We’ve been thinking a lot about time this summer. The past is the obvious temporal stomping ground for an archive about American Jewish communities. But what about the future? Where are we headed? We’ve been following the work and writing of our colleague at Stanford, Lisa Kay Solomon. She’s an author, strategic foresight designer, and Designer in Residence and Lecturer at Stanford d.school where she leads their futures work and teaches popular classes like “Inventing the Future” and “View from the Future,” helping leaders and learners build agency and navigate ambiguity amid increasingly complex futures. Solomon is also actively engaged in the Jewish community, so we thought we’d reach out to hear to help us make some connections between the American Jewish community and futures thinking.
Berman Archive: Can you explain what you do for people who are not familiar with futures thinking or futurism?
Lisa Kay Solomon: First, let me demystify a common misconception: futurism isn’t about prediction. A futurist isn’t someone with a crystal ball—we’re people comfortable with uncertainty who have trained ourselves to think systematically about what might happen next.
Futures thinking is both a mindset and a set of practices for expanding our agency in an increasingly complex world. It empowers us to make more thoughtful choices by recognizing that the future isn’t predetermined. Instead, there’s a wide range of possible futures that we can and should explore and shape together.
What does this look like in practice? Futures thinking involves learning to take a long-term perspective, thinking beyond immediate concerns—increasingly important yet increasingly difficult in our accelerating world. It requires systematic anticipation, paying attention to external trends and macro dynamics like demographic shifts or environmental changes to better understand how and why the world might change. Futures thinking also incorporates bold imagination to see beyond the status quo and envision possibilities that seem implausible today, then share those visions in ways that inspire others to work toward bringing them to life. Finally, it demands comfort with ambiguity—the ability to hold competing truths simultaneously without needing to resolve tensions immediately.
At Stanford, I teach classes like “Inventing the Future” and “View from the Future,” where students move beyond asking “Can we build it?” to explore “Should we build it?” My goal is to help them feel empowered to build futures they want to inhabit—rather than becoming passengers in other people’s futures.
Berman Archive: What could Jewish communal professionals gain from futures thinking?
Lisa Kay Solomon: At its core, futures thinking asks us to be “good ancestors”—to consider the long-term impact of our decisions and extend our moral imagination to future generations we’ll never meet. This framing immediately resonates with Jewish values like tzedakah, tzedek, and tikkun olam, which provide scaffolding for nurturing generations to come. In an increasingly uncertain world, these deeply held values offer clarity and guidance through ambiguity while fueling positive action.
Through my work with Jewish communal leaders on leadership development and strategic planning projects, I’ve become amazed by the natural alignment between Jewish tradition and futures thinking. Core Jewish concepts like l’dor v’dor (from generation to generation) and tikkun olam (repairing the world) are inherently future-oriented, asking us to consider our responsibility to generations yet to come.
Many of our holiday rituals embody essential elements of futures thinking. The High Holidays’ practice of t’shuvah asks us to reflect on the past year as a ritual of “return” to prepare for the year ahead. The Passover seder doesn’t merely recount the Exodus story—it asks us to tell it in ways that make it relevant for each generation, essentially inviting us to “time travel” through the past to foster conversation about contemporary and future choices. Even Shabbat asks us to pause and honor the week that has ended in order to prepare for the week to come.
Throughout history, Jewish leaders have demonstrated the bold imagination and long-term thinking that characterizes effective futures work. Consider Theodor Herzl, who boldly—perhaps preposterously at the time—envisioned a Jewish state as an antidote to antisemitism in his 1896 pamphlet “The Jewish State.” Or Rabbi Benjamin Frankel, who in 1923 recognized that Jewish college students needed communal support and created the first Hillel at the University of Illinois above a barber shop. For over 100 years, Hillel has provided foundational infrastructure and community for young Jewish leaders at a critical life stage.
Even the Jewish superhero creators of the 1930s and 1940s—Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, and Stan Lee—embodied futurist practices, using narratives of hope and justice to envision different possibilities during a difficult period for Jewish immigrants in post-Depression and post-WWII America.
Whether through rigorous scenario planning or imaginative storytelling, these approaches share a common thread: the belief that we have both the responsibility and the power to shape tomorrow.
Berman Archive: What place do the past, broadly, and archives, specifically, have in thinking about the future?
Lisa Kay Solomon: History and the future are dynamically linked. The best futurists I know are often historians, trained to examine the past through the lens of context, patterns, and larger systems—the same skills futures thinkers need. Archives provide critical clues to understand not just what happened, but why.
Fred Polak, a Holocaust survivor who became foundational to futures studies and authored “The Image of the Future,” captured this perfectly: “The rise and fall of images of the future precedes or accompanies the rise and fall of cultures.”
Archives preserve these “images of the future” that Polak identified as crucial to cultural vitality. When we understand how previous generations envisioned tomorrow—their hopes, fears, assumptions, and blind spots—we gain insight into what enabled some communities to thrive while others declined. Archives can provide both guidance and warnings for what may lie ahead.
For Jewish communities especially, archives preserve stories of resilience, adaptation, and future-building that inform how we approach uncertain times. They remind us that our ancestors faced destabilizing moments and found ways to plant seeds for generations they would never meet.
Berman Archive: Where should Jewish communal professionals start if they want to cultivate futures thinking? What books or sources do you recommend?
Lisa Kay Solomon: While futures thinking isn’t new, the pandemic has sparked increased interest in strategic foresight resources. Some of my favorites include Roman Krznaric’s The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking, Peter Schwartz’s foundational The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, and Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby’s How to Future.
I’m also enthusiastic about The Long Now Foundation, started by futurist Stewart Brand, creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. The Long Now offers an incredible repository of talks and audacious projects focused on long-term thinking, including its 10,000-year clock. (Full disclosure: I recently joined The Long Now’s board!)
I’ve also created “Leading Like a Futurist,” an online class through LinkedIn Learning that serves as an accessible primer for futures concepts and applied practices.
What excites me most, however, is examining foundational Jewish texts through a futures lens. Earlier this year, I wrote for eJewishPhilanthropy about approaching Passover rituals as a futurist. More recently, I co-authored an article with Rabbi Jay Moses of the Wexner Foundation about a program we designed that infused Jewish texts with futures thinking in deeply connected, even spiritual ways. Nearly every time I apply a futures lens to Jewish text, I discover new connections and overlaps.
I believe every reader of this archive’s newsletter has an opportunity to return to their favorite Jewish resources, rituals, and texts and ask: “How might I put a futures lens on this?” The answers may surprise you—and they’ll certainly enrich both your practice and your community’s ability to navigate an uncertain but shapeable tomorrow.
Berman Archive: We’re an archive, so we have to ask, what is your favorite archival item from any collection?
Lisa Kay Solomon: Stanford Library is home to Stewart Brand’s archive, which includes materials used to create the iconic Whole Earth Catalog. When it launched in 1968, the catalog sparked multiple cultural revolutions, including the modern environmental movement. Stewart Brand is known for many memorable quotes, including “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish”—the line Steve Jobs famously used in his 2005 Stanford commencement speech. But my favorite quote from Stewart’s archive is “Unmake Victims. Start with yourself.”
This simple phrase encapsulates everything I find compelling about futures thinking: the recognition that we have agency, that change begins with individual action, and that we can move from passive recipients of circumstance to active shapers of possibility. It’s a perfect bridge between the archival past and the futures we’re working to create—and it embodies the very essence of being a “good ancestor.”
