Reflections
Reflections, observations, resources, fragments, and other notes from my work in futures and facilitation.
ChatMD?
Earlier this year, Futurism reported that OpenAI has launched a health-focused version of ChatGPT that can ingest full medical records. This raises some interesting questions for futures facilitators.
Facilitating futures, not just presenting them
As a futures facilitator, my attention is often less on the artefact or the method (the scenario, the trend map, the framework) and more on what’s happening in the room.
Collapse narratives in futures work
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.
Whose futures get heard?
Every futures process answers a hidden question before anyone speaks: Who is this space (or workshop or initiative) designed for?
Facilitation as the hidden engine of futures work
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.
Why futures without psychological safety (and/or bravery) default to the status quo
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 to risk saying the thing that might sound naïve, unpopular, or unfinished.
State change, on foot: thinking about walkshops and urban futures
In walkshops, “state change” isn’t something you design on top of the session. It’s already happening, all the time.
Participation is a futures capability, not a personality trait
In futures workshops, silence is often misread as disengagement. More often, it’s uncertainty doing what uncertainty does: slowing people down.
When people are asked to help build futures they didn’t choose
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 does this mean for hope and sense of agency?
Silence is data, not failure
That awkward pause after a futures question? It’s not a problem to be fixed. It’s information.
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