The future is not an academic exercise. It is about blood and tears, treasure and poverty, dreams achieved and destinies averted. It is about sweeping healthcare reform and the atrocity of war. As professionals, we are all too often trapped in our powerpoints, distracted by our petty intellectual rivalries, lost in the language of technocrats. But this is life and death, success and failure.

I am reminded of this as I read the wonderful Dinokeng Scenarios, a view of three possible futures for South Africa. Knowing the situation in that country – violence, hope, unemployment, illness, and burgeoning democracy – the stakes could not be higher. To quote the project:

We are at a crossroads, but what is wrong in South Africa can be fixed. South Africa is a country of great possibility. We have a reasonably strong asset base. But we also have a deficit – we are badly served by our leadership. There are dangerous seeds in our present which have the potential to lead us to disaster, possibly even authoritarian rule. This is a moment of choice that requires strong decisive leadership.

The project presents three guiding scenarios: Walk Apart, Walk Behind, Walk Together, representing the possibilities represented by allowing the status quo, expecting a government to provide solutions, and depending on community integration, respectively.

I suggest you download them all, for two reasons. First, to see how futures can serve as both professional and inspirational documents, since this project represents the highest level of professionalism and spirit in the world of foresight. Second, you owe it to yourself and to our neighbors in South Africa to understand their struggle, if perhaps to understand your own.

We are all in this together. When one person fights to make a brighter, more just, more humane, healthier, more prosperous future, we must all join in.