The concept of practising failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery, and, with Walter Benjamin, to recognise that “empathy with the victor inevitably benefits the rulers.”
– Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
It’s a funny thing, foresight work.
You help people to build pictures of the future context for a given entity or issue — but you’re not saying what you think is going to happen.
We’re not in the prediction business, nor even that of saying what we want the future to be.
Instead, we’re looking at ways in which today’s uncertainties might play out over time, challenging current assumptions and expectations, even current hopes and fears.
The scenarios we create together can offer unique vantage points on the issues of the here-and-now: manufactured hindsight. You know, as a scenario user or learner, that you’ve done a good job if you see something strategically useful which you couldn’t see at the outset of your work.
That sense of going beyond what you could already perceive, or conceive, is sometimes called the “a-ha” moment: a realisation, not always comfortable, that things could be otherwise.
This is why scenarios should be built with people, not for them. Re-perception of our current situation comes as much from the process as the end product; you can’t outsource the thinking that lets you see the world anew.
Still, as my Oxford colleague Gerard Drenth points out, there’s a danger of “So what?”
The work can’t just be interesting, it has to be useful.
Some people think that what’s useful is to “get it right” – to correctly forecast what the future will bring.
But the job is not merely to guess what happens next. Rather, it’s to see what we’re missing in our understanding of what’s already around us, right here and now.
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matt finch / mechanical dolphin 