I’m one of many interviewees in the two new Ludic Narrans books by Play Story Press, a “playful oral history” of fields including gaming, mixed reality, immersive theatre, sports, interactive roleplay and more – bringing together a vast amount of research into different forms of play by Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon University.
I was a guest on the latest Strategy Meets Reality podcast with consultant, strategic adviser, and ex-instructor of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Mike Jones.
Catch up on YouTube below, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I made a guest appearance on the latest episode of “Not Another KM Podcast”, hosted by Brittany Persinger and Rachel Teague, to talk about scenario planning, foresight, and knowledge management.
You can find the podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and anywhere else you get podcasts.
My latest piece of writing, “Wise Enough for an Uncertain World: Scenario Planning and Social Impact“, can be found at the Danish social impact nonprofit Impact Insider.
It’s an exploration of how we make a measurable difference to social issues in an unpredictable world, drawing on research with the University of Oslo, the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN), the IMAJINE project, and Peat Hub Ireland.
If social impact means creating long-term change, then we face a difficult problem: we live in turbulent times, and the future in which our impact will unfold is deeply uncertain.
Scenario planning can help by developing multiple plausible and contrasting futures, relevant to current concerns but challenging to our assumptions. Building and using scenarios offers the opportunity to critically explore expectations, hopes, and fears about the world within which we hope to make an impact.
Scenarios can inform the design of impact metrics which embody deeper values by considering the question: What might future generations wish we had measured in hindsight?
As we consider what inhabitants of different future scenarios might value, we can then identify and design appropriate impact measures to implement today.
Read “Wise Enough for an Uncertain World” at Impact Insider.
At Oxford Answers, the blog of the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School, Sophie Mitchell and I have a new post about the auDA scenarios built by Australia’s domain name registrar auDA.
“If global governance comprises not just formal institutions and regulations but the ‘mood music’ of the world, what part do we all have to play in shaping that mood today and taking responsibility for the future which transpires? Will leaders take collective action and contribute to digital civil society? Will digital platforms embrace a duty of care towards the most vulnerable users? Or will competitive opportunity be sought in the cracks, if tectonic shifts occur in the management of the global internet?”
The course “Cómo montar un laboratorio ciudadano en bibliotecas y otras instituciones culturales” (How to set up a citizen laboratory in libraries and other cultural institutions), run by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, recently celebrated its fifth anniversary with a special publication, “Bibliotecas y participación ciudadana” (Libraries and citizen participation), which is now free to download in PDF format.
It has been my pleasure to contribute to the course as a tutor since its inception, and to make a small contribution to the celebratory volume, which offers a range of practical tools for those who might want to set up their own “citizen laboratory”, working with communities and institutions to experiment and innovate on social and cultural issues.
You can find “Bibliotecas y participación ciudadana” here.
One of my contributions to the 2025 Global Youth Climate Summit, hosted by the University of Oxford, has just gone online at the Oxford Climate Change Challenge site.
In the newly-released talk “Navigating the sea of uncertainty: challenging assumptions about what the future holds“, we consider ways to address times of turbulence, when the context in which we operate seems to be unsteady and unpredictable.
You can also see a previously released talk from the same event, “The black box of action: how to make your climate project count“, at the same site.
From time to time, as one year draws to a close and another approaches, I share some tool or tip that may be useful: the “arrows of time“, value-creating systems, a wider reflection on scenarios as “stories of the future you didn’t see coming“.
This year, I offer just a single question.
Ask yourself: “How will this moment be remembered?”
It seems innocuous, but an honest answer will force you to be brave in confronting your assumptions and beliefs.
It stems from work of mine which was cited in Betty Sue Flowers’ new book, Scenarios: Crafting and using stories of the future to change the present.
There, I wrote that mature foresight work
enables people not to say, “Which future do I think I want, from the limits of my perception and understanding today”, but instead to ask “How would people in each different future judge the decision which I currently think to be so wise?”
This is the true benefit of manufactured hindsight: a kind of epistemic humility in the face of uncertainty, where instead of presuming we know what’s best for times which haven’t arrived yet, we enter into dialogue with potential futures and see beyond the received wisdom which may limit as well as reassure us.
If we simply ask ourselves, as we head into a new year, how this moment will be remembered, it tells us something about our understanding of the here-and-now – but also our beliefs about the future which is ahead of us.
The answers we come up with provide us with assumptions to explore, test, and challenge. What if a different future awaits, perhaps one that will judge us by different values and standards to those we hold today? What if hindsight will teach us a lesson we hadn’t yet imagined?
By exploring this question and different potential answers, we can reach for wisdom, rather than simply pointing at the future we think we want, on the basis of where we stand in the uncertain present.
“What I liked most about the workshop was getting to experience a framework for discourse between different stakeholders where everyone was approaching challenging ideas with an amount of vulnerability and openness. Things like the icebreaker question and being pushed outside of our cognitive comfort zones led to a kind of shared sense of uncertainty and unease that made it much easier for conversation and creativity to happen.”
Words from a participant at the scenarios workshop I led as part of the Peat Hub Ireland initiative, funded by the Irish Environmental Protection Agency and delivered by UCD colleagues under the leadership of Florence Renou-Wilson, including David Wilson, Kate Flood, and Elena Aitova.
You can see the full report, including an appendix on the scenarios, at the EPA website. Thanks to all the colleagues and to the host of our scenario session at Tyrrellspass, County Westmeath – it’s a rare delight to run a scenario workshop with a ninety minute bog walk in the middle of it…
“Uncertainty, agency, and the future context of internet governance: a foresightful conversation” is an article I co-wrote for the Journal of Internet Technology and Politics with colleagues Lucia Vesnic-Alujevic, Sophie Mitchell, Zoe Hawkins, and Cho Khong.
We explore how the structures, dynamics, and value of internet governance may play out in different scenarios – and the implications for the situations and decisions we face today.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 