John Mahaffie

In a controlled study, researchers found people routinely willing to swap similar pens with others, but less willing to exchange lottery tickets. The reason? The lottery ticket in your hand has a potential future value which may—you don’t know—exceed that of another ticket. You don’t want to swap away a ticket that might turn out to be the winner. This happens even if the subjects of the experiment are reminded that probability shows either ticket has an equal likelihood of being a winner.

With pens, you are not likely to come out behind. A pen’s a pen, and neither your pen nor the other guy’s is the key to a future fortune. This shows how potential future regret shapes our decisions in the present.

So we have the power to anticipate having regret in the future. That means regret is not only a back-facing emotion, it also shapes our view forward, and so it shapes our future. The regret we feel can be about a missed future chance, an anticipation of failure, or an expectation that we will come up short in how we handle change.

The antonym of regret is satisfaction, and I would argue that anticipated satisfaction can be a powerful motivator for the future. But we have to allow ourselves to proceed with confidence armed with a vision of a positive future. That suggests to me that positive scenarios of our future are a strong motivator.

There’s not likely to be much of an outcome, for sure, if you go around expecting the worse, starting up with your regret even before things have transpired. This sort of sour approach to the present and the future is nothing but destructive. In my view, Pollyanna had it about right—we need a positive outlook and we can help build that with a focus on the future that gets us to positive ideas about the future. Along the way exploring people’s fears, but also their hopes about the future will help the cause.

See also: “The Optimism Bias” on optimism bias: are we hardwired for optimism?

I’ve weighed in before on hope, optimism, and the future:

“The Right Kind of Hope in Futures Thinking”

“It Doesn’t Seem Like the World is Going to Hell”

Image: jmoneyyyyyyy, via Flickr, Creative Commons attribution license.

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.
–John W. Gardner 1912-2002, author, business, leader, designer of Medicare

I favor negative scenarios-at least sometimes. Individuals should contemplate, once in a while, what they would do if they lost their job, their house, or their spouse. Why? Because reckoning with who we would be, what we would have left, and how we would get on with things builds a more robust view of the future and our part in it. Organizations should play out the same kind of thinking-ultimately to get to positive and empowered views of their futures.

Of course, positive scenarios are also good and powerful. Peter Schwartz, in The Art of the Long View, asserts that clear, evocative scenarios about a post-apartheid South Africa-positive stories-carried around the country and presented to groups, especially to white South Africans, helped end apartheid. He asserts that they enabled people to imagine a new South Africa, without apartheid, that was good for blacks and whites. Those positive scenarios met people’s fears head-on, and showed them how their future could be positive.

There’s also great power, and perhaps even greater insight in negative scenarios. Views of harsh change in your sector, for example, make things look dire. An organization can see change-steady or discontinuous change-that truly threatens them. And at first a dark scenario can make things look hopeless. But a negative scenario gives you the chance to imagine a positive future against that picture of troubling change.

Nothing is more powerful than that. It’s much easier-it comes naturally-to see a successful future when conditions are in your favor. Thinking your way to a positive outlook when the picture looks bleak means you can find success in adversity. You will be stronger for it.

In truth, in our consulting practice we nearly always have groups work on both positive and negative scenarios. A collection of scenarios, positive, negative, and uncertain, gives a group the most chance to chart a course with understanding of the range of potential outcomes. As Norman Vincent Peale said in 7 million plus copies of his book, there’s power in positive thinking. But there is plenty of power in negative thinking too.

Regret shapes the future, but so does satisfaction

Come over to the dark side