Tag: scenarios

Cranes in the sky

Mechanical Dolphin

Well, it’s like cranes in the sky
Sometimes I don’t wanna feel those metal clouds

Some time ago, I found myself reflecting on Solange’s song ‘Cranes in the Sky’ at the end of a strategy project. Sometimes the best way into something is at an angle; not through the Excel sheets and the PDFs and the ‘lessons learned’, but through a feeling, a stray thought, an analogy, a song or an image which reminds you somehow of the matter at hand.

In a 2017 interview with her sister Beyoncé, Solange explains where the song came from:

“Cranes in the Sky” is actually a song that I wrote eight years ago. It’s the only song on the album that I wrote independently of the record, and it was a really rough time. I know you remember that time. I was just coming out of my relationship with Julez’s father. We were junior high school sweethearts, and so much of your identity in junior high is built on who you’re with. You see the world through the lens of how you identify and have been identified at that time. So I really had to take a look at myself, outside of being a mother and a wife, and internalize all of these emotions that I had been feeling through that transition. I was working through a lot of challenges at every angle of my life, and a lot of self-doubt, a lot of pity-partying. And I think every woman in her twenties has been there—where it feels like no matter what you are doing to fight through the thing that is holding you back, nothing can fill that void.

I used to write and record a lot in Miami during that time, when there was a real estate boom in America, and developers were developing all of this new property. There was a new condo going up every ten feet. You recorded a lot there as well, and I think we experienced Miami as a place of refuge and peace. We weren’t out there wilin’ out and partying. I remember looking up and seeing all of these cranes in the sky. They were so heavy and such an eyesore, and not what I identified with peace and refuge. I remember thinking of it as an analogy for my transition—this idea of building up, up, up that was going on in our country at the time, all of this excessive building, and not really dealing with what was in front of us. And we all know how that ended. That crashed and burned. It was a catastrophe. And that line came to me because it felt so indicative of what was going on in my life as well. And, eight years later, it’s really interesting that now, here we are again, not seeing what’s happening in our country, not wanting to put into perspective all of these ugly things that are staring us in the face.

Sometimes it’s so hard to face the real issue, what the strategist Richard Rumelt might call the crux or the kernel of a situation. Our anxiety about facing up to the truth causes our attention to slip away from harsh reality; we seek comfort in makework that seems to gird us.

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Romancing the Gothic: Climate, Justice, and the Strategic Sublime

Mechanical Dolphin

I’m very pleased to be joining the Romancing the Gothic lecture series for a session on “Climate, Justice, and the Strategic Sublime: Scenarios as Gothic Genre”.

The lecture, which will take place at 10am BST on Sunday 21st May, with a repeat at 7pm BST the same day, forms part of the “EcoHorror, Nature and the Gothic” lecture season.

Register for the 10am BST session on Eventbrite here.

Register for the 7pm BST session on Eventbrite here.

“Facing The Strategic Sublime” for BSFA Vector

Mechanical Dolphin

“Facing The Strategic Sublime: Scenario Planning as Gothic Narrative”, my piece with Marie Mahon, is in the latest issue of the British Science Fiction Association’s Vector magazine.

You can read the article below as a PDF download, or at the Vector website.

vector-297-strategic-sublime-finch-mahonDownload

ISKO Singapore: Scenarios, Futures, and Knowledge Management

Mechanical Dolphin

On 21st April, I’ll be joining a webinar hosted by the Singapore chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization to discuss scenario planning, strategic foresight, and knowledge management.

Hosted by Patrick Lambe, the session will include panellists Gary Klein of Macrocognition LLC and Susann Roth of the Asian Development Bank as well as myself.

The online event takes place on Friday 21 April 2023, 7.00-8.30pm SGT (7.00am EDT, 12 midday UK, 7.00pm Manila) – find out more and register here.

Energy Consumers Australia: Foresighting Forum Quick Watch

Mechanical Dolphin

The team at Energy Consumers Australia have released a short Q&A video covering aspects of my recent keynote on dealing with uncertainty in sociotechnical systems.

You can find more from the recent Energy Consumers Australia 2023 Foresighting Forum here.

Islands in the Sky: a course on planning for the future at the Open University

Mechanical Dolphin

As part of its OpenLearn free online learning offer, the Open University has released a planning course which incorporates Islands in the Sky, an adaptation of the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach developed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the course notes explain, “Islands in the Sky is a situational awareness and scenario-based strategic planning tool that is especially useful for managing uncertainty. It is designed for structuring conversations about the future business environment to inform decision-making in the present.”

It was a privilege to develop the approach with a team from the Open University and other colleagues, and contribute to the video materials for the course. You can find more about the Open University’s version of Islands in the Sky at their website.

Islands in the Sky image from the Open University course

Strategizing across organizations

Mechanical Dolphin

“Capitalizing on big opportunities and solving systemic problems will require organizations to come together to develop strategies as a group.”

Together with Rafael Ramírez, Trudi Lang, Gail Carson, and Dale Fisher, I have a new piece in MIT Sloan Management Review exploring scenario-based strategy for networks of organizations addressing large-scale challenges, drawing on experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic with the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN).

Tree bridge created from entwined roots – from Wikimedia Commons user Arshiya Urveeja Bose – CC-BY 2.0

You can find “Strategizing across organizations” at the MIT Sloan Management Review website.

You can also find the accepted version of the paper at Oxford University’s online ORA resource.

Space cowboys, Evian bottles, and the Islets of Langerhans: Scenario Planning and the Territorial Body in Time

Mechanical Dolphin

On Saturday 25th February 2023, I’m presenting a paper, “The Ghosts We See From the Mountains: Scenario Planning and the Territorial Body in Time” at the University of Warwick conference “Territorial Bodies: World Culture in Crisis“.

As the conference organisers explain,

The concept of ‘territorial bodies’ takes inspiration from the Latin American feminist transnational concept of ‘body-territory’, which has been used as a ‘strategic’ tool to engender new forms of global solidarity, linking multi-form violence at various scales. More broadly, body-territory becomes a lens through which to critique overlapping forms of violence in an era of socio-ecological crisis. This conference encompasses wide-ranging perspectives on the concept of ‘territorial bodies’, from the extractive plunder and dispossession of land, to the violation of gendered bodies, to the exploitation of racialised bodies and uneven flows of migration. We aim to critically evaluate the interconnections between bodies and territories, using the framework of “territorial bodies” to generate new modes of understanding crisis in neoliberal culture.

My paper, drawing on the example of the IMAJINE project, explores how scenario planning can inform our discussion of the ‘body-territory’.

What do we learn about territorial bodies and their attendant inequalities when we examine them from the perspective of multiple imagined futures?

How does investigating the future of territory itself enrich our understanding of the bodies which inhabit said future, and the power relations in which they are enmeshed? How can that understanding in turn usefully inform action in the present?

And, insofar as scenarios themselves render time in spatial metaphors – with factors, actors, and uncertainties juxtaposed to explore the dynamics of times to come – what do we learn about the body-in-time when we consider it in territorial terms?

You can read the paper as a PDF here, or watch a partial preview on YouTube. Find the full conference programme online here.

Open your eyes: strategy, scenarios, and artificial tears

Mechanical Dolphin

I recently watched Park Chan-wook’s tremendous new film Decision to Leave. Styled “a romantic thriller”, it deals with a detective who falls for a suspect in the murder investigation he is leading.

Hae-Jun, the insomniac detective, investigates the death of a former immigration officer in an apparent mountaineering accident. Suspicion falls on the officer’s Chinese wife, Seo-Rae, whom the cops think isn’t showing enough grief. As Seo-Rae and Hae-Jun become entangled beyond the scope of the investigation, the mystery deepens: who is snaring whom?

A 1960s song which recurs throughout Decision to Leave, “Mist” by Jung Hoon Hee, highlights some of the movie’s themes.

As director Park explains on the MUBI podcast:

The beautiful lyrics just hit my heart straight away, especially the part where it says, “Open your eyes in the mist.”

[…T]hroughout the song, you get this impression that the one that you love is leaving you, and you see them in silhouette, obscured in this deep fog; that’s the dominating image in the song.

And then, towards the end, you hear this lyric: “Open your eyes in the mist.” And that is a command to you, to open your eyes and take a straight look at that person.

So the command is, even though it’s misty, things are ambiguous, you have to make an effort to see clearly. Now, what is this song commanding you to take a look at straightforwardly? I think you can fill in the blank. It could be the person you love, or your own emotions, or just reality in general.

That was really the inspiration [for Decision to Leave]. It conjured the image of a detective, someone who always tries to take a clear look at his situation. And that’s when I decided to put in the scenes where the detective uses artificial tears. He always uses them to kind of clear his eyes, whenever there’s a decisive moment that he really wants to take a straightforward look at.

For so many of us in this era, we too find ourselves peering through the fog and mist of the so-called “TUNA conditions”, characterised by turbulence, unpredictable uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity. No matter how hard we try to resolve these conditions, we cannot be fully sure of what is going on or what will happen next.

When I heard this interview with Park Chan-wook, I was intrigued by the story about the pop song which inspired the movie, but I was also startled by the term “artificial tears”. I’d never heard this phrase used to describe eye drops before. I loved it.

It made me think how, in TUNA times, we can look at the world around us, considering the uncertainties with the power to reshape our immediate environment, and create future scenarios to help us think about how those uncertainties might play out in times to come.

Those future scenarios are designed to challenge our assumptions – not to be dystopian or utopian necessarily, but to go beyond our already-existing expectations, hopes, and fears, so that we see from outside of our old frame of reference and, taking the vantage point of an imagined future, see our own here-and-now more clearly.

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