Thinking

Psychological safety is often talked about as if it were a mood. Let’s create a space with good vibes, a warm and welcoming energy where people can feel “comfortable”. But in futures work, I believe that psychological safety is structural.

There’s a facilitation exercise called Blind Portraits that has some interesting lessons for futures facilitators.

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 surrender a good question for a mere answer.

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 exploration.

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 needs to be done.

Place is never just a backdrop.

In many futures conversations, the most important futures are the ones no one names.

Curiosity is often treated as a personality trait, a thing that you either have or don’t. But in futures and foresight work (and no doubt in other creative practices), curiosity functions more like a muscle that can be strengthened, weakened, or neglected over time.

Planned obsolescence is often discussed as a moral problem, and so it is. It does real damage, socially and ecologically. But it’s also something else: a future assumption baked into design.

Futures work asks people to question assumptions, imagine alternatives, and sit with uncertainty. None of that happens when participants are passive for too long.