We begin to glimpse change. Leaders must act before clarity arrives, trusting early signals and preparing for disruption.
• Spring futures are regenerative. Often forgotten, they remind us of what we once believed possible. They emerge after shocks — like the 1976 Soweto Youth uprising or a financial crash, or tariff war — that shake us out of inertia.

Though designed for strategy, I’ve found this model deeply personal. We all experience seasonal shifts: a career winter, a rediscovered spring, the clarity of a summer moment.

And yes, the title Four Future Seasons contains a small “easter egg”. The acronym, FFS, is what many of us mutter when confronting the chaos of today! Rather, my hope through my book is that it becomes a framing of how to create better futures — for all.

Four Future Seasons: How to Anticipate and Prepare for Multiple Potential Futures by Dr Craig Wing is published by Penguin Random House.