Kia ora and welcome to episode thirteen of The Futures Workshop!

Most of the tools we’ve looked at so far rely on scenarios - imagined future scenes which we then use to work out the implications for us and our organisations.

But today’s guest Andrew Curry says scenarios aren’t always the best approach. It can be cognitively tricky to get groups to fully embrace a speculative future and make the leap to where they fit into it. Sometimes, says Andrew, it’s better to stay in what he calls the “thick present”, using a tool known as Futures Landscapes.

Andrew is another significant voice in our global futures community. He is the director of Futures at the School of International Futures, and has led projects that span everything from net zero mobility to the impacts of geopolitical events on food and energy.

We hope you enjoy this episode on the Futures Landscapes tool. You can find some of the resources Andrew refers to below.

Thanks to The Beths and (The Boss) for their beautiful music.

Further resources:

An abstract on Futures Landscapes which Andrew created for the Discovery of the Future conference

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:0123fb5a-75aa-4f5d-8b4d-6450f21d35df

An urban food environments report to show how the tool might work in practice. Andrew tells me that the ‘domains’ part is a little harder to find in this report, but they are listed out on p13 and the supporting systems loops and analysis are at the back as an Annex

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:0fc744c1-7940-40a0-988b-1581f2b21d78

Welcome back to the Dubai Future Forum podcast lounge, from which I’m delighted to share another special episode of The Futures Workshop.

For this episode I was joined by former Head of Foresight and Futures Literacy at UNESCO Riel Miller, who shared his reflections on the Forum before taking a deep dive into “futures literacy” - a concept with which he has become synonymous. We talk about the importance of futures literacy, what it is and is not, and how to create an effective literacy lab.

I hope you enjoy the conversation with Riel as much as I did! Thanks so much to the Dubai Future Forum 2024 for hosting us and as always thank you to The Beths for the beautiful music.

You can find further resources in this Futures Literacy Playbook, which is free to download. These slides introduce the futures literacy lab methodology.

This week, a special episode of The Futures Workshop: my conversation with Professor Paul Saffo, recorded in front of a live studio audience at the Dubai Future Forum in November 2024.

Also special is today’s topic. After ten episodes exploring different tools and how to use them, Paul challenges us to think about the proper place of tools in futures work. He says we should use them in the same way a drunk uses a lamp post: for support, rather than for illumination.

Paul is a deep thinker, a rock star in the futures world and has a real gift for communicating complex ideas. He shares some beautiful and clever metaphors to help get his message across, and we think this episode will be of great interest not just to future thinkers but to anybody who uses tools in their day to day practice.

Please enjoy this special episode. Thanks to the team at Dubai Future Foundation for your hospitality and expertise, and thanks of course to Professor Paul Saffo for your generosity and intellect!

This week we’re following up our conversation with Ivana Milojevic with an imagined workshop. We show you how you might use the Futures Triangle tool with a group - guiding them to identify the pull, push and weight forces that affect the way we work towards a preferred future. We then look at how those forces might interact with each other - particularly where the tensions or obstructions might lie. Then we conclude with some final insights and briefly talk about how to turn those insights into practical next steps for action.

You’ll benefit from listening to Episode Nine: Ivana Milojevic on The Futures Triangle, before you take on this workshop episode. And as always, if you’re more of a casual listener to the podcast, feel free to skip over these even-numbered workshop episodes which are focused more on the day-to-day work of futures practitioners.

Whatever your background, we hope you enjoy this episode and as always welcome your feedback!

Today we’re in conversation with Ivana Milojevic, another of the world’s leading voices in the area of futures. Ivana has worked extensively around the globe, and shares some of her most memorable experiences in a wide ranging discussion, with a focus on the Futures Triangle tool.

In this interview Ivana explains how by understanding three invisible forces - the weight of the past, the push of the present and pull of the future - we can deepen our understanding of an issue, as well as spot particular challenges, and opportunities to make progress.

Along with being an accomplished futurist, Ivana specialises in peace studies and conflict transformation. We spend some time in this episode talking about how these three disciplines intersect to create meaningful change.

I hope you enjoy Ivana’s humour, warmth and intelligence as much as I did! Let me know if you have any thoughts or feedback on this conversation and as always I’ll be back in the next episode putting these tools to practical use in an imagined workshop.

Welcome to our latest episode, in which we take the tool introduced by Jake Dunagan in Episode Seven, and try it out in a workshop setting.

Jake’s specialty is “experiential” (or “design”) futures and central to this is the Create-a-Scene tool, which uses various facilitation techniques to bring a future scenario to life. In this episode we imagine a dystopic “collapse” scenario, and then a more optimistic “transformed” scenario.

We’ve telescoped this workshop more than usual - spending less time on the administrative and practical aspects of the workshop (like thinking time and Post It notes), to give us more time to explore two different scenarios with this tool.

Thanks for listening, and remember to subscribe if you’d like to get fresh episodes direct to your inbox when they drop.

In this episode I talk to one of the pioneers of design futures (or if you prefer, “experiential” futures) about how to emotionally engage people in futures thinking. By creating immersive scenarios, Jake says we can help people connect with what they’re imagining.

We talk about some of his most memorable scenarios, how to bridge the “cognitive gap” that stops people emotionally connecting with the future plus the challenges of facilitating design futures workshops and how to overcome those challenges.

Apologies for the poor audio in this episode - you won’t have trouble following the conversation but we wish it was of a higher quality. Thank you for bearing with us as we work to get the best out of our equipment and our software!

Thanks again to The Beths for their beautiful music.

You’ll find more detail on the 2x2 matrix for scenario planning that Jake referred to here, and a selection of resources he’s provided in the pdf below.

Welcome to episode six, another workshop episode we’ve created to assist facilitators and practitioners.

In this episode we imagine a workshop where the goal is to eliminate food deserts in Auckland by 2050. Using backcasting, we imagine our goal then work our way backwards, looking at the series of steps and milestones it would have taken to get there.

We hope you enjoy it! If you’re a facilitator and you’d like to feed back about what is and isn’t helpful in these workshops, please send us an email.

I’m excited to share our next conversation in The Futures Workshop series: my interview with Sarah Mecartney (Regional Director of Melanesia for the Pacific Community).

Sarah has chosen to talk about Backcasting, one of my favourite futures tools. She makes it sound much less intricate than this diagram! But as a visual aid it may be helpful for you to refer to during or after our conversation.

We also have a good chat about the unique futures skills of indigenous populations, many of whom have traditional worldviews and practices that align perfectly with the “new” futures thinking recently embraced by the Global North.

I chaired a panel featuring Sarah and other indigenous leaders at the Dubai Futures Forum last November, where we talked about some of these commonalities and opportunities to link old and new. She’s a warm, smart, engaging speaker and this podcast interview could have gone on for hours!

We mention the Pacific Pathfinder toolkit - you can find more on that here.

Please enjoy this episode, and as always I’ll follow it up with a practical workshop episode in a few days time.

Following our episode three conversation with Professor Sohail Inayatullah on his Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) tool, in this episode we imagine using it in a workshop setting.

Like all our even-numbered episodes, this one is aimed at practitioners and facilitators who want some practical examples of tool-use to assist with their own skill-building. If you’re a general listener you may wish to skip these workshop episodes and enjoy our interview episodes instead.

Thanks for the feedback from practitioners here and on Linked In! Please keep it coming, we enjoy working with you to make these workshop episodes as useful as possible.

Useful links:

https://www.metafuture.org/