I started traveling and training last week as part of my job with the Foresight department, so the research framework that we use has been top of mind. One of the steps is developing archetype scenarios of possible futures based on the drivers of change that emerge from the research: baseline is the “expected” future, the one that unfolds if current trends and the rules that govern the system stay the same; collapse describes what might happen if the rules crumble; transformations describe futures in which the systemic rules have profoundly changed.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that, in this present darkness, the center has not held and our systems are quite literally failing. Unilateral decisions shuttered USAID and have FEMA in an existential crisis. A literal nazi billionaire has technical control of the US Treasury and all citizen data. The country is in a trade war with Canada and Mexico. It remains clear that the president still doesn’t know the difference between insane asylums and political asylum.

And beyond the crumbling pillars of democracy, the threads of justice and moral decency are snapping. The damage is immeasurable.

And yet…

I think there is an opportunity right now to imagine new ways of doing things. In a world in which the center does not hold, what are the new rules that we want to write? Project 2025 gives us a blueprint of one set of new rules. But there are so many other ways we could do this. Samantha Montano, emergency management scholar and author of the book Disasterology talks about the difference between reforming emergency management systems and building new ones from the ground up and offers that we may be in a moment where we have an unprecedented opportunity to build from the ground up. It made me wonder what other systems we have the (unfortunate and almost unimaginable) opportunity to dream into re-being.

If we have to rewrite the system of government-supported research, what does that look like in an ideal world? If we get the opportunity to rewrite the picture of borders and immigration and foreign aid, what is the most equitable and prosocial system we can imagine? If the systems we know that govern trade and capitalism fail, what’s next?

Transformation scenarios aren’t all bunnies and unicorns. They’re built on existing timelines and tease out tangible sparks of change that, if encouraged, can forge new (and better) systems. I sometimes write out transformation scenarios to shift my paradigm from despair to hope, and it is real work to think through the morass of this murky, mucky present.

And yet…

I think that’s the key. I think humans want to have hope, but it feels so ephemeral, and we need to have tangible stories to form a scaffolding to give it a body. So I think that’s my tempered encouragement today… what are the systems that, given the world and time, you would rewrite, and what is the story you would tell? I think we’re all little-e experts in something… what are the rules in your “thing” that we need to break to release something new?

The narrative of fear is really effective. We’re evolutionarily primed to respond to fear, and right now, fear is not calling on the better angels of many of the people around us. But there are whispers of better stories out there, of mutual aid and sanctuary and resistance. And I think if we start sharing our “best imaginables” then maybe we’ll be able to work to scaffold a truly best possible. We just need to be able to see and hear some stories of the gritty, tenacious, steely hope.