There is often a moment in the futures sessions that I facilitate when people stop asking, “Is this the right future?” and start asking, “What future are we willing to create together?”
That’s the moment futures work starts to have impact. When we treat people and participants as mere “audiences”, we end up with interesting futures that don’t go anywhere. But when we treat them as “creators”, as “authors of possible futures”, futures become more real and actionable.
That’s why facilitation matters so much in the futures work that I do. Sure, managing the processes, time, and so on matter, but even more important is my deliberate interventions to move away from “people consuming insights and reacting” to “people making meaning and making choices”.
The most successful futures sessions don’t deliver answers. Instead, they unlock authorship. And once people start to experience themselves as authors of the future, even briefly, it’s very hard to go back to being passive experiences of futures that “just happen”.