How is the nature of soft power changing?
What part are critical and emerging technologies playing in these changes?
What is the role of soft power in 21st century geopolitical dynamics?
What threats and opportunities might be emerging?
Do we see ways in which changes in the soft power environment affect the changing character of armed conflict?
Tag: strategy
ISF Podcast: Threat Horizon and the auDA scenarios
I recently joined the Information Security Forum’s Mark Ward and auDA’s Sophie Mitchell for a short podcast discussion exploring foresight, uncertainty, cybersecurity, and Internet governance.
We looked at these issues through the prism of auDA’s recent scenarios for the future of the Internet and ISF’s own Threat Horizon foresight product.
Oxford Scenarios Programme 2024
In an uncertain world, scenario planning equips you with skills and tools to deal effectively with potential opportunities, threats and challenges.
This new video from the team at Oxford’s Saïd Business School showcases the latest cohort from the award-winning Oxford Scenarios Programme, which helps participants learn how to develop robust strategies in the face of numerous plausible futures.
As one graduate of the programme puts it, “I always come to Oxford expecting to have my mind really stretched…the thing that surprised me most this time was that I’ve come away with a feeling of confidence that I can take what I’ve learned and really apply it in my day job.”
(It’s also a tremendous amount of fun).
Enrolment is now open for April and October 2024. Find out more here: https://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/programmes/executive-education/person-programmes/oxford-scenarios-programme
“The True Source of Hope Is That We Never Know”: Scripturient x Design by Fire, with Brett Milligan
The latest edition of Scripturient, my quarterly column for Information Professional magazine, is out now and can be downloaded here.
In it, I interview UC Davis’s Brett Milligan, who together with Emily Schlickman is the author of Design by Fire, a new book exploring our relationship to wildfires.
A transcript from the interview underpinning my column can be read below.
Matt: What was your first ever encounter with fire in nature?
Brett: It would have been the hearth at home, or campfires; my dad took me, sometimes the whole family, camping a lot as a kid and would be very clear about taking care to extinguish it properly. I wasn’t exposed to wildfires until my time in California, decades later, and my first close-up experience with a large wildfire, the smoke, the immediacy of it, came with the LNU (Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit) complex fires a few years back.
Climate action and the vantage point of imagined futures: a scenario-based conversation
npj Climate Action has today published a new article, “Climate action and the vantage point of imagined futures: a scenario-based conversation“, co-written by Marie Mahon, Malka Older, David Robertson, and myself.
Drawing on the example of the IMAJINE project, the peer-reviewed piece explores how scenarios can provide the basis for discussion across disciplines and offer fresh ways to nourish our thinking about climate action.
It covers topics including: the nature of climate change and our understanding of it in different scenarios; questions of risk and responsibility now and in times to come; the use of scenarios to identify current blind spots and stimulate creative thinking; and the possibility that scenarios might offer fresh perspectives which allow us to reevaluate our notions of the sustainable “good life” and identify vulnerabilities which are overlooked in the present day.
Peat Hub Ireland: 2050 Scenarios
I’m just back from collaborating with the Peat Hub Ireland team on a scenarios workshop which invited participants from across the communities and institutions involved in Irish peatlands management to explore three visions of the world in 2050.
Historians, scientists, community members, officials, archaeologists, educators, researchers, activists, and businesspeople all gathered to find new ways to think about sustainability and custodianship, suitable for times of turbulence and unpredictability.
It was quite unique to run a scenarios day incorporating a two-hour break for a lunchtime country walk – but being out on the bog gave us a shared experience of the landscape whose future we were exploring, and some useful metaphors for dealing with conditions of uncertainty.
Our work built on the scenario elements of the Horizon Europe-funded IMAJINE project, which were led by the University of Galway’s Marie Mahon and myself. Peat Hub Ireland’s Florence Renou-Wilson, David Wilson, and Kate Flood worked with me to develop IMAJINE materials into a fresh set of scenarios for the world of peatlands management in 2050. We were supported in delivering the workshop by colleagues including Elena Aitova and Liz Bruton.
You can find out more about Peat Hub Ireland at their website – and there’s an account of the day from the Department of the Environment, Climate, and Communications’ Dave Dodd here. Stay tuned for more about the scenarios, too.
Emerging Threats x auDA: Mapping the Future of Internet Governance and Security
A group from the University of Oxford’s Emerging Threats group have written a response to the auDA future-of-the-Internet scenarios, exploring them from an emerging threats and geopolitical security perspective.
You can read “Mapping the Future of Internet Governance and Security” here.
Futures of the networked world – auDA Internet governance scenarios
Australia’s Internet domain name self-regulatory body, the .au Domain Administration (auDA), has released a public version of its scenarios exploring the future of Internet governance. I’m pleased to have supported auDA in this process, and you can find the full scenario set here.
auDA is endorsed by the Australian government to administer the .au domain, with a mission to ensure it is a secure, accessible, and trusted asset for Internet users. In addition to its domestic duties, auDA also advocates for the .au domain and participates in global Internet governance processes. The organisation’s Future Scenarios Project provides a basis for wider strategic and policy conversation about our networked world and its governance, and how they might evolve in times to come.
You can read auDA’s own blog introducing the scenarios here – and there’ll be more to come, from auDA and myself, in due course.
Scenarios, cinema, and the horizon of dreams
“…of all forms of art, only film could show the remote horizon of dreams as a habitable country and, at the same time, could turn familiar landscapes into a vague scenery fit only for dreams.”
Gerald Murnane, The Plains
The word scenario came into strategy thanks to Leo Rosten, the humourist and screenwriter who also did work for the RAND Corporation during the mid-20th century. Rosten took a term, already slightly outdated in Hollywood, which meant “an outline for a proposed film”, and applied it to RAND colleagues’ future projections which invited Cold War policymakers to “think the unthinkable”. (If we go a little further, the word’s etymology takes us back to an Italian theatrical term meaning a stage set, scenery, or backdrop).
Even in the age of TikTok and bite-sized streaming video, the cinematic metaphor still has power. As Gerald Murnane’s words suggest, plausible yet challenging visions of the future context can enable us to imagine what it would mean to dwell in a place that once seemed to linger on the far horizon. In turn, that experience allows us to recognise that everything we take for granted in the here-and-now is in fact as malleable and overdetermined as the stuff of a dream.
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matt finch / mechanical dolphin 