Affordances, Missed Opportunities, and Shaping the Future of Abundance
I was recently reminded of an intriguing idea while listening to Rory Sutherland talk on a podcast. Rory pointed out how incredibly tough it is to measure missed opportunities—things that could’ve happened but didn’t, ideas we never explored, collaborations never pursued—all these subtly valuable possibilities that quietly slip away without ever leaving evidence they were even there.
That’s an interesting point. We’re very good at counting visible benefits or explicit costs. If a project overruns its budget, we measure precisely by how much. If revenue drops 12%, we understand exactly what’s lost. But our ability to account for possibilities that never got off the ground—because of hesitation, inertia, or simply limited imagination—is practically nonexistent. There’s no easy way of quantifying the value of what never was.
This got me thinking about “affordances,” an idea from product and interface design. Affordances are subtle yet important signals a designer builds into a product or environment to guide you intuitively toward certain actions or behaviors. (Think of how a door handle gently instructs you whether to push or pull, without you needing a sign.)
Affordances aren’t just physical design features. They’re also embedded in the systems, environments, and institutions we build—our economic policies, the structure of our workplaces, even the cultures we inhabit. Each of these quietly but powerfully shapes what we do, and perhaps more importantly, what we imagine is possible to do.
Why Affordances Matter in How We Think About Opportunity
We often underestimate how much our environments and institutions signal certain ways of thinking and behavior patterns—and how subtly those signals shape what’s possible. If institutional incentives repeatedly highlight immediate gains, quarterly targets, or short-term efficiency, we implicitly narrow our thinking toward measurable near-term outcomes. Unintentionally, opportunities that take more time, cooperation, or imagination—and whose payoffs are harder to see in advance—feel riskier, less realistic, even unthinkable.
As a result, we quietly lose all sorts of interesting possibilities: ideas that might’ve been explored, partnerships never formed, innovations never attempted. These losses are virtually invisible—yet incredibly important.
The Invisible Price Tag of Missing Opportunities
Our inability to precisely measure the costs of missed opportunities is a real blind spot. Economists and managers like clear numbers—that’s understandable. But this preference biases us toward counting tangible things, often at the cost of disregarding options that are harder to quantify yet hugely valuable in the long-term. This imbalance hampers creativity and courage. It emphasizes continuity over experimentation, caution over ambition, known paths over bold exploration.
We risk becoming efficient at doing what we’ve always done while quietly losing the capability—or the confidence—to even see exciting alternative futures. This subtle narrowing can be costly, and it’s far more common than we may realize precisely because it’s invisible.
Expanding the Pie, but in Less Understandable Ways
Right now we’re moving into an era of potentially unprecedented abundance. Technology, collaboration, knowledge, connectivity—these forces continue to expand possibilities in ways we struggle to fully understand or measure clearly. Yet precisely because this growth is incremental, diffuse, and harder to visualize, it’s difficult to quickly adjust to—at least compared to more straightforward, clearly bounded opportunities.
We know how to respond when we see obvious opportunities or risks with immediate payoff or danger. But abundance that emerges in less tangible, slower, or more complex ways often feels abstract. It’s harder for us as individuals—and collectively as societies—to fully grasp, adjust to, and embrace these opportunities, even though they might promise far greater potential overall.
Affordances as a Starting Point for Imagining Abundance
If affordances quietly influence what we feel capable of, perhaps one powerful path toward grasping and integrating these more abstract kinds of growing abundance is by explicitly reconsidering the affordances of our institutions, policies, and environments.
Could we intentionally design signals pointing toward innovation, collaboration, and imagination—subtle nudges that make it easier to choose ambitious, creative paths? Can institutions reward longer-term thinking, encourage exploration, and empower collective imagination around the possibilities ahead?
Abundance Won’t Just Happen—It Needs Us
The future promises enormous possibilities. But it won’t automatically emerge merely because potential exists. Our collective actions matter enormously. Designing affordances into our societal structures and systems to enable imaginative thinking won’t happen on its own. It requires intentional effort, conversation, policy decisions, leadership, and everyday individual choices.
Seeing clearly how much opportunity we’re already missing—and how limitations of imagination quietly constrain us—is an important step toward intentionally shaping better systems that encourage us toward abundance. If we deliberately design affordances into our institutions and practices that signal openness, creativity, collaboration, and ambition, we will find ourselves able to recognize—and capture far more of—the abundance already present around us.
That’s the goal worth directing our collective agency toward: building the subtle but vital signals that make an abundant future not just theoretically possible but actively imaginable—and achievable.