Futures work asks people to question assumptions, imagine alternatives, and sit with uncertainty. None of that happens when participants are passive for too long. One of the most useful ideas I’ve borrowed from teaching and learning design is Wes Kao’s State Change...
Futures don’t become actionable because they’re clever. They become actionable because people recognise themselves in them. That recognition only happens through participation. That means participants speaking, listening, reacting, disagreeing, building on each...
When futures work fails, it’s tempting to blame the method. Maybe the scenarios were too abstract. Maybe the time horizon was wrong. Maybe the data wasn’t robust enough. Sometimes that’s true. But more often, what I’ve seen is something else: the futures work didn’t...
For a long time, I tried to decide whether I was an introvert or an extrovert. When I am facilitating, I am extrovert: full of energy, constantly keeping people going, occasionally the “life and soul of the party”. But given the choice between going out and...
In futures and foresight, we often talk about scenarios, or multiple plausible futures, that offer structured uncertainty and a way to think beyond prediction. Scenarios are powerful. I use them often. And if memory serves, they are probably the most popular futures...
In futures work, hope is often misunderstood. It’s sometimes treated as optimism, a belief that things will turn out well. But in complex systems, that kind of hope rarely survives contact with reality. The kind of hope I’m interested in is different. It’s the...
