A lot of modern infrastructure quietly assumes constant uptime. The internet. Our power systems. Our payment systems. Our GPS-powered navigation tools. When any of them stutter, even if only momentarily, things start to unravel quickly. I’ve observed that this sometimes seems to lead to sudden breakdowns. And everyone seems to be caught by surprise.
What’s interesting is that many older systems expected failure. Power outages happened. Maps worked offline. Payments were slower, but more forgiving. There was slack built in, not because designers were less capable, but because failure was assumed. I know this because I started my corporate career as a programmer, then managed a team of software (application) developers whilst working as a project and programme manager. I have first-hand experience of planning for things to go wrong.
Today, systems are faster and smoother, right up to the moment when they aren’t.
I wonder if we’ve optimised so relentlessly for efficiency and convenience that we’ve allowed resilience to fade away into the background. This means that when things don’t function as we’ve come to expect, people seem to be helpless. Angry. Irritated. But helpless.
So what does this have to do with futures?
I think that the situation we find ourselves in with technology isn’t a technical choice. It’s a future assumption. An implicit belief that continuity is the norm and disruption is exceptional.
But systems always fail. The question isn’t whether breakdown will happen, but whether we still remember how to design for that reality.
In futures and foresight work, I often raise the questions about what futures are silently built into our systems. What kinds of behaviour, dependency, and vulnerability do they assume?
The future may depend less on inventing new technologies, and more on relearning how to build things that can bend rather than snap. And I am talking about technology now, but this thinking applies equally to humans: how can we build resilience into our systems so that humans can bend, not break?