[Long Range Thinking] The Basics

When it comes to thinking about and planning for the future, my intuition tells me that most people are better at thinking about short-term consequences than longer-term ones. The graph could look something like this:
The question is: what tools and techniques can we use or create to make it look more like this:

Also, my intuition tells me that most people are better at thinking about things in their immediate vincinity than bigger ones.


Other things to consider:

Danyl once told me that we evolved on the savannahs to think about things that move slower than running speed, occur in the space of a day, and involve numbers less than seven.

In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell cites a study that found our social structures start to break down as soon as they're larger than 120 people.