Category: foresight

Book Chapter: Scenarios as a device for forming common futures

Mechanical Dolphin

“Scenarios as a device for forming common futures”, the chapter I co-authored with UCL’s Richard Sandford for the volume Building the Post-Pandemic University, can now be read for free online.

We argue that:

Universities need to develop ways of creating their own narratives of the future, in order to anticipate what lies ahead and recognise possibilities for change.

By developing their own capacity to imagine possible futures, rather than working with future narratives designed outside the university, institutions will be better placed to recognise their distinctive and heterogeneous character, to be clear about their particular orientation to the future and potential contribution to its development, and to strengthen the university community through this shared process.

You can find our discussion of scenarios, foresight, and universities’ particular situation as complex, internally diverse “engines of the future”, at Elgar Online.

'Dreaming Spires', by Flickr User JJBullock - Copyright JJ Bullock 2010
‘Dreaming Spires’, by Flickr User JJBullock – Copyright JJ Bullock 2010

Scenario Planning Blog at BMJ Medical Humanities

Mechanical Dolphin

“Though it’s just a trick of the calendar, as the new year begins our thoughts inevitably turn to the future. Yet we cannot gather data from events that haven’t happened yet, and forecasts drawing on precedent can flounder when situations are unstable.”

For the BMJ Medical Humanities blog, I cover a few scenario planning basics as we make our way into 2024.

Jay Huang from Pleasanton, USA – Low Fog Sunrise @Golden Gate Bridge, CC BY 2.0.

Useful perturbance: 2024 from the corner of your eye

Mechanical Dolphin

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) has just released its Preventive Priorities Survey 2024, a useful document which “evaluates ongoing and potential conflicts based on their likelihood of occurring in the coming year and their impact on U.S. interests”.

Launched in 2008 during the post-9/11 era of the “global war on terror”, the survey polls foreign policy experts to rate a set of contingencies proposed by the CFR, based on a call for suggestions on social media.

Reading the report is a useful way of “standing on the shoulders of foreign policy giants”, but also a reminder that, by looking only where the giants turn their heads, we may end up sharing their blindspots.

Rioters at the side of the U.S. Capitol, by Flickr user Bill Bryan – CC BY-2.0 DEED

As the economist Frank Knight argued, probabilistic forecasting depends on making analogies to past events: we calculate risk in a given situation by modelling that situation based on past experience. However, Peter Scoblic reminds us, analogy may be an unreliable guide in the messy worlds of business and geopolitics – especially because comparing current situations to past ones can trigger biases which will then be hard to shift.

Why is this a problem?

Read more →

“How I use the dream”: 5 reflections on strategy + reperception

Mechanical Dolphin

What do I do? I help people think through big decisions, individually or collectively, when situations are uncertain.

It’s strategy, not therapy, but there’s kinship between the two.

Learning about “what goes on within and between us”, the psychology of individuals and groups, nourishes the work – and you can find that nourishment in unexpected places.

Sometimes it’s pretty conventional: a journal article, a course at the Tavistock, formal professional gatherings such as a group relations conference.

Sometimes learning seems to find its way to you: a challenging event in your personal life yields a nugget of wisdom, a conversation with a musician provides an unexpected metaphor, or maybe you get an unexpectedly helpful book recommendation from a chatty shop assistant. (That’s how I first encountered the work of Irvin Yalom).

Sometimes you can learn a lot just from getting stuck in a transit strike.

Dreaming by Jozef Israëls

As Ellen Ramvi puts it, “learning is getting involved in what one doesn’t know” — and there’s plenty of ways to get there.

Read more →

UNESCO Ideas LAB: Staying with the trouble

Mechanical Dolphin

Over at the UNESCO Ideas LAB blog, I have a piece with colleagues Niamh Ní Bhroin and Steffen Krüger, drawing on our recent article for Prospects about scenario planning and the future of education.

Title card from the Oslo “Schools and/or screens” scenario set

Read “Staying with the trouble: Scenarios and the future of education” here.

Who must we become to think the unthinkable?

Mechanical Dolphin

Sometimes, there’s a thought out there, but we’re not yet the person who is able to think it.

Something comes to us as a glimmer or a hunch, an inkling, a vague intuition that we may or may not choose to pursue – or be capable of currently pursuing.

Let’s call such thoughts “unthunk”: it’s a satisfying sound.

Read more →

Blink and You’ll Miss It: Surveillance, Society, Foresight, AI

Mechanical Dolphin

“How can we use events which haven’t happened yet to help us understand surveillance and society?”

Over at the blog Blink on Medium, I have a short piece with colleagues Carissa Véliz, Malka Older, and Annina Lux, reflecting on how to think critically about automation and surveillance in a season “swarming with futures”.

The IMAJINE scenarios

The post ties in to our recent article for Surveillance & Society, “The Art of Strategic Conversation: Surveillance, AI, and the IMAJINE Scenarios“.

UNESCO Prospects Journal: Scenarios and the future of education

Mechanical Dolphin

The question for teachers, learners, and the various organizations and communities in which they participate becomes “How will we adapt, evolve, and thrive even if uncertainties play out in ways for which we had not initially prepared?”

In the UNESCO International Bureau of Education’s journal Prospects, the University of Oslo’s Steffen Krüger, the University of Agder’s Niamh Ní Bhroin, and I discuss the “Schools and/or screens” scenario project for the digitalisation of education in Norway.

UNESCO Headquarters sign. (C) Matt Finch, 2023

We show how challenging issues raised in the context of distant imagined futures proved to be immediately pertinent in the developing Covid-19 pandemic, and, as a wide range of actors explore the possibility of a new social contract for education, we reflect on how future scenarios can provide fresh perspectives on issues that are difficult or even impossible to resolve within current frames of reference, including questions of equity and justice that may be construed differently in times to come.

Read “Unlearning, relearning, staying with the trouble: Scenarios and the future of education” at Prospects online.

ISF Threat Horizon Podcast: Exploring Cybersecurity Scenarios

Mechanical Dolphin

On the latest episode of the Information Security Form (ISF) podcast, I speak with ISF’s Max Brook and Mark Ward about using scenarios to help security practitioners see beyond present problems: exploring uncertainty, attending to blind spots, and strategizing more effectively under conditions of uncertainty.

Threat Horizon: Exploring the futures

“An app is not going to solve our democracy; it’s something we have to solve ourselves.”

Mechanical Dolphin

In the new issue of the journal Surveillance & Society, Oxford’s Carissa Véliz, sci-fi writer and aid worker Malka Older, and Capgemini Invent’s Annina Lux join me to talk about how future scenarios can inform discussion, debate, and decision-making about the relationship between artificial intelligence and surveillance.

Read “The Art of Strategic Conversation: Surveillance, AI, and the IMAJINE Scenarios” here.