the tiny mindful moments podcast

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.

One of the most hopeful things neuroscience tells us is that we are natural explorers. Curiosity isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s how learning happens.

I’ve been thinking about how I am often involved in creating multi-sensory, place-based futures with groups, and I’m reminded again of Miti Desai’s essay about her experience with the gurukul system of training. There is one moment from her writing that has stayed with me: a teacher peeling an apple slowly, carefully, attentively, and offering it as part of a conversation.

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?”

One of the most useful ideas I keep returning to is Adam Grant’s from his book Think Again: in a fast-changing world, the real advantage isn’t being right. It’s being able to think again.

I revisited Kristi Nelson’s reflections on deepening our comfort with uncertainty recently, and it got me thinking again about how, in futures and foresight work, uncertainty is often treated as a problem to solve.

I watched quantum physicist Shohini Ghose explain something that futures practitioners often feel in their bones: in quantum physics, uncertainty isn’t a measurement problem. It’s built into reality.