Use SCAMPER to Generate More Than One Possible Self

What each one is actually for

Possible Selves Exercise

The Possible Selves Exercise asks you to write two specific characters instead of one vague goal: the person you're hoping to become, described in enough physical, waking-Tuesday-morning detail that you could recognize her walking into a room, and the person you're afraid of becoming, described with the same specificity — what she's doing at 11pm, what she's avoiding, what she tells herself. You're not making a wish list. You're building two people you can check your current choices against.

SCAMPER

SCAMPER takes something that already exists — an idea, a plan, a habit — and forces seven specific changes onto it one at a time: Substitute a part of it, Combine it with something else, Adapt it from somewhere else, Modify (stretch or shrink) it, Put it to another use, Eliminate a part of it, or Reverse its order or logic. Each letter is a different lever pulled on the same starting object, and pulling all seven usually produces at least one version you would not have thought of by simply staring at the original and waiting for an idea to arrive.

What you get out of pairing them

On their own, each practice solves a narrow problem. The possible-selves work gives you two vivid characters but usually only two — a single hoped-for self and a single feared self, frozen in place once you've written them. SCAMPER gives you a machine for generating variations but nothing to point it at except whatever idea happens to be in front of you. Put together, you stop being stuck with the one hopeful sketch you happened to write on a given evening. You get several credible versions of who you could become, because you ran the same seven changes on your first sketch that you'd otherwise only run on a business idea.

What Possible Selves Exercise rests on

• Concrete goals outperform vague aspirations observational studies
  Specifying a concrete hoped-for or feared image of the future is more motivating and actionable than an abstract aspiration.
• Future self continuity motivates present action observational studies
  Vividly imagining one's own future self increases psychological connection to that self and motivates present behavior aligned with it.
• Gap awareness motivates change plausible mechanism
  Awareness of the gap between one's current self and a hoped-for or feared future self motivates action to close that gap.

What SCAMPER rests on

• Perspective taking expands frame randomised trials
  Deliberately adopting a vantage point other than one's own default view widens the range of interpretations or options available for a situation.
• Constraint forces novel combination practitioner report
  Forcing a specific type of change onto a familiar idea forces combinations that unconstrained thinking would not reach.
• Structured prompts widen idea generation practitioner report
  Applying a fixed set of transformation prompts to an existing idea generates a wider range of alternatives than unstructured brainstorming.

Where they actually meet

Both practices do the same underlying thing to different material: they take a starting point that feels fixed — 'my future self,' 'this idea' — and force a small number of specific transformations onto it so more than one version becomes visible. The possible-selves exercise usually stops at two versions (hoped-for, feared) because that's the frame it was built for. SCAMPER was built to keep going past two, seven times over, and there's no reason its seven-lever engine has to stay pointed only at ideas.

The principle underneath both

When you deliberately generate more than one concrete alternative to a thing you'd otherwise treat as singular and fixed, you can see options that were always structurally available but invisible from inside the default view. A vague hope ('a better version of me') behaves like there is exactly one target. A structured set of prompts run against that hope behaves like there are several, and several is what an actual decision needs.

What that makes the real goal

If deliberately generating alternatives is what does the work, the actual goal is not 'imagine your future self' or 'brainstorm better.' It's producing a small set of genuinely different, concrete options for something you were treating as fixed — so choosing between them, instead of accepting the one version that occurred to you first, becomes possible.

Other practices that serve the same goal

Several other practices are aimed at exactly this same goal of forcing multiple concrete alternatives into view. Edward de Bono's Six Thinking Hats assigns a different fixed lens — facts, feelings, caution, benefits, creativity, process — to the same problem in turn, similar to SCAMPER's seven levers but built for group decisions rather than solo idea generation. The 'premortem' technique, imagining a plan has already failed and working backward to why, is a narrower cousin of the feared-self half of the possible-selves work, with published evidence that it improves risk-spotting in group forecasting. Career and life-design work coming out of Stanford's d.school also runs multiple 'odyssey plans' — three or four distinct plausible versions of your next five years — specifically to break the sense that only one path is available.

A tradition that already does this

The clearest existing precedent for this exact pairing is 'Designing Your Life' (Bill Burnett and Dave Evans), which treats a person's future the way a designer treats a product: sketch several distinct concrete versions of it, then apply structured reframing prompts to each one rather than polishing the first draft. It doesn't use SCAMPER by name, but the move — generate more than one version of your future self, then deliberately transform each one rather than accepting it as-is — is the same shape.

Using the Possible Selves Exercise to Give SCAMPER Something Worth Reshaping

SCAMPER needs a starting object before it can do anything. Point it at a business idea and it reshapes the business idea — useful, but it never touches who you're becoming while you build it. Write your hoped-for and feared future selves first, in full scene detail, before you SCAMPER anything. Then, when you run the seven prompts against a real decision — a job offer, a move, a relationship choice — evaluate each SCAMPER-generated variation by asking which of your two selves would actually choose it. 'Eliminate the commute' might produce a version of the plan your hoped-for self would take in a heartbeat. 'Reverse the timeline' might produce a version only your feared self would end up living. The possible-selves sketch turns SCAMPER's seven outputs from seven random variations into seven outputs you can actually rank against each other.

Using SCAMPER to Stop Getting Only Two Versions of Your Future Self

Most people who do the possible-selves exercise write exactly one hoped-for self and one feared self, then stop, because nothing in the original exercise tells you to keep going. Take the hoped-for self you already wrote and run it through SCAMPER's seven prompts directly. Substitute: swap one core trait of that self for its opposite and see if the resulting person is still someone you'd want to be. Combine: merge your hoped-for self with a trait from someone you admire who isn't in your current sketch. Adapt: borrow a habit from a completely different domain, an athlete's recovery routine, say, and graft it onto your sketch. Modify: exaggerate one trait until it becomes almost a caricature and notice what that reveals. Put to other use: imagine this future self in a context you hadn't pictured, like eldercare or a layoff, and see if the identity holds. Eliminate: remove the single trait you're proudest of and see what's left. Reverse: write the exact inverse of your hoped-for self and check whether it resembles your feared self more than you expected. By the end you have five or six distinct candidates instead of one, and the differences between them are usually where the real information is.

The Sunday night before you say yes to the promotion

You're at your kitchen table with the offer letter open on your laptop. You wrote a hoped-for self a few months ago — the version of you who has more autonomy, works fewer hours, and coaches your kid's team on Thursdays. This offer doesn't obviously match or clash with that sketch; it's just more money and more scope. Instead of guessing, you run 'Eliminate' on the hoped-for self: what if you took away 'more hours' as an assumption and just asked whether this specific role, done at your current hours, still produces the person you sketched? It doesn't — the role as offered eats Thursdays. You run 'Substitute' next: what if you swapped 'this company' for 'this same role somewhere with a four-day week'? That version of the offer would fit. You go back to the hiring manager on Monday and ask, not to negotiate salary, but to ask if the fifth day is negotiable. It is. You wouldn't have known to ask if you'd only had the original hoped-for sketch and the original offer, with nothing in between generating the version that actually let you check.

When this is worth reaching for

You will know it is the moment when a real decision is in front of you — a job, a move, a relationship call — and you notice you keep circling the same one or two options because nothing else has occurred to you. The same signal shows up later: your hoped-for self sketch has gone stale, written once, unchanged for a year, and you suspect it no longer reflects what you actually want. Running it through even two or three of the seven SCAMPER prompts is often enough to tell you whether the sketch still fits or needs rewriting.

Where this does not apply

If you already know exactly what you want and the only thing left is doing it, this pairing will slow you down for no benefit — it exists to generate options, and you don't have an options problem. It's also a poor fit under real time pressure: running seven prompts against a future-self sketch takes real sitting-still time, and a rushed pass through SCAMPER tends to produce seven shallow variations rather than two or three good ones. And if writing a feared-self sketch tends to spiral into rumination for you rather than clarity, skip that half and work only from the hoped-for side — there's no rule that says you need both to get value from the pairing.

What the evidence does and does not support

The possible-selves research (Hazel Markus and colleagues) has real observational support for the claim that vivid future-self imagery is associated with more goal-directed behavior — it's not a randomized trial showing the exercise causes better outcomes, but the correlation is well replicated. SCAMPER's evidence base is much thinner: it's mostly practitioner reports and case studies from design and innovation consulting, with no controlled trials showing it outperforms unstructured brainstorming for any particular population. Running SCAMPER specifically on a future-self sketch, rather than on a product or business idea, has not been studied at all — this combination is a reasoned inference from two separately-supported ideas, not a tested method in its own right.