“Futures Change” Workshop: Fusing Futures and Complexity
What is true about money today? How much time & energy would be required for it to no longer be true?
Last week Belgian futurist Maya Van Leemput and myself led a 90 min workshop at the Re:Publica festival in Berlin titled “Futures Change”. Following the theme of the festival, “Cash”, the 25 workshop participants examined possible futures for the economic system. Maya and I used this opportunity to experiment and remix different methodologies and merge ideas from futures and complexity theory.
100 things that are true about money
We started by asking the group to come up with 100 statements that are true about money today (inspired by Jane McGonigal’s 100 Ways game). We encouraged each to think of at least 5 different statements and to diversify their thinking by considering the 5 STEEP domains (Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political). Each participant choose up to 4 post-its and place them on a board. Pretty soon we had a nice 10x10 grid with post its in 5 different colors, representing the STEEP distribution.
Time vs. Energy for Change
We then asked each participant to choose one post it (not necessarily her own) and imagine what would it take for it to change? How much time and how much energy (resources, physical power, talent, money…) would it require for this truth to no longer be true. Each participant chose a post it, read it out loud and placed it on a large graph where the X-axis marked time and the Y-axis marked energy (inspired by Dave Snowden / Cynefin Co’s Estuarine Framework). We didn’t allow others to interfere with their choice of placement on the graph, yet the mumbling of why there and not elsewhere kept everyone in the room engaged.
When the post-its were positioned on the graph we discussed the more rigid region at the top right, where we expect things to stay quite stable, as it would take a long time and energy to change them. And the volatile region at the bottom left, where things may change fast, whether we like it or not. It was also interesting to see that one post it was placed lower than the X-axis as the participant claimed that changing it would actually give energy back rather than require it to be invested. This confirmed a similar case that Dave Snowden reported about in one of the early Estuarine Mapping workshops.
Flipping Thick Presents
We then discussed the present, what futures studies often talk about as the “long now”. We specifically introduced futurist Roberto Poli’s framing of Thick Presents — that seeks to expand the framing of the present as thicker than a durationless interface between past and future. Everything that exists, everything we know and everything that really matters is in the present, and therefore our experience of the present is thick and multilayered. The present period of me writing this post may be short, but it is not durationless. It has some thickness to it, since it has a past, and until I finish writing it, it will also have a future. Different thick presents take place in simultaneity, from a thin fleeting moments to very thick presents like the information-age, or the Anthroposcene, that are harder to pin-point with an exact starting date, let alone, an end date.
We broke the group to trios and ask each 3 to choose one post it from the graph and reflect on its thick present. We then asked them to think what would it take for this thick present to become a past — to no longer be true. Each group suggested a few scenarios that could possibly bring an end to that thick present and were again encouraged to consider whether the change would originate in the same STEEP domain as the thick present or might it be initiated by drivers of change originating in other domains (STEEP domains are not mutually exclusive, we did not use them for categorization, but instead to inspire diverse thinking).
Finally each group reported back briefly with an emphasis on the question, whether their deeper reflections drove them to reassess the positioning of the post-it on the chart and do they now believe there’s room to reposition it and why.
Reflections and Further Development
This was a quick experiment and unlike most other workshop was focused more on the creative exchange in the process rather than a productive output in the form of strategic action (like in policy or activism oriented workshops) or artistic intervention (like in speculative design and fiction workshops). Additionally, this workshop deliberately cherry-picked methodologies from quite a few very different fields and thinkers.
In later opportunities, possibly with more time on our hands, it would be interesting to further develop the flipping process by engaging a more thorough Friction (/Estuarine) Mapping process in each of the trios working on mapping friction (constraints and constructors) within their more narrow field of inquiry. Such a process could allow even further deepening and expanding of the complex landscape that produced each of these thick presents. Through this mapping we may expose affordances for possible actions to modulate these friction points and shape the flow.
The Futures Change workshop was the first part of our Change for the Futures sub-theme at Re:Publica. It was followed by a Futures Exchange panel (available on YouTube) discussion with Orit Halpern, Johannes Kleske and John Sweeny (moderated by Maya and myself) and a less formal Futures Interchange meetup. Later in the afternoon I gave a talk titled Towards Teleportation: Wayfining Maps and Mapfinding Ways where I introduced the latest parts of my research on Friction and Flow: A Design Theory of Change, touching on some of the thinking behind this methodology. The documentation is now also available on Youtube:
Thanks to Maya for the inspiring collaboration and the friendship; to Bram for the documentation and companionship; to Jane, Dave and Roberto for the inspiration; to Alex, Enrique, Sophie and the Re:Publica team for the hosting and trust; and to the many workshop participants including John, Johannes, Julia, Martin, Frida, Rike, Erik, Guy, Zeeshan, Lia and the many others for waking up early full of enthusiasm and hope towards the futures.
