There’s a facilitation exercise called Blind Portraits that has some interesting lessons for futures facilitators. Two people sit facing each other. Each draws the other’s portrait for three minutes without looking at the paper and without lifting the pen. You have to...
In her essay Important Questions to Ask Yourself, poet Jane Hirshfield tells a story about a man who travels far to ask a wise teacher a question. When he finally asks it, the teacher slaps him. The lesson, the disciples later explain, is simple and severe: never...
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...
