Posts with the tag
“Futures”

New – 2023 events and programme flyer, find out what’s on and what we are doing

2nd January 2023 by Adriana Sahagún Martínez

You can download the flyer below to find out about what we plan to do this year and how you can get involved.

Adriana Sahagún Martínez

Communications Manager

International Civil Society Centre

Adriana is responsible for developing and implementing the Centre’s communication strategy. Prior to joining the Centre, Adriana worked at ShareTheMeal, an initiative of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), where she developed and implemented multiple global marketing campaigns. Before that, she worked for six years in the private sector, where she held various positions in Corporate Social Responsibility and Integrated Marketing Communications.

Whose future is it anyway? Civil society and strategic foresight

12th December 2022 by Ben Holt

This blog is based on a keynote speech delivered at the International Civic Forum 2022 (ICF 2022), the Centre’s annual civic space platform to network, build trust and identify opportunities for collaboration on emerging issues. The ICF 2022 focused on “Anticipating Futures for Civil Society Operating Space”. It kicked off a three-year initiative to strengthen anticipatory capacities and future readiness of civil society professionals working to defend civic and civil society operating space.

Every one of us wants to change the future.

That could mean making a difference to the life of one person, altering the entire course of history through revolution, or stopping the rise of the oceans as our climate crises deepens.

We’re all here because we want to make an impact on complex, messy issues, and that takes time. So, every day we make decisions, we implement plans, we deliver services. We move forward.

Understanding possible futures

All of these actions are intended to influence the future. We’re working to create something new or to prevent something worsening, to change somebody’s life or to remove injustices that affect us all.

But how well do we understand the future? How often do we explore the possibilities? When do we visit plausible future worlds to understand the challenges and the opportunities?

Or is ‘the future’ obscured, a grainy, opaque continuation of today with a bit more technology, a change in government, new fashions and a flying car or two?

Something that happens to us, rather than something we actively shape.

Connecting to the future

Part of everyone already lives in the future; a little corner of your brain and a collection of emptions is always there.

You might never have noticed but they are. Listen to them now.

I want you to put yourself on this grid. Move yourself up or down, depending on whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about the future. Move left or right depending on whether you think you can make a difference or can’t make a difference.

When I do this exercise with humanitarians, activists and civil society organisations, I always see lot of green and blue…

We tend to have a relatively pessimistic – or maybe realistic – view of the future but feel we can make a difference, which can give us hope. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t.

But not everyone feels like that… because people don’t all have equal access to the future.

Entire groups of people are down there in the bottom left; disempowered, scared, angry, ignored and excluded by the system that is shaping the future they will have to live in.

Participants at the International Civic Forum

Participants at the International Civic Forum share their feelings about the future.

Who shapes the future?

So many people are not asked or involved in reimagining the future, even by the people who say they’re here to support them. They are just expected to exist in it once it arrives. They are stripped of power now, and they are denied power over the future.

What can civil society do? We can give people a path to other side of that grid, where they feel they can make a difference, where they have the power to imagine a world that has a place and protection for them. (That means involving people, amplifying their voices, championing their perspectives).

And the institutions we run have to constantly navigate and shape that future. They have to become better at anticipating shocks and considering the implications of emerging trends. It has to be part of our daily operations, the mechanics of how our organisations function.

How do we do that? Thankfully, all humans have an amazing ability to time travel….

Storytelling and strategic foresight

Storytelling is deeply human. It is part of who we are as a species. We tell stories as individuals, as families, as organisations, as sectors and societies.

And that is what gives us this amazing ability to time travel; we can project ourselves into possible futures and tell others about it.

We all do it, all the time. It is how we make plans to meet at the weekend, how we set ourselves goals, how we organise our communities to take on a new challenge, it is how we mobilise people in politics and it’s how we ferment revolutions.

We tell stories about different visions for the future and ask for help to make it happen.

All the people who make real change in the world are futurists, whether they call themselves that or not; they have had the courage to question things and imagine something which is not yet visible.

 

Strategy and possible futures

Organisations already tell stories about the future all the time. We create visions and strategies, growth trends and budget projections.

We tell the story via formal documents and spreadsheets (to make it seem rational and reliable), but it is still a story about how we want the world to be, and how we will work to make it happen. And they are full of assumptions about what the future will be like.

But how many organisations consider what the world might be like when that strategy is supposed to thrive….? How many create different versions? And how many keep an eye on the weak signals and emerging trends that will shape the world tomorrow?

A nice strategy or vision is not enough. Our organisations need to be constantly engaged with possible futures, constantly anticipating risks and moving fast on opportunities, and we need to shift to anticipatory governance models to enable that.

Anticipating the future

This is critical because, left to their own devices, humans are actually not great at anticipating the future.

There are lots of psychological reasons – from optimism bias to data blindness, shifting baseline syndrome to an overreliance on past experience – so we need a more systematic way to explore the future, to add evidence to our imaginations, to create, examine and explore different possibilities.

Strategic foresight is a useful set of ideas, tools and methods that can help with this.

Emerging trends and change

Where do we start?

The world constantly changes. It can seem overwhelming. We are already living in a pretty dysfunctional dystopia. How do you start to make sense of today, let alone things that haven’t even happened yet?

There are some forces which shape human history and society, and always will. So, mapping some of those big drivers of change is a helpful starting point.

For example, politics shapes our lives and the history of our country and communities. It will continue to be a powerful force even as the personalities change, the institutions erode, and new movements emerge.

 

Gathering evidence

Civil society can act as a sensing network to spot things early and understand their impact in different places.

We must gather evidence, add detail, identify emerging trends and layer on different types of information. Add anthropological research and consultation to the mix, asking people about their changing world and hopes or fear for the future.

All of these elements help us to start spotting patterns and see the connections between seemingly random issues – they let us start to make sense of that overwhelming change.

And from this we begin to structure different possible futures and detailed scenarios. These artefacts become really useful tools for discussion; they open space for people to connect, talk and challenge assumptions about the future and imagine different possibilities.

Using strategic foresight

What do we do with it? Strategic foresight can be used in several ways.

We have already mentioned strategic planning: by expanding the range of alternative futures we plan for we are better prepared for the challenges we face.

Foresight also helps us deal with uncertainty and complexity by improving our understanding of emerging risks, issues and their potential implications.

In a sector well known for being risk-averse, this can only be a good thing.

I think that considering the future is a critical element for good innovation. Plausible, powerful scenarios are useful places to innovate in because there are new opportunities and challenges there.

It is also critical to consider the world any innovation will grow into – is your latest product or service ready for the future? Can you build anything into it as it grows which will make it stronger tomorrow?

And it is not all about speculation and innovation. You can use strategic foresight to stress-test decisions that have to be made now.

When you are choosing between option a and option b, you can walk them into the future and see if they will cope with a changing world or if they need to be rethought or refined now.

Critically, strategic foresight allows you to bring people together, to explore and negotiate a better world. It can create a shared vision that generates new energy, enthusiasm and hope.

All of this means we become better at anticipation: “identifying and preparing sooner for new opportunities and challenges that could emerge in the future” (UN) and we can bring people with us to face them, we can redirect finances, and we can mobilise resources.

I look to the future because that’s where I’m going to spend the rest of my life. – George Burns

Anticipation, surprise and action

Why is it important?

Strategic foresight is not about predicting the future. It is about avoiding surprise and shocks, about having more time to respond, and about actively working towards a future we believe to be better than today.

Because if we – as Civil Society organisations – don’t do that, we’re carrying the inequities of the past into the future and accepting that the injustices and inequalities that we’ve inherited from the past will inevitably be part of the future. We can do better than that. We can imagine a more hopeful future, and we have the power to deliver it, or at least fight for it.

Shaping the future

A lot of futures and foresight work is currently carried out by governments, corporations and the military. If they are deciding what humanity’s future should look like, it will reflect the biases and privilege of the people with power in those institutions.

Remember, Civil societies great strength is its reach and its diversity.

As my friend and futurist at the UN Aarathi Krishnan says: “Being more anticipatory necessitates being more participatory”.

We can surface new information and new stories. We can challenge the fact that not everyone gets an equal say in the future.

Done well, futures and foresight work can bring very diverse groups together and open up new options for action.

It can be a radical approach as it challenges short-term interests and hierarchy. It can create a new space for debate and a new horizon – beyond the election cycle or the next shareholders meeting.

Start by changing today

Good futures should challenge the world to consider different perspectives, different impacts, different needs and hopes so we can create new futures with new power structures, new representation and inclusion, and new ways to deliver powerful change.

We can imagine and champion these different futures.

It will take time to make them real. And that is why we need to start today.

Ben Holt

Global Lead for Strategic Foresight

International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC)

He works for the IFRC’s Solferino Academy, helping the Red Cross Red Crescent network to explore possible futures and learn the skills needed to make them useful to decision-making and delivery. He regularly collaborates with the Cambridge University Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER).

Discover the ‘Anticipating Futures for Civil Society Operating Space’ report 

10th November 2022 by Eva Gondor

This report contributes to the Centre’s multi-year initiative Anticipating Futures for Civil Society Operating Space to strengthen the anticipatory capacities and future readiness of civil society professionals who are working to defend civic and civil society operating space. It is intended to provide a basis for further activities, especially in identifying gaps that require collective sector commitment. 

The report is the outcome of an exercise to map the current landscape: the issues impacting civic space, the strengths and weaknesses of civil society organisations’ (CSOs) responses and their reflections. 

Download Report

Eva Gondor

Senior Project Manager

International Civil Society Centre

Eva leads on the Centre's civic space work - the Solidarity Action Network (SANE) aimed at strengthening resilience of and solidarity among civil society actors, and the International Civic Forum (ICF), our annual civic space platform to network and identify opportunities for collaboration. Prior to joining the Centre she worked at the Robert Bosch Stiftung (Foundation) in Stuttgart where she managed the foundation’s projects focusing on civil society and governance in Turkey, the Western Balkans, and North Africa.

Podcast: Integrating technology into children’s daily lives

11th November 2021 by Adriana Sahagún Martínez

For the Centre’s 2021/22 Report on “Civil Society Innovation and Digital Power Shift’’, we’re speaking with inspirational innovators from civil society organisations (CSOs) around the world to hear the stories of their inclusive innovation approaches to advance people-centred digitalisation, to either address system power imbalances or capitalise on emerging people power and technological capabilities.

In this episode, María Berenguer, co-leader of the Youth&ICT4D department at SOS Children’s Villages International, talks about the organisation’s Digital Village project, which aims to integrate technology into the daily lives of children and families.

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Find out more about the Digital Village project.

Explore the Centre’s ‘Civil Society Innovation and Digital Power Shift’ report. 

If you are interested in joining this exciting project, please fill in the form.

Communications Manager

International Civil Society Centre

Tools for inclusive futures: Futures Frequency: A workshop method for building alternative futures

29th September 2021 by Vicky Tongue and Lena Tünkers

Members of the Scanning the Horizon community recently met online to continue our exploration of ‘tools for inclusive futures’, engaging methods to democratise futures conversations in organisations, using digital tools which do not require previous experience from either facilitators or participants. These tools have been highlighted in our recent Sector Guide on Strategic Decision-Making in a Whirly World.

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Futures Frequency

This time, we wanted to find out more about Futures Frequency, from the Finnish innovation and futures fund Sitra. The idea behind Futures Frequency is that it inspires thinking and action towards positive, preferred futures and can be ‘used and applied by anyone’. You can check out an intro video here.

We decided to use it to explore futures of human diversity, and felt that a group of 9-12 is a good size to allow the discussion parts to take place in threes. No advance preparation was requested from participants, just encouragement to join with an open mind, and be ready to ‘enjoy the ride’, go with the process and put their heads in a different, more creative and playful space.

Setting the stage

We started with some relaxed individual reflection about the big ‘what if’ question – in relation to futures of human diversity in 2050 – which occurred to us. Then we introduced ourselves and our big question in plenary and it was already really interesting to see the different angles which people had already come up with – from gender fluidity, to intergenerational working with people living longer, to racism being history, to humans being seen as just another part of nature. Just this initial sharing already encourages you to open up and expand your own thinking more.

First stage, challenge your assumptions about the future

Then we had to activate our imagination muscles more by moving into the first main stage of the Futures Frequency method, challenging assumptions. We were given an audio drama snippet to listen to individually and then as a small group, we discussed what assumptions we heard in the piece and how it connected to our own assumptions or what felt familiar. This was a really interesting process to go through, surfacing both small assumptions or questions but also bigger ones about when in the future the conversation was set or whether we were just defaulting to assumptions about things in this future were still working in a similar way to the present. From a facilitation angle, you could either use one of the many supporting resources which Sitra provides for this, or you could create your own snippet – audio or written – linked to the theme you’re exploring.

This process does highlight biases you weren’t aware of in your own thinking and how your brain tries to ‘fill in the gaps’ around incomplete information you have on a situation. It also helps you better understand and appreciate how those you are working with are also thinking. This would be particularly important in a very diverse group, or especially if exploring potentially sensitive topics together. This stage increases your awareness of why you think certain things, before you then move onto imagining preferred futures.

Second stage, imagine your preferred futures

In this stage, you again start with individual reflection to imagine what the theme – for us, human diversity – might look like, without boundaries, with new possibilities, and envision a mental snapshot of the future you personally prefer for this, trying to engage different senses to bring this image to life. Then moving into Miro or another digital whiteboarding space, each person in the group writes up their personal vision in one sentence on a post-it and shares it with the others in the group. Then you all work together to combine your (three) different visions into a new statement which integrates the main ‘spirit’ of each. We didn’t really have enough time for this as we were primarily exploring the method – rather than the topic – fully, but in a full session this stage clearly needs a good amount of time to complete. Again, all this has templates from Sitra.

Take action towards your preferred futures

The final stage involves thinking through actions which you can take towards bringing this vision about.  First, we were guided through an individual brainstorm to come with ideas that would lead us to our vision. Time was the creative constrain here. In our small groups we were then tasked with coming up with a news headline from the future which captured what would have happened in the intervening period. We imagined we were living in 2030 and working as reporters for ‘Future News’, sharing our headline and a short explanation of the actions that had taken place and answering any questions from the other groups. And we could add visual images to represent the story as well.

Final reflections on the method

It’s recommended to add further methods to this final phase if you want to build out the process into more of a detailed action planning process. For instance, you could use backcasting or future literacy labs. But from a first experience, it really is a very useful way of getting the participants into a different space to share ideas and inspire others, appreciate the diversity of perspectives in the group and be encouraged to use your imaginations, within a simple but effective framework. It really does feel like a universal method which anyone can just pick up and use!

Vicky Tongue

Vicky Tongue was the Centre’s Head of Futures and Innovation/Scanning the Horizon project manager from 2018-2022, leading the Centre’s futures strategy and collaborative trends scanning community. In this role, Vicky wrote and edited many of the Centre’s Scanning Sector Guides and Civil Society Innovation reports.

Lena Tünkers

Co-Founder and Partner

Zukünftige

Lena Tünkers is an entrepreneur, process designer and facilitator, guided by the purpose of empowering people to cheerfully move towards the future. She has designed and executed a variety of strategy and innovation processes in Denmark, Kenya and Germany and applied the method Futures Literacy and Futures Frequency to the topics of education, collaboration, leadership and culture. From her work with the UN, Spotify, HelloFresh and Hugo Boss, among others, Lena brings experiences in business model design, strategy as well as innovation development. She is a board member of Founders of Tomorrow and hosts the House of Beautiful Business in

Podcast: Strategic Decision-Making in a Whirly World

13th September 2021 by Adriana Sahagún Martínez

Listen to Miriam Niehaus and Vicky Tongue discuss our Scanning the Horizon Sector Guide on ‘Strategic Decision-Making in a Whirly World’, the culmination of our 18-month learning journey on complex and uncertain futures.

The Guide brings together insights from interviews with strategy leads from 14 ICSOs and global movements from this community, and a review of more than 60 management and academic literature resources on leadership, complexity, uncertainty, strategy and systems thinking from the past year.

We would like to thank our two cooperation partners – Direct Impact Group and Ford Foundation – for kindly supporting our Scanning the Horizon work over the past 18 months.

Read and share the Sector Guide: bit.ly/3hZ4ViD
Discover the Scanning the Horizon Community: bit.ly/3vUgI7d
Learn more about intergenerational fairness: bit.ly/2UWTuAD

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Communications Manager

International Civil Society Centre

Podcast: How can social changemakers get better at not just adapting to change, but actively engineering it?

13th August 2021 by Adriana Sahagún Martínez

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Foresight practitioner Krizna Gomez has written JustLabs’ new ‘Guide to Foresight in the Social Change Field’ and is a passionate advocate of why foresight needs to become part of the DNA of the social change field. In this episode, Krizna shared some of her insights from leading futures work with organisations in the social change field around the world, as well as activists and creatives, and why this new guide is needed to ‘demystify’ foresight. Krizna also presented some simple visual outcomes of applying these steps to look at the future of media and information, and the kind of areas of new exploration this can generate for social change organisations and leaders.

Download JustLabs Guide to Foresight in the Social Change Field.

Krizna Gomez works as an independent consultant, using design thinking, foresight, systems thinking and other methods normally not employed in the social change field, to help partners tackle long-standing problems with a fresh perspective, and opening them up through working with experts from other disciplines such as neuroscience, tech, marketing, and design. She is a recipient of the Joseph Jaworski Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Award (Humanitarian Special Award) by the School of International Futures. See Krizna’s full bio here.

Find out about the Centre’s Scanning the Horizon civil society futures community here.

Communications Manager

International Civil Society Centre

ICSOs and intergenerational fairness: Why long term thinking is important and empowering in today’s whirly world

28th July 2021 by Vicky Tongue and Julie Jenson Bennett

The Centre’s new Scanning the Horizon Sector Guide on ‘Strategic Decision-Making in a Whirly World’, explores five main strategic pointers for civil society decision-making and adaptation in complex, uncertain ‘never normal’ futures. To further explore the fifth strategic pointer, ‘Rethink adaptable strategies to embrace emergent change with-in a long-term view’, we recently ran leadership and strategy events with two of our strongly recommended resources, including the School of International Futures (SOIF)’s exciting work on intergenerational fairness.

In this blog, Vicky Tongue, the Centre’s Head of Futures and Innovation, and Julie Jenson Bennett, Practice Lead, Intergenerational Fairness, School of International Futures, reflect on how ICSOs can contribute to and benefit from long-term intergenerational thinking and practice.

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Intergenerational fairness as an important skillset for a whirly world

Embracing the ‘Long Now’ is one strategy to help navigate a ‘whirly’, uncertain world, stretching responsibility over longer timescales – beyond a human lifetime – and giving a bigger picture to short-term turbulence. It helps crisis decision-making to elevate long-term equity and extends ‘legacy’ thinking to help identify what should be kept from the past, what should be unlearned in the present, and what is still needed to avoid future-loading major risks from important decisions made today.

All big current global issues have huge intergenerational fairness and equity dimensions, both between different generations alive today but also not yet born. Intergenerationally fair policies and strategic decisions allow people of all ages to meet their needs, and meet the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. ICSOs have an important role in ensuring that decision-makers take such considerations into account beyond current political cycles. But they also have a responsibility to ensure that their own organisational decisions are also fair for all generations.

The intergenerational fairness topic is particularly fascinating. As an organisation embarking on its strategy, this is particularly relevant in order to ‘disturb/disrupt’ current decision-making, to ensure long-term strategic choices for an alternate future.

Shahin Ashraf, MBE, Head of Global Advocacy, Islamic Relief Worldwide.

Interest in intergenerational fairness as a growing trend

Signals around equity between generations as a growing issue have been getting stronger since the 2008 financial crisis, further amplified by increasing mobilisation on climate change, and with the global pandemic. Younger generations have been getting more active in suing their governments to establish rights and duty of care towards the future. There is increasing interest from citizens, politicians and policy-makers around intergenerational cohesion and solidarity – rather than conflict – and different national ‘next or future generations’ initiatives are emerging. The OECD published a landmark report on intergenerational justice last year challenging the global policy community to be more systematic about this.

But this can come with major challenges which make it hard to accomplish. Future and younger generations have no vote, there isn’t much reliable information available to decision-makers about the long-term impact of most public policies, and the issue can quickly become polarised and make constructive discussions difficult. So how can we move from good intentions to true accountability, and ensure that (in Gaston Berger’s words) we’re looking at the future to disturb the present, and taking informed decisions today to design better, equitable policies and programmes?

A practical, flexible framework for assessing intergenerational fairness

The School of International Futures (SOIF) and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s ‘Framework for Intergenerational Fairness’ is a practical framework which any organisation – without prior futures or foresight experience – can use to assess whether any strategic, policy or investment decision proposed by others, or itself, will be equitable for people living today and tomorrow. This can be a very empowering process to support informed action-oriented conversations with what could otherwise remain an interesting, important but remote and hazy theoretical discussion.

The framework consists of three key, flexible elements:

  • A policy assessment tool to analyse whether decisions on what is fair and unfair for all generations, exposing specific dimensions of unfairness, identifying unintended consequences and making trade-offs more explicit.
  • A participatory national, or community, dialogue to define collective goals of what a fair and desirable future looks like – including conversations with future generations by proxy – for the policy to be assessed against,
  • Institutional ownership to determine how the methodology will be resourced, used and evaluated in government and society, so that it has independence, accountability, political legitimacy and administrative commitment.

Check out this introductory presentation from this year’s Global Foresight Summit for more.

Assessing decisions in as little as two hours

Any strategic, funding or policy decision can be assessed in five ways, to see if it:

  • Disadvantages people at any particular life stage
  • Disadvantages people at any period in time, present or future
  • Increases the chances of inequality being passed on through time
  • Restricts the choices, agency and freedom of people in future
  • Moves society further away from its vision of the future.

 

 

In a couple of hours, you can use the tool to make clear judgements and support risk analysis, contingency planning and policy design. Diagnostic prompts help you scan and assess policy impacts and trade-offs in detail, stress-test the decision against alternative future scenarios, and scrutinise the policy-making process itself for unfairness. You can adapt the lenses and depth and breadth of analysis for different issues and audiences.

Pilots over the last three years have successfully used the tool on a range of live policy issues and with diverse assessor audiences, including citizens. It enables nuanced understanding of the dynamics at play in complex policy areas, and can identify specific cohorts worse off under a policy scenario, and recommendations for additional policy areas and communications toaddress issues and perceptions of unfairness.

How ICSOs can use it and find out more?

There are two main angles for CSOs:

  • Holding governments to account for difficult issues of intergenerational fairness – ICSOs can use this framework in their advocacy work, or with concerned citizens and media actors, to scrutinise the work of governments e.g. during policy design, parliamentary scrutiny, spending reviews.
  • Shining a light internally – Organisations can use these principles to assess any of their own strategic policy or financial decisions – especially around spending and granting – to objectively establish whether they are fair for the long term, or just responding to short-term interests.

Our conversations also identified two exciting potential wider applications:

  • The domains and assessment criteria in the tool can help facilitate conversations ‘by stealth’ about entrenched power interests and inequality structures in the present. This can generate new kinds of conversations outside of traditional framings which come with political/polarised debates, divisions and rhetoric. So it could also be a useful model to support difficult ‘power shift’ conversations in our sector and agree the desirable fair, legacy outcomes we want to collectively achieve.
  • An interesting starting point for global conversations around the post-2030 SDG successor agenda, which runs out soon!

What’s next for the framework and how to stay involved?

SOIF is interested in expanding networks and coalitions to upskill and scale these processes, including ICSOs. They are open to providing support if you are interested in adapting it for your contexts or policy issues.

As a starter, they will be running more webinars from August to introduce new audiences to the framework, and also hands-on participatory sessions to use the policy assessment tool on live issues – in as little as two hours. For updates and opportunities, visit https://soif.org.uk/igf/.

Vicky Tongue

Vicky Tongue was the Centre’s Head of Futures and Innovation/Scanning the Horizon project manager from 2018-2022, leading the Centre’s futures strategy and collaborative trends scanning community. In this role, Vicky wrote and edited many of the Centre’s Scanning Sector Guides and Civil Society Innovation reports.

Julie Jenson Bennett

Practice Lead

School of International Futures

Julie Jenson Bennett leads the Intergenerational Fairness Observatory at the School of International Futures. Her futures practice developed over twenty-five years as a researcher and strategist in technology and product design. Alongside her work at SOIF, Julie co-directs The Generation Poetry Project, exploring new communication systems emerging amongst younger people, and is an Associate Lecturer at Central St. Martin's in the Product, Ceramics and Industrial Design programme.

Tools for inclusive futures: Reflections on ‘Imagining Feminist Futures after COVID-19’

5th March 2021 by Vicky Tongue

In 2021, the Centre’s Scanning the Horizon futures community is working on ‘inclusive and equitable futures’, exploring and sharing models, analysis and collaborative opportunities for more diverse futures conversations and thinking. One key part is sharing practical and accessible tools, particularly open source methods which do not require significant specialist knowledge or skills to implement and, increasingly, virtual delivery options.

We want to explore new opportunities to either use these tools for our own community or group collaborations, or exchange experiences as we use shared techniques with our own audiences. These ‘meet the author’ tools workshops are a new kind of online community offering this year.

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Tools for inclusive futures: Bringing you the best of what is ‘out there’

Common barriers to introducing or strengthening futures thinking in organisations include time-consuming workshops, not being able to bring diverse groups together (especially in-person) or the need for consultants or specialists to lead this work. So in 2021, we want to find the best of what is ‘out there’ to address these challenges, and bring them back into our community to help democratise futures practice beyond a smaller group of organisational strategic thinkers.

So we were very excited to find the new ‘Imagining Feminist Futures after COVID-19’ workshop methodology developed by the Australian CSO International Women’s Development Agency (IWDA) in 2020. This is a 3-hour online methodology which can bring new, diverse audiences together without expert external facilitation. And we partnered with IWDA to deliver a combined familiarisation and training of trainers session on 23-24 February for ten organisations from the Scanning the Horizon community.

A way to bring futures thinking to feminist thinkers, and feminist thinking to futures thinkers

Imagining Feminist Futures After COVID-19 is a project IWDA with support from a steering group of actors across the feminist movement. The project aims to enable feminist organisations and networks to think through the ways in which the COVID-19 crisis is changing the future trajectories – both positive and negative – for feminist social change towards the year 2030.

IWDA commissioned a consortium of feminist futurists, led by Changeist, to design this adaptable workshop methodology based on futures thinking approaches to support diverse feminist activists, organisations and networks to come together virtually (or in person where possible) and apply their own futures thinking and scenario building. For many participants, it may be their first experience of structured futures thinking, and as such, the tools have been designed for use by an audience which is totally new to the concepts.

A core objective of the project is to make the workshop methodology available for anyone to run with their own organisation, network or community. In return, they ask that participants share the findings from these different workshops. IWDA, along with project steering group members, plan to bring their own analysis and visioning to these outcomes and develop a range of creative outputs to add to the rich discussions happening across feminist movements.

IWDA has been holding feminist futures workshops with participants in Australia and across Asia and the Pacific. This workshop with our Scanning the Horizon community was IWDA’s first time with a group of more generalist futures thinkers, rather than strongly feminist-focused organisations and individuals.

The short summaries of (i) principles and frameworks that support and enable a feminist future and (ii) privileging forces/established power structures within society that hinder equal progress towards feminist futures help bring about different and deeper types of conversation. With more generalist audiences, we recommend including these as additional pre-reading, and to increase the amount of time in the agenda allocated to discussing the lens of privileging forces.

And actually, just a great entry point for different and dynamic conversations

Participants felt the workshop methodology can be used both to inform strategic thinking and also as a tool for personal formation and training minds to think in more inclusive and equitable ways about the future. Its full trends list includes STEEP + V – incorporating values into a standard social, technological, economic, environmental and political assessment – which makes this a more holistic and interesting process.

We wanted our particular group to work on a broad range of trends, so included 18 from the full list of 20 (three teams with six trends). For groups with a specific aim or audience, focusing down on a smaller set of more relevant or influential trends may work better for more focused futures conversations.

Interestingly, of the trends provided, our three breakout teams independently decided to focus on: (i) ‘new faces of change’, (ii) ‘refocus on community’ and (iii) ‘sharing and peer economies’. This may reflect interest in exploring some of the new decentralised and power and leadership models which have become more prominent since COVID-19.

You can see the outcomes of our conversations here. They show that the method is great at enabling dynamic and interesting exchanges which can shift thinking and explore new possibilities in the group you’re working with. It also documents a range of insights which can be compared and contrasted with other groups also using the tool.

You don’t need expert knowledge, but you do need well-prepared facilitation

Key factors for facilitation are who you have in the virtual ‘room’ (see below), how you capture different perspectives, and how you support participation and share the findings.

IWDA have really made the toolkit as ready to use as possible, with a clear, well-illustrated facilitation guide and pre-populated Miro board for your use. After our session, nearly all participants felt ready to run a workshop themselves, with proper preparation time. This included participants relatively new to futures thinking, feminist thinking or even both, which reiterates just how accessible it is and does not require significant pre-existing knowledge, experience or expertise.

It does, however, require careful thought on facilitation, and time to ensure in advance that participants have sufficient basic skills and familiarisation with Miro. This may be easier for digital natives and require more preparation time for others (note that participation does not require a paid account. You should offer advance familiarisation sessions to people who have not Miro before, and share a practice ‘play’ board. The workshop board layout is a very intuitive design, with arrows to guide people through the navigation. If you take this time and care, the technology should not be alienating or prevent people from taking part.

And you do need to stress fully with participants how important it is for them to take the time for the pre-reading so that they will get the most out of the group conversations.

You also need to think through how to organise the group documentation of dynamic conversations to fit the time available – as you will feel the pressure to get things down! The beauty of Miro allows everyone to write down and share their ideas individually, in an open way aligned to the aims of the method. But a designated scribe may also be needed to help summarise the collective sense-making conversations for report back in plenary, at the risk of simplifying or even silencing some of other strands, to report back to the others.

Ensuring diversity in the virtual room and breakout teams

When asked who they planned to run the workshop with, there was a real mix of audiences, both internally within our own organisations, externally with partners, networks and stakeholders, and in social circles with family and friends. And also with a range of people – activists and young changemakers, advocates, leadership/management teams, gender team/community of practice – but ideally with a broad mix of perspectives and roles to keep the explorations as diverse and dynamic as possible.

The workshop is designed for 5-20 participants. Breakout groups of around four people feels optimal to both generate ideas and keep documenting of conversations manageable. But ensuring diversity of groups is most critical – experience/knowledge/roles (futures/feminist/other), gender and geographic diversity, and a mix of optimists/pessimists (which could be identified by icebreakers).

Building a base of practice and knowledge

Half the organisations who took part are already planning to run workshops with their networks. The Centre itself will run another session in May at an Americas/Europe/Africa-friendly time for organisations. We want to contribute to a community of worldwide practitioners using this method, and share both content findings and facilitation experiences or tips with IWDA. This blog is our first contribution, so watch this space for more updates from us and the other participants-turned-practitioners, over the coming months!

Let us know if you are interested in joining or running an upcoming workshop on ‘Imagining Feminist Futures after COVID-19’.

Our next community methods/tools workshop will be with ParEvo on 29 April 2021 – see more here.

Vicky Tongue

Vicky Tongue was the Centre’s Head of Futures and Innovation/Scanning the Horizon project manager from 2018-2022, leading the Centre’s futures strategy and collaborative trends scanning community. In this role, Vicky wrote and edited many of the Centre’s Scanning Sector Guides and Civil Society Innovation reports.

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