Although I know nothing about basketball, I’ve been thinking about something often called the “Chris Paul effect” since reading about it in Jamil Zaki’s article about super-facilitators in the Harvard Business Review. In case you don’t know anything about this...
Often, a carefully designed futures sessions, packed with sound methods and provocative prompts, yields futures that are flat and oddly familiar. I think that this happens, not because people aren’t imaginative enough, but because they don’t feel safe or brave enough...
In walkshops, “state change” isn’t something you design on top of the session. It’s already happening, all the time. Every step is a shift. Every corner, sound, smell, encounter, pause, or crossing is a change of state. When we work with futures in urban environments,...
In futures workshops, silence is often misread as disengagement. More often, it’s uncertainty doing what uncertainty does: slowing people down. Participation doesn’t happen because people are confident. It happens because the conditions make it safe to think out loud...
I recently heard a story about writer whose role had shifted. They were no longer expected to write, but to help train an AI tool to write in their place. What struck me wasn’t the technology (although it is remarkable how fast AI and LLMs are changing the creative...
That awkward pause after a futures question? It’s not a problem to be fixed. It’s information. When groups go quiet, it’s often because the question is stretching identity, not just opinion. Sometimes it’s because people are sensing risk in being wrong. And sometimes...
