by Suzanne Whitby | Aug 7, 2022 | Faciliating Futures
One of the hardest parts of facilitating futures work is knowing when not to move the group on. There’s often pressure, explicit or implicit, to reach clarity quickly. To summarise. To decide. To produce something tangible that justifies the time spent. But some of...
by Suzanne Whitby | Jul 27, 2022 | Faciliating Futures
Many futures conversations fail not because people lack imagination, but because they’re trapped in “used futures”. These are inherited visions that feel familiar and inevitable. Changing the question when facilitating futures can be enough to change the future that...
by Suzanne Whitby | Jul 7, 2022 | Faciliating Futures
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, his students explain later, is simple: never surrender a good question for a mere answer. I think about this often...
by Suzanne Whitby | Jun 27, 2022 | Faciliating Futures
Place and space are often used interchangeably in everyday language, but in human geography, these terms mean different things. Without doing a deep dive into the academic literature around place versus space (something that I have been doing as part of my PhD),...
by Suzanne Whitby | Jun 7, 2022 | Faciliating Futures
One of my favourite questions in place-based futures work is simple, but deceptive. I ask, “Whose futures are visible in this space, and whose are missing?” This is a question that I usually ask in the present, often on a participatory walk, and sometimes in a room,...
by Suzanne Whitby | May 7, 2022 | Faciliating Futures
In futures work, hope is often misunderstood. (It’s certainly understood in other contexts, too, but I’ll try to stay on topic!) In futures, it’s sometimes treated as optimism, which is a belief that things will turn out well if we just think positively enough. That...
