Quotable quotes

Wes Kao wrote a piece about“spiky points of view”, and it got me wondering what a spiky point of view might be in futures facilitation.

One of the hardest parts of facilitating futures work is knowing when not to move the group on.

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 becomes imaginable.

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.

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?”

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?”

In futures work, hope is often misunderstood. It’s sometimes treated as optimism, which is a belief that things will turn out well if we just think positively enough. That kind of hope doesn’t survive contact with complexity for very long.

A lot of modern infrastructure quietly assumes constant uptime. The internet. Our power systems. Our payment systems. Our GPS-powered navigation tools. When any of them stutter, even if only momentarily, things start to unravel quickly.

Good facilitation in futures work isn’t about adding polish. It changes what becomes possible.