Lisa Kay Solomon is a designer-in-residence and lecturer at theStanford d.school, the university’s design hub. In her classes, which include “Inventing the Future” and “View from the Future,” she helps 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,” saidSolomon, a member of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills.This interview first appeared inDocumensch, the newsletter of Stanford’sBerman Archive. It has been edited for length and clarity.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.You work with Jewish communal professionals. What can they gain from futures thinking?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 [charity], tzedek [justice] and tikkun olam [repairing the world], 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 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 teshuvah [repentance] 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.What place do the past, broadly, and archives, specifically, have in thinking about the future?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 book] “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.”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.What is your favorite archival item from any collection?Stanford Library is home to Stewart Brand’s archive, which includes materials used to create the iconicWhole 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.”RelatedJ. covers our community better than any other source and provides news you can't find elsewhere. Support local Jewish journalism and give to J. today. Your donation will help J. survive and thrive!Support J.