Trading Tomorrow for the Now
How should leaders make decisions that balance the immediate and long views?
A side effect of 21st century progress is a habituation to fast and frictionless answers that begets an immediacy bias in how we experience the arc of our own existence. Our online and offline worlds are blurring, increasingly mediated by digital age technologies designed to deliver instant gratification through real-time fulfillment of information, products, services and experiences.
We satisfy our daily material needs (wants?) by adding purchases – be they groceries or bubble tea – to a digital cart and anticipating delivery in mere minutes to hours. We want to know something so we ask a search engine about it in the moment. We seek a confidant or a companion so we turn to an AI chatbot. We hear about something happening in the world so we turn to social media to get unfiltered updates.
As leaders, we are often pressured to have a hot take on current events before the full context can be understood. And the online story about such events often gets established well ahead of facts and perspective. Internet researcher Renee DiResta calls this phenomenon “immediate narrative setting” by influential voices online. It’s a dynamic that allows for a lot of misinformation and even malicious content to spread far and wide in ways that are near impossible to correct after the fact.
Establishing (and protecting) the narrative has become a key part of leadership today. In a fragmented, polarized and volatile information ecosystem, setting the terms of engagement can make or break a reputation, policy or program. This incentivizes early moves in developing contexts. In uncertain times, leaders often feel urgency to have an answer or try to control the outcome in response to new forces and evolving dynamics with long-term consequences.
How should leaders make decisions that balance the immediate and long views?
Leaders who fall into a pattern of making in-the-moment decisions have not left room to consider that near-term actions may be adding up to big consequences for the future. Living on impulse can mean trading tomorrow for the now, especially when fulfilling immediate needs borrows on resources or sets new norms that erode future opportunities. Short-termism also plays into dominant paradigms (and those who benefit from them) designed to distract attention and extract resources from efforts to design a different system that benefits more people.
What is the right move for right now is not always the right move once the fog of the moment clears.
The tension of leading for both short-term and long-term priorities is not new. But the combination of our market and attention economies has made it challenging to bring a long-term focus to leadership. And finding the right balance between the two temporal poles can be more art than science, and relies on pressure-testing decisions though both pragmatic and futuristic lenses.
RESOURCE: Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs by Ari Wallach
Luckily, Ari Wallach has written an antidote for short-termism. According to Ari and his team, "Longpath" is a verb: to Longpath means to actively counter our instinct for short-termism by making decisions, today, that create far futures where humans, ecosystems and planet flourish. The mindset is informed by three key practices:
Futures Thinking: the capacity to imagine many possible tomorrows (or what I think of as hopeful scenario planning with realistic contingencies)
Transgenerational Empathy: a commitment to acting in the interest of coming generations (or what I think of as being a responsible steward of the world you inherited)
Telos: the ability to align one’s actions with broader purpose and vision (or what I think of as purpose-driven leadership for the collective good)
For a quick take on the Longpath mindset, check out Ari’s TED Talk and the essay for WIRED magazine that set the foundation for the movement.
The world taking shape in 2025 seems to be well off a longpath-oriented future. Would that more leaders and influential voices took Ari’s message to heart and worked to imagine a different world of collective flourishing.