Wes Kao makes a blunt but helpful point: students don’t owe us their attention. The same is true for participants and futures facilitation.
Participants don’t owe us belief, engagement, or imagination just because we’re holding the marker or running the workshop. If anything, futures work raises the bar. We’re asking people to think beyond habit, beyond certainty, sometimes beyond comfort.
That requires more than good content. It requires intentional shifts in state.
In futures workshops, state changes might look like:
- moving from abstract trends to embodied observation,
- shifting from expert voice to participant sense-making,
- pausing for silence after a provocative question,
- or literally changing location, posture, or direction.
These shifts are not breaks from the work. They are the work. They interrupt certainty, make space for other voices, and perhaps most importantly, they prevent the facilitator’s narrative from becoming the future by default.
State change, in this sense, is an ethical stance: a refusal to dominate attention, meaning, or interpretation for too long.