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The Cabinet of Useful Things · No. 004

The Four Other Futures

Your strategy can imagine only one future: the present, with newer software.

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Cabinet item 004Prompt

The Four Other Futures

Use when

Your strategy can imagine only one future: the present, with newer software.

Inputs

The strategy, plan, or decision.
One assumption it treats as fixed.

State the fixed assumption in one plain sentence.
Imagine four plausible futures in which it no longer holds. Give each future a different cause.
Choose the future that changes the strategy most. Name one early signal and one small experiment.

Produces

Four genuinely different futures—and one worth investigating before the present becomes compulsory.

Four distinct futures that do not preserve the current category by default.
The future that most usefully challenges the strategy.
One early signal and one small, reversible experiment.

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