“I’d like to begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land that we’re on, and paying my respects to elders past, present, and emerging.”
That’s the form of words as I say them now; the current evolution. I learned to say them on the lands of the Turrbal and Jagera people in what is now Brisbane, and the lands of the Jarowair and Giabal people in what is now Toowoomba. “Custodians” has recently replaced “owners”, at the suggestion of Chris Lee; “emerging” replaced “future” a while back, although I’m not sure entirely why, I just noticed that some people I respected used that word rather than the other.
The saying, as a whole, is an Acknowledgement of Country; a form of recognition and respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their relationship to the land which is often spoken at the beginning of a gathering in Australia. These days, I say it when hosting online meetings and workshops on Zoom or other platforms. Although I’m currently in London, and might be speaking with people anywhere in the world, I usually choose the Australian form of words if I’m working in a multinational space, because Australia was where I first became aware of the need to acknowledge Indigenous peoples’ custodianship of the land, and of a formalised protocol which could guide us in doing so.
The conference’s “Unscripted Futures” session seeks to:
“explore how radically open futures can be constructed and how we can secure that future scenarios are not locked into the premises of today. The aim is not to simply celebrate the openness of the future, but to create a space for developing experiments, for proposing alternative possibilities and constructing new futures, and then studying and discussing their implications and consequences ‘on the ground’.”
Marie Mahon of NUI Galway and I will discuss “Unscripting Europe”: Using Future Scenarios to Rethink EU Territorial Inequalities, exploring the scenarios being developed by the Horizon 2020 IMAJINE project.
Inequality isn’t just a question of measuring the current distance between the haves and have-nots, then checking whether that distance increases or decreases. It’s also about changing forms of privilege and injustice, changing values, and a changing social context. How can plausible imagined futures help us to better understand the nature of inequality?
Then, David Robertson of Monash University and I will talk about Playing With The Futures You Didn’t See Coming: High-Agency Participatory Scenario Activities, On and Offline.
David & I will belooking at what it means to create truly playful activities and encounters where participants can surprise the facilitators, formats can be broken or rebuilt during use, and new ideas can arise. We’ll talk about the infamous Library Island game, as well as some of its successor experiments from the era of Zoom and COVID lockdown.
I’m not a big fan of the phrase “new normal”, but if there is one, then for me it involves a lot of Zoom calls, which means mostly seeing people’s heads and shoulders in a cropped little screen.
For my ELGL20 keynote to local government professionals, I grabbed a stepladder to try and find a different perspective, even in a world constrained by the limits of the laptop lens.
My ladder was a prop to remind people why we do foresight work. Sometimes, we think we know what the future holds and we take action in the present, just as confident as someone stepping onto the first rung of a ladder.
But that ladder comprises all the assumptions we are relying on about what the future holds, and what part we’ll play in it.
Every policy is a prediction. Tax cuts will boost the economy. Sanctions will slow Iran’s nuclear program. Travel bans will limit the spread of COVID-19. These claims all posit a causal relationship between means and ends. Regardless of party, ideology, or motive, no policymaker wants his or her recommended course of action to produce unanticipated consequences. This makes every policymaker a forecaster.
We might start climbing that ladder and then realise we need to step left, or right. We might find that the next rung is missing. We might have set off on our ascent quite happily, only to find that circumstances at the top have changed and it is really difficult for us to climb back down. We may even find we have to awkwardly perch half-way up the ladder (I ended up using mine as a chair while I spoke to the ELGL crowd).
Scenarios and other foresight techniques can help us examine the assumptions we are making about the future before we take that first step.
The ladder was also something of a gambit on my part. I hadn’t planned to include it as part of the keynote, but we were using a videoconferencing platform which made it difficult for the speaker to know how the audience were responding. Our host compared it to “speaking on a lit stage where you know the audience is out there, but it’s hard to see their faces”.
Around the halfway point of my session, I wasn’t confident that my message was getting across and I wanted to be sure to drive the point home. I dashed out of the study and fetched my stepladder from behind the kitchen door. Often the liveliest and most memorable parts of a workshop, or any human encounter, come when something doesn’t go according to plan. It’s important to remember that when events go astray, they can go better than we expected or intended, as well as worse – especially if we take advantage of the moment.
So that’s why I brought a ladder to a Zoom keynote. Even if you, too, are trapped by the boxes of the videoconference screen, what can you do to help yourself, and the people you speak with, find a fresh perspective on the futures which await?
Spanish speakers can now watch a short public video from my contribution to the Laboratorios Ciudadanos Distribuidos course developed by the Spanish Ministry of Culture & Sport and MediaLab Prado.
The recording offers a brief overview of new approaches to public value. It outlines a number of practical tools that allow you to map the value created by your organisation or team, then consider ways to transform the value and impact you offer to the community you serve.
Following our recent two-part discussion on this blog, you can hear Saskia Van Uffelen, Belgium’s Digital Champion, speaking with me on the OECD’s Government After Shock podcast in this week’s discussion.
During our interview, Saskia explores communication, leadership, and adaptation beyond crisis. If we pull on the “elastic” of our society and its institutions too far, it will break. Are we ready to fashion a new, more resilient world as the crises of 2020 demonstrate the old one’s limitations?
Saskia Van Uffelen is the Digital Champion for Belgium, tasked with promoting the benefits of digital society as part of the European Commission’s efforts to ensure every European citizen acquires the digital skills they need to remain productive, employable and enfranchised. After a career encompassing roles at Xerox, Compaq, HP, Arinso, Bull, and Ericsson, she is currently Corporate Vice President for the French group GFI, supervising developments in the Benelux countries. Saskia is also the author of Dare For Tomorrow: Leading, Working, Learning, and Living in a Digital World.You can read the first part of our interview here.
As Digital Champion, you have an interest in the future of the public library, an institution which is also very dear to my heart. The social changes you’re describing will have an impact on our civic information institutions, and the context they operate in.
You’ve said elsewhere that, “If anything has remained the same in your organisation (culture, processes, eco-systems), it will simply not work anymore. You need to adapt your company and your culture. Adapt or die.”
Are libraries too prone to thinking about what used to work, instead of looking strategically to the future and to forces outside their sector?
If we abolish the police and reimagine the ways in which our societies cope with disorder, violence, and transgression, what else will have to shift? How radically could public libraries change, if we reimagined the institutions of information as profoundly as we might reimagine the institutions of justice?
I led strategy workshops last month with some very senior librarians in Australia, and at the beginning of these sessions, we gave an Acknowledgment of Country, acknowledging the Traditional Custodians of the land we were on and paying our respects to Elders past, present, and emerging.
We didn’t just speak these words as a formula and then move on. We talked about what it meant to acknowledge country in digital space, when each of us was in a different location, from Australia to the UK. We talked about acknowledging the histories which have led us to a world in which I could speak the traditional language used for generations in the place where I was born, and not make any effort to adapt the way I speak for audiences in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the US, Canada, or many other nations.
We talked about what it would mean for the institutions represented in the workshop not just to acknowledge these histories, or to carry out the work of recognising and remedying them through diversity and inclusion efforts, acts of reconciliation and decolonisation, and so on. We talked about what it would mean for these institutions to become explicitly antiracist.
It was important to talk about this, because for some public institutions, it proves hard to take a stand against injustice. The political environment in which public library services and other organisations operate is shaped by the elected governments which determine their funding and policies, and this can make it challenging for institutions to do the right thing. Read more →
“Group dynamics are ‘like an iceberg – you see some of the relationship on the surface and then there is also everything beneath the water. There are the explicit, seen, and formal aspects; then all that is implicit, unseen, unspoken, and even unconscious.'”
In this series, I’m looking at how we can push the boundaries of literacy in the 21st century, to encompass new areas of representation. What does it mean to read the future? To read risks? To read the forces that underpin our relationships and drive us psychologically? To read the signs and signals which exist in the natural world?
The latest instalment explores questions of “psychodynamic literacy”. If we were better at reading the forces that shape our relationships, could we rewrite them to get better, happier outcomes?
Today I spoke with leading US information professional R. David Lankes about foresight, strategy, and coping with uncertainty beyond immediate short-term crisis response.
David created one of the first 100 web sites ever, plus the first web presence for CNN, the Discovery Channel, and the U.S. Department of Education. We spoke about what he foresaw at the beginning of the Internet age, the surprises which emerged along the way, and how we might learn from the past when the future is uncertain and unlikely to repeat what went before.
I joined Kirsten Wyatt of the US Emerging Local Government Leaders’ GovLove podcast to talk about scenarios, strategy, foresight, play and the power of drawing.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
