Most futures sessions involve people sitting still, listening for long stretches, trying to imagine radical change through abstract language and bullet points. Which is odd, because our brains didn’t evolve for that at all.
John Medina’s Brain Rules makes this clear: the human brain evolved to solve problems in motion, together, under uncertainty, and through emotion. Not to absorb information passively.
When futures work ignores this, it’s both boring and biologically misaligned. If we want people to imagine different futures, we have to design for how the brain actually works. That means more movement and less immobility, more emotion and less neutrality, and more curiosity instead of content overload.
Which is why I love having the opportunity to design Futures Walks, walkshops, and experiential, place-based futures sessions.
Ultimately, futures thinking isn’t just a cognitive task. It’s a full-body, social, imaginative one. So why reduce it to a slide deck?