---
schema: "bureau.tool/v1"
id: bureau-tool-004
title: "The Four Other Futures"
type: "Prompt"
time: "5–15 minutes"
source: "https://thefantasticbureau.com/briefs/the-imagination-deficit/"
publisher: "The Bureau of Fantastic Strategy"
---

# The Four Other Futures

## What it does

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

## Use when

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

## Give it

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

## Copy this

Help me widen the strategic imagination around this strategy.

First, identify the assumption being treated as fixed. Then imagine four plausible but genuinely different futures in which it no longer holds. Each future must result from a different change—not four versions of the same trend.

For each future, give me:

1. A short name.
2. What changed.
3. What becomes newly valuable.
4. What becomes obsolete.
5. One early signal that this future may be arriving.

Do not automatically preserve our current category, business model, or advantage. Avoid generic innovation language.

Finish by choosing the future that most usefully changes the strategy. Explain why in two sentences and suggest one small, reversible experiment.

STRATEGY:
[PASTE HERE]

FIXED ASSUMPTION:
[PASTE HERE]

## You will receive

- 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.

---
Filed in The Cabinet of Useful Things · https://thefantasticbureau.com/instruments/