I would argue that one of main reasons why the tech industry is under fire at the moment is because they’ve optimised around “present thinking” rather than understanding the long term impact of their actions. https://twitter.com/johncutlefish/status/1380717444700905476

If course if you don’t think about the future, it creates a sense of plausible deniability. How could we have possibly known about the effect we’d have on society? You could have known by moving away from a present thinking mindset and considering the externalities.

Agile massively optimises for present thinking, and any attempt to consider the future is demonised as “waterfall” or “big design up front”. Thinking about the future in any meaningful way has been demonised as a result.

The way you think about the future in agile is to ship your product and see what happens. The result of not thinking through the consequences is often to the detriment of people who don’t look and sound like the people on the product team.