What Comes Next?

“Our planning for the future often depends on an approach we learned in childhood. We draw a straight line from today to next year and prepare for the future based on our recent experiences, best guesses, and current gut feelings,” write Nicholas Skytland and Alicia Llewellyn. “The problem with this is that the potential of this approach is limited by what we currently know and have personally experienced. We don't make room for the unknown and unfamiliar.”

In What Comes Next: Shaping the Future in an Ever-Changing World, Skytland and Llewellyn lay out a better strategy for planning for that uncertain future, viewing the world as though looking through a kaleidoscope, creating controlled sections of the uncertain chaos. In the book, they present what they call the Futures Framework, a framework that uses the Four Forces of purpose, people, place, and technology, as well as the areas where those forces intersect, to plan out a set of potential futures.

Designed for Christian leaders in ministry, church, or nonprofit vocation, What Comes Next is a quick and easy read. It tackles a lot of complex topics without getting bogged down into technical jargon or overly academic writing. The book is meant to be put into action, part theoretical and part workbook, each chapter including a lot of reflection questions and ending with action steps. The book is designed to guide you through your own future planning, for you to apply concepts as you read them, finishing the book with an actionable plan.

With a separate chapter for each of the eight intersections of the Four Forces, Skytland and Llewellyn give enough detail in each part of framework for leaders to take action — dreaming up possible futures, laying out pathways, creating action steps – without getting too bogged down into details.

While working at NASA, Skytland and Llewellyn had a lot of experience designing “paper rockets” — plans that were visionary, affordable, and doable but still were never implemented, instead being placed on a dusty shelf in an office building. “The reason that many grand visions never turn into anything other than gravitationally challenged paper studies isn't that the idea itself was flawed, but because the will to implement the vision wasn't there,” they write. “It's not enough to have a great idea. You have to actually launch it.” What Comes Next is intended to help Christian leaders not only come up with the right ideas based on futures thinking, but also to help them launch those ideas.

Most leaders have become disillusioned with the traditional planning and budgeting process, knowing that the system doesn't work because they're not accounting for an uncertain future. For anyone who wants to take an educated, systematic look at their future to more accurately plan for what's ahead, What Comes Next is a must-read.