Venturing into the field
We were sat in a team meeting the other day and suddenly realised that between us, over the coming months we’ll be venturing to a whole range of different places in Europe. These trips are part of different system change projects we’re all working on at that the moment — from exploring where the School of System Change goes next, running sessions that feed into the Civil Society Futures Inquiry or part of the pan-European Citizens Lab network i’ve been involved with recently.
But they’re also an opportunity meet people pioneering and designing approaches to changing systems, exploring and understanding what is going on in different local contexts, plus making connections between the different contours of activity happening in these different places. This is also all part of our ongoing explorations about what the The Next Wave is, exploring the (possible) paradigm shift that is emerging in people’s mindsets, behaviours, and societal structures. The things that might have the potential to address the complex challenges of our time.
Some of the questions we’ll be taking to these different sessions and trips are:
- What are we seeing as the edge / radical practise?
- What new models and ways of organising are emerging?
- How are people living / embodying the Next Wave?
- What does this mean for society and how we might support each other in creating systems change?
If you have a story or perhaps a perspective to share — or you will be in any of these places and fancy a chat, here’s where we’re going to be:
In May we’ll be in Rome (developing up CitizensLab prototypes) and Berlin (part of Impact Hub’s Unlikely Allies event). During June we’ll be running a sessions as part of the Unusual Suspects Festival and a session in Nottingham (for Civil Society Futures), plus we’re hosting a ‘Change Exchange’ — so if you are doing System Change work this is the one for you. In July we’ll be running a masterclass at Ouishare Festival in Paris and will be in the Leeuwarden in the Netherlands (for CitizensLab again).
We’ve also been have exploratory chats about the Future of Capitalism, starting by just meeting in our local pub as a group from Forum for the Future, but we are looking for places and ways to extend this conversation further too.
We’ll be sharing our insights and field notes from these different trips, events and conversations so we’ll keep you posted on some of the conversations and insights we pick up along the way.
We want to spend some time in the autumn making sense of some of what we’ve seen and heard. We are also planning a 3 day retreat to explore these questions in more detail and take the time for understand what The Next Wave means for us all as individuals. If you’d love to be part of this — get in touch: l.armstrong@forumforthefuture.org
