Future Design Inquiries. October 2026

Hello from ENSO, a future design company. We’re sharing the things that make us think, bring us joy or shift our perspective. 

What we’re reflecting on

Collective values

It’s election season (again) so I’ve been thinking about the collective values that we’re prioritizing these days. This piece, by an American psychologist who married into Danish culture, taught me about one of Denmark’s core values called tryg. Like many words describing an intangible, there is no easy translation but she describes it like this: “The word is often translated as ‘safe’, but that is not quite right. It does not primarily refer to the absence of threat. Rather, it points to the presence of a particular state: the body at ease – calm, relaxed, with a sense of familiar warmth. Like the relaxed feeling of a child resting in her parents’ arms.” 

It’s not spontaneous either – it’s intentionally cultivated and the Danes take that project very seriously. But that effort isn’t viewed as an individual responsibility but rather a collective one, and schools, workplaces, family life, public spaces and restaurants are designed to promote it. Nothing is rushed. Expectations are clear. Environments are predictable. And because of it, parents leave babies asleep outside cafes and kids bike to school alone. Not all the outcomes are good. “Meetings are spent revisiting the last meeting, planning the current one, eating together and preparing for the next meeting,” she says (only one piece of that sounds tolerable to me). Not surprisingly, decisions are slow. But I’m struck by the way this value has been designed into all facets of life, because everyone takes responsibility for building the society they want to live in. 

In future design, the methodology ENSO uses for our projects, we start with the future we want and work backwards to figure out how to design it. It’s usually difficult because even if an organization or community can figure out what the core values are, it’s challenging to design around them, to really live into them. Clearly, the Danes have figured something out. (HS)

Time for improbable futures

Inside most companies, it’s planning season. New columns are added to spreadsheets, unwittingly determining a future that’s very much like the past, plus a bit. Except this year, most plans will bake in AI to drive efficiency: a future very much like the past, minus a bit. Is that really our highest aspiration for what’s been called the most powerful technology ever created?

That’s the projected future: business as usual, extrapolated. But it’s just one scenario among many. The futures cone (below) maps the others — plausible, possible, even preposterous — and asks the question: which future do we actually want? The biggest leaps start at the edges and move inward with diligent work. The moon landing was ‘utter bilge’ according to Britain’s Astronomer Royal in 1956. It became possible when Gagarin orbited, plausible when Kennedy committed, probable when Apollo 10 succeeded, and history in 1969.

This year, the case for looking further out is stronger than usual. 62% of people across 30 countries say their country is on the wrong track; in the US it’s 73%. When the probable future is this unpopular, incrementalism is the risky choice. Today’s pervasive discontent does not preclude ambitious ideas, it creates the context for creation.

So a practical suggestion for your 2027 plan: alongside the projected column, add one for the possible or preposterous. Pick an idea worth pursuing that makes steps towards the future you actually want. Then assemble a small group of people committed to making the improbable inevitable. This is how everything from the moon landing to the Olympics to the Red Cross to a united Europe got started, and it’s the pragmatic optimism we need now. (SB)

!Grit does not mean solo suffering!

ENSO has long advocated that companies articulate a shared mission — something of societal importance that others can get excited about. “Save our home planet” and “make life multi-planetary” are famous examples, as opposed to solo endeavors like “be the best …” or “be the #1…”. Shared missions are more inspiring, and more likely to win friends with regulators, partners, and customers. So why are they rare? Perhaps because companies are run by people raised to believe success is a solo act. Angela Duckworth’s recent essay gets at this: school fosters the solo-success belief (we get personal grades, not class grades) and cultural narratives of heroic achievers perpetuate it. Yet every high performer she’s studied credits a host of supporters. She’s a powerful messenger for this: her book Grit was taken by many as permission for solo suffering, rather than perseverance with help. And the case goes beyond conventional performance: consistently, the biggest driver of wellbeing is belonging. 

Back in 2013, working on Khan Academy’s first marketing, we spent time in the classroom of an award-winning teacher. Her whiteboard was divided into two lists: “need help” and “can help”. Students who needed help added their name and challenge (“Sebastian, quadratic equations”); students who could help added their name alongside. With this simple design, she shifted the culture from winning gold stars alone to earning status by helping. Where else can we design for interdependence — in teams, in companies, in the missions that matter? (SB)

Beyond business orthodoxy

One of Harvard Business School’s most-used cases asks students to play a manager deciding the fate of a brilliant but abrasive banker. Chris Marquis, who has taught at Harvard, Cornell and now Cambridge Judge, has led that discussion many times. He’s come to see it as a case study of what’s wrong with business education: students practice being ‘the decider’, while big questions go unaddressed (what culture created that banker? whose knowledge is missing?). His recent essay, I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down, is an insider’s argument that this training does real damage. The evidence is sobering: when US firms appoint managers with business degrees, wages fall about 6% within five years, with no gain in output, investment or jobs. That’s not what students come for; my experience after a decade of doing talks at Wharton is that students are yearning to operationalize their ideals. Still, Marquis has watched idealism give way to the race for McKinsey internships within a single semester. My hunch is that the pressure is social: few people want to be the idealistic optimist in a room of optimizers. But the same wiring is also the way out: Marquis points to Martin Parker’s idea of ‘schools for organizing’, which would teach people how to coordinate towards shared ends. Where ENSO differs: Marquis calls the win-win of profit and purpose a delusion. We agree it isn’t automatic, since it’s too easy to proclaim a purpose and change little. But business can be organized around missions that matter, and ambitious missions need committed optimists. And in that room of optimizers, optimists need friends. (SB)

These nuggets are curated by ENSO partners Hanna Siegel (HS) and Sebastian Buck (SB).

6 things that made us think, gasp, share and laugh:

• Halloween 100 years ago was a little different: kids had to actually perform a trick (song, poem, dance, joke) in order to get their treat

• nice.rocks is exactly what it sounds like
• Curtis White’s Seven Theses on Resistance 
• “What is needed is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source … Deliberately falling out of love … is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing.” Get philosophical about how to move on from a breakup (TL;DR fake it ‘til you make it)
• Explore the world’s dark skies
• Any Human Ever lets you draw a (fictional) average person at random from any time throughout history, and learn what it would have been like 

What we’re working on

ENSO is a small, senior team so that we can work on just a few initiatives at a time. This allows us to go deep on some of the biggest challenges/ opportunities. Recently, we’ve been working on a few main missions with our partners:

1. Reimagining the future of the seas, and exploring what a new frontier in maritime might mean for the world
2. Building awareness and new behaviors for childhood safety, when there's already too much to do.
3. Helping artists sustain an artistic life over the long term, and designing the space and tools to help artists everywhere thrive. 
4. Changing the world of work: the labor market is the engine of prosperity, but ~80% of people are not engaged or thriving. We’re working to change the system.

Thank you for being part of the network that fuels our optimism and expands what’s possible. We’re grateful for you, and we’re committed to creating positive futures together.

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Reach us at news@enso.co

See you next time.