I watched quantum physicist Shohini Ghose explain something that futures practitioners often feel in their bones: in quantum physics, uncertainty isn’t a measurement problem. It’s built into reality. Some things are fundamentally unknowable. And instead of treating...
When I am facilitating futures, the first 20 minutes of a session tells me how the session might go without careful facilitation. The opening exercises and activities aren’t simply ice-breakers, as many participants think, but an opportunity for me to observe the...
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...
