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...
My last reflection for 2024. I’ve seen futures processes fail, not because the scenarios were weak, but because the facilitation was. Some common anti-patterns that I’ve noticed include: Scenario-as-performance Scenarios are presented to people, not worked with...
Movement is often treated as a break from thinking. But research shows that movement is a form of thinking and meaning-making. Our brains evolved in motion, solving problems while walking, navigating, scanning, and responding together. When we sit people still and ask...
Most futures sessions involve people sitting still, listening for long stretches, trying to imagine radical change through abstract language and bullet points. Which is odd, because our brains didn’t evolve for that at all. John Medina’s Brain Rules makes this clear:...
