2020 Foresighting Forum, Energy Consumers Australia

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I’ll be appearing via video at next month’s 2020 Foresighting Forum hosted by Energy Consumers Australia, the national voice for residential and small business energy consumers in Australia.

The Forum brings together stakeholders from across Australia’s energy sector to explore long-term questions of heat, light, and power.

I’ll be presenting a group of scenarios, created with representatives of the Australian energy sector in 2019, which could help reframe curent perspectives on Australia’s energy future and the strategic decisions which must be made in the present.

 

Planning your new year with Arrows of Time

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The arrival of a new year tends to focus our attention on what’s coming. People make resolutions, use the holiday season to take stock and decide where they want to go next, or treat January 1st as a turning point for their lives at work or home.

Here’s a tool I sometimes use, adapted from the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach, where it’s called “Arrows of Time”. I shared it at the end of 2018 and I’ve added a little something extra for this year’s version.

To get started, you just need a piece of paper and something to write with.

Read more →

2019 GovLove Hit Parade: Leadership & Scenario Planning

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The US-based GovLove Podcast, run by the Engaging Local Government Leaders network (ELGL),  celebrates the end of each year by showcasing the most popular episodes of the previous 12 months.

I’m pleased to announce that July’s episode on Leadership & Scenario Planning, which I recorded with ELGL’s Kirsten Wyatt, has taken the number one slot.

Check out the whole list in this Twitter thread from the GovLove team.

 

The Mandarin: Scenario Planning for the Public Sector

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My latest article has just been published in The Mandarin, Australia’s publication for public sector leaders.

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Australia’s Federal Parliament house, by Wikipedia user JJ Harrison – (CC BY-SA 3.0)

“We can’t predict the future, but scenario planning can identify what it might look like” explores the practice of scenario planning, including interviews with practitioners and clients from the OECD, Australia’s science organisation CSIRO, and leadership roles in government and policy bodies.

Visit the Mandarin website to read the article today.

Kurs setzen für mehr Bibliothekserfolg: Bremen workshop, March 2020

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How far ahead do you plan your professional development? German-speaking librarians and information professionals interested in foresight, strategy, and leadership can join me and my fellow consultant Andreas Mittrowann for a special one-day workshop in Bremen on 9th March 2020.

Andreas and I will be exploring questions of design, planning, and innovation in this special event incorporating the “Library Island” game.

You can read more about the Bremen event at Andreas’ blog and sign up to join us via the workshop’s Eventbrite page.

Truth, lies, fake news, futures, Brexit

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So, after the UK election, it looks like Brexit will be happening, barring a truly wild turn of events.

It hasn’t mattered to the electorate that politicians have lied to them; they haven’t been put off by misleading videos, the rebranding of a party’s social media account as a “fact checking” service, or the failure of politicians to submit to debates, interviews, and media scrutiny.

In fact, perhaps voters wanted to be misled – to be told that one can simply “get Brexit done”, after years of wrangling.

For information professionals, this moment returns us to the idea that policing facts will not solve the various issues of trust in information which have been bundled as “fake news”. People might accept being misled if they believe the political system is stacked against them; it seems people will also accept being misled if they are tired and frustrated by politicians’ failure to thread the needle of Brexit’s self-inflicted crisis.

Brits voted to leave the European Union in 2016 without a clear definition of what that meant, or what future relationship with Europe was being mandated. Politicians struggled to parse the meaning of that vote and, when Theresa May returned to the polls in 2017, the renewed “will of the people” was clearly and legitimately expressed in the form of a divided parliament. Nobody had a clear sense of how to deal with the outcome of that referendum.

Now, it seems the voters of the United Kingdom have chosen to slice the Gordian knot, irrespective of whether or not Alexander has lied to them, or what other cherished ties might be undone in that stroke.

What does all this mean for information professionals? Read more →

Dots that I haven’t joined yet

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I’m momentarily at rest in my beloved Brisbane, with the sun blazing down in December and bushfires on the news and Leila Taylor’s book Darkly to read.

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Taylor’s book, subtitled Black History and America’s Gothic Soul, blends memoir and criticism to explore the places where African-American history, culture, and experience meet the Gothic – from The Castle of Otranto through Edgar Allan Poe to Marilyn Manson.

I’m back in Australia helping organisations to look at their future and imagine what might await them in years to come, using scenario planning. This is a method by which, instead of trying to predict what’s coming, we co-create plausible visions of the future which challenge our current assumptions. Successful scenarios are not judged by whether they come to pass, but whether they trouble, complicate, and enrich our thinking.

And the dots which I can’t quite join yet became visible when I read this, in Darkly: “Gothic narratives were (and still are) a means of working through the discomfort of a changing world through the safety of fiction.”

Which is so close to what scenarios do as to blur the edges of the two concepts. In scenario planning we talk about avoiding the “brutal audit” of a crisis by rehearsing for the things you can’t, or don’t want to, see coming through your current framing of the world.

Read more →

Interview with Wendy Catling of Ettamodern.com

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I had the chance to interview one of my heroes, the Australian artist and educator Wendy Catling of ettamodern.com, during my recent visit to Melbourne.

Wendy works with digital and photographic processes, particularly cyanotypes, to create artworks which address private history, psychological disturbance, Australian landscapes, and the natural sciences.

The interview comes in advance of a new series of artworks by Wendy which combine narrative, memoir, family archives, and technical experimentation to tell stories of hidden violence, resilience, and renewal.

Viewers and listeners should be warned that Wendy’s work addresses histories of family abuse and domestic violence. Australian listeners affected by these issues can can contact the 24 hour counselling service 1800RESPECT by telephone at 1800 737 732, or online at 1800respect.org.au.

IMAJINE pilot workshops: the future of spatial justice

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Our IMAJINE team working on scenario planning for the future of regional inequality and territorial cohesion in the European Union has held its first pilot workshops on the West Coast of Ireland.

Researchers and regional officials joined NUI Galway’s Marie Mahon and myself at the Teagasc Rural Economy Research Centre in Athenry. There, we trialled fast, practical foresight tools allowing participants to sketch roadmaps of the futures which may await them.

The Oxford Scenario Planning Approach, which we’re using to structure these sessions, allows us to identify and develop plausible scenarios which serve to test assumptions and reframe the way participants look at the future. By imagining the most difficult or surprising circumstances a community might face, we seek to develop a playbook of strategies for emergent issues in territorial inequality and spatial justice.

The IMAJINE project continues through 2021 and incorporates Europe-wide foresight alongside deeply local engagement with policymakers and other stakeholders. Stay tuned for more updates.

Can you dig through spaghetti to save a ribbon? @UTSLibrary

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A library needs your help — and by helping them, you’ll be helping the world.

A few years ago, the librarians at University of Technology Sydney (UTS) in Australia awarded a creative residency to Chris Gaul, a designer and artist who used sound and visuals to find new ways to bring the collection to life.

One of Chris’ most impressive works from this period was the Library Spectogram, which visualised the library’s collection, organised by the Dewey Decimal system, as a colour spectrum.

 

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Chris’ artwork visualised the collection by representing the number of books under each Dewey subject heading as a colour, with different shades of each colour representing the subdivisions within each class.

What made this truly brilliant was what UTS Library did next: turning Chris’ artwork into a practical tool, an interactive web interface to explore the library collection.

On the UTS library catalogue, the library spectogram exists as a band of colour – “the ribbon” – which you can click to expand the colours of each subject into the subdivisions which they’re shaded by.

 

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The spectrum makes understanding and browsing the Library’s collections more intuitive and engaging. It’s a simple tool which could be used by almost any library with an online catalogue, large or small, in any sector.

In a world where everyone is trying to wow you with the latest digital innovation, it’s a simple, humble, effective tool which offers a transformative experience in collection exploration: the online version of serendipitous browsing among the shelves.

So what’s the problem?

UTS Library is going through massive changes right now: moving to a new building on their Ultimo campus and starting to rethink their discovery services, which could mean moving to a new online home too. The long-awaited project to share the ribbon’s code openly has been deferred by several years.

Plans to release it in early 2018 were delayed until the start of this year, and as 2019 comes to a close, more than seven years after Chris’ original residency, the ribbon is still not out in the world. With the planned overhaul of discovery services, it’s even possible that the UTS ribbon might be lost entirely.

What’s needed now is to find a way for the code which creates the ribbon to be liberated from the UTS online catalogue and shared openly. That’s where you, or someone you know, comes in.

UTS’ Dr Belinda Tiffen has kindly given permission for interested parties to work with the Library to make this happen. This could involve a group of interested students taking it on as a project; it could become the focus of a hackathon; or it could be volunteer work by public-spirited souls who want to give something back to libraries worldwide.

The code uses the functionality of the UTS search engine Endeca to group search results, so there could be a bit of a technical challenge digging through “spaghetti code” to make this happen – but once the ribbon’s code is exposed and shared with the world, any library with an online catalogue could consider making use of Chris Gaul’s gift to UTS.

In an age when university libraries are striving to be open, it would be an act of generosity, sharing digital discovery tools just as freely as libraries wish to share their content.

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At a time when we recognise the need to preserve digital as well as physical heritage, it would ensure that the Library Spectogram doesn’t just become “a nice thing one library had once”, yet another great innovation which is celebrated on social media and shown off at conferences, but ends up on the scrapheap when steps aren’t taken to nurture and sustain it.

If you think you could help UTS Library to share the Library Spectogram code with the world, contact UTS Library’s Resources & Discovery chief, Sharlene Scobie to offer your services and learn more.