Today TIME published an Op-Ed I wrote titled You Can’t Predict the Future. But Can You Rehearse It?. The piece explores a simple but important idea: the future is not something we can reliably predict, but it is something we can rehearse.

The Op-Ed focuses on why prediction is becoming less useful in a world where pressures across science, technology, geopolitics, economics, society, philosophy, and the environment are arriving at the same time. But the article only briefly touches on something that has shaped my thinking over the past year: how the idea of possibility chains actually emerged. It started with a familiar problem.