Most groups don’t get stuck because they lack ideas. They get stuck because they hate the “fog”, that awkward middle space where nothing is clear yet. So what to do when the fog rolls in during a futures session? My approach is to make ambiguity a shared, normal phase...
In his book Questions Are the Answer, MIT professor Hal B. Gregersen argues that breakthrough thinking rarely comes from having better answers. It comes from asking better questions. Better questions are the kind he calls “catalytic questions”. These are...
In times of geopolitical instability, rapid technological change, and overlapping crises, it’s increasingly hard to make confident claims about what regions or countries will look like five or ten years from now. And yet, confident predictions persist. You still hear...
Wes Kao makes a blunt but helpful point: students don’t owe us their attention. The same is true for participants and futures facilitation. Participants don’t owe us belief, engagement, or imagination just because we’re holding the marker or running the workshop. If...
We often approach the future by looking forward: imagining scenarios, mapping trends, projecting change. But sometimes, a future becomes more accessible when we approach it from the other direction. I’ve been thinking about the idea of an annual review, not as a list...
I’m back to thinking about Miti Desai’s essay, “An Indigenous Pedagogy in Contemporary Times: My experience with the gurukul system of training”. In the Gurukul system, learning happens through proximity, repetition, observation, and relationship, as . Not through...
