Quotable quotes

The ways we move through a city influence what we notice, what we care about, and ultimately what kinds of futures we think are possible there.

What skills do futurers and futures facilitators need to help people process almost-certain loss? As I am writing this, the concept of a “midwife for death” or a “death doula” keeps coming to mind: depending on the kind of futures facilitation we do, is it necessary for us to learn how to assist in process of both “birthing new ideas” and assisting in the process of allowing old ideas – and attachments – to die?

Speculative scenarios have real-world impacts. So where are the scenarios that are so powerful that they boost confidence? Get people thinking and acting? Help us turn away from what’s wrong in our crazy, beautiful world and toward what will help us sustain, regenerative, and thrive?

Earlier this year, Futurism reported that OpenAI has launched a health-focused version of ChatGPT that can ingest full medical records. This raises some interesting questions for futures facilitators.

As a futures facilitator, my attention is often less on the artefact or the method (the scenario, the trend map, the framework) and more on what’s happening in the room.

In times of geopolitical instability, rapid technological change, and overlapping crises, it’s increasingly hard to make confident claims about what regions or countries will look like five or ten years from now. And yet, confident predictions persist.

Every futures process answers a hidden question before anyone speaks: Who is this space (or workshop or initiative) designed for?

Although I know nothing about basketball, I’ve been thinking about something often called the “Chris Paul effect” since reading about it in Jamil Zaki’s article about super-facilitators in the Harvard Business Review.

Often, a carefully designed futures sessions, packed with sound methods and provocative prompts, yields futures that are flat and oddly familiar. I think that this happens, not because people aren’t imaginative enough, but because they don’t feel safe or brave enough to risk saying the thing that might sound naïve, unpopular, or unfinished.

In walkshops, “state change” isn’t something you design on top of the session. It’s already happening, all the time.

In futures workshops, silence is often misread as disengagement. More often, it’s uncertainty doing what uncertainty does: slowing people down.

I recently heard a story about writer whose role had shifted. They were no longer expected to write, but to help train an AI tool to write in their place. What does this mean for hope and sense of agency?

That awkward pause after a futures question? It’s not a problem to be fixed. It’s information.

Ikigai is often presented as something to be found: a neatly defined purpose that sits at the intersection of what you love, what you’re good at, and what the world needs. That framing is tidy. And I think it’s misleading, to be honest.