AI can be a powerful tool in futures and foresight work. It can scan vast amounts of information, surface patterns across domains, and generate plausible starting points for scenarios or speculative artifacts. Used well, it expands our field of vision and accelerates...
Following on from my recent thoughts about collective intelligence as a futures skill, I thought I’d come back to the widespread assumption that leadership, and futures work, requires certainty. That someone, somewhere, should know where things are headed and what...
Place is never just a backdrop. Every place encodes power: who it was designed for, who feels welcome, who is watched, who belongs, and who does not. Boardrooms, campuses, public squares, heritage sites, city streets: each one quietly signals whose voices matter and...
In many futures conversations, the most important futures are the ones no one names. Sometimes they’re avoided because they feel too political, too uncomfortable, or too implausible. Sometimes people assume others don’t want to hear them. Sometimes they’re hard to...
Curiosity is often treated as a personality trait, a thing that you either have or don’t. But in futures and foresight work (and no doubt in other creative practices), curiosity functions more like a muscle that can be strengthened, weakened, or neglected over time....
Planned obsolescence is often discussed as a moral problem, and so it is. It does real damage, socially and ecologically. But it’s also something else: a future assumption baked into design. Products designed to fail, wear out, or become obsolete rely on a very...
