the tiny mindful moments podcast

Movement is often treated as a break from thinking. But research shows that movement is a form of thinking and meaning-making.

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.

Psychological safety is often talked about as if it were a mood. Let’s create a space with good vibes, a warm and welcoming energy where people can feel “comfortable”. But in futures work, I believe that psychological safety is structural.

There’s a facilitation exercise called Blind Portraits that has some interesting lessons for futures facilitators.

In her essay Important Questions to Ask Yourself, poet 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, the disciples later explain, is simple and severe: never surrender a good question for a mere answer.

AI can be a powerful tool in futures and foresight work. It can scan vast amounts of information, surface patterns across domains, and generate plausible starting points for scenarios or speculative artifacts. Used well, it expands our field of vision and accelerates exploration.

Following on from my recent thoughts about collective intelligence as a futures skill, I thought I’d come back to the widespread assumption that leadership, and futures work, requires certainty. That someone, somewhere, should know where things are headed and what needs to be done.

Place is never just a backdrop.

In many futures conversations, the most important futures are the ones no one names.

Curiosity is often treated as a personality trait, a thing that you either have or don’t. But in futures and foresight work (and no doubt in other creative practices), curiosity functions more like a muscle that can be strengthened, weakened, or neglected over time.

Planned obsolescence is often discussed as a moral problem, and so it is. It does real damage, socially and ecologically. But it’s also something else: a future assumption baked into design.

Futures work asks people to question assumptions, imagine alternatives, and sit with uncertainty. None of that happens when participants are passive for too long.

Futures don’t become actionable because they’re clever. They become actionable because people recognise themselves in them.

When futures work fails, it’s tempting to blame the method. Maybe the scenarios were too abstract. Maybe the time horizon was wrong. Maybe the data wasn’t robust enough. Sometimes that’s true. But more often, what I’ve seen is something else: the futures work didn’t fail: the conversation around it did.

For a long time, I tried to decide whether I was an introvert or an extrovert. Having explored all the personality tests out there (for what they are worth: not much, I think, but that’s another topic), I think that I am probably a mix of the two. Like most people.

In futures and foresight, we often talk about scenarios, or multiple plausible futures, that offer structured uncertainty and a way to think beyond prediction. Scenarios are powerful. I use them often. And if memory serves, they are probably the most popular futures and foresight method that exists. But scenarios alone are not enough.

In futures work, hope is often misunderstood. It’s sometimes treated as optimism, a belief that things will turn out well. But in complex systems, that kind of hope rarely survives contact with reality.

Power in futures work doesn’t just show up in who sets the agenda. It shows up in who feels able to speak.

We often talk about futures work as if it happens in a room. But place is never neutral. When we work with place consciously, it becomes a co-facilitator.

Most futures work still treats imagination as something that happens in the head. But the brain doesn’t work that way.

We tend to talk about futures and foresight as analytical capabilities: the ability to scan signals, build scenarios, or anticipate change. But I’m increasingly convinced that one of the most important futures skills is something else entirely: collective intelligence, or the ability of a group to think, imagine, and decide well together under uncertainty.