A Newsletter for Creatives Seeking Emergent and Regenerative Future Foresight by Geraldine Wharry​

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Thought this week

Today's Futuring dispatch 🚀

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• Grabbing the future by the 🎱
• Regenerative Futures Architect 🗺️
• Rewilding Futures resources + replay + invitation
• The Thought Leadership Nexus: Becoming a Decoder in Action

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My mission is to hopefully provide some insights and as always, I'd love to hear from you. Let's get started!

Grabbing the future by the 🎱

1 min read

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What's in a job title?

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I’ve had a few job titles in 25 years. I'm sure many of you have experienced this. Fashion designer. Design director. Trend forecaster. Fashion Futurist. I’ve been called a Futurologist too. Add to this Strategist, Educator, Speaker, Advisor, Writer, Speculative Designer

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The consensus was always: stick to titles that are easy to understand, for a niche that is already 'niche niche'.

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But 2024 marked a personal turning point where I went full throttle, in the full slow. 100% commitment.

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I took a quiet sabbatical from what I felt was creating a lot of static in my mind and soul. I have been yearning to recalibrate but always too busy and overcommitted. This meant protecting my energy and mental space, in a world overwhelmed with commentary and rules of the game that have come to feel counterintuitive to my process. I parked socials (not quite fully but almost), stopped reading a gazillion newsletters and articles, and prioritised more intimate communications, collaborations and relationships.

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In hindsight, this journey started a few years ago with slow fashion forecasting and the inspiring forecasters in the Trend Atelier who were embedding this in their work and lives.

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One of the things that has recently emerged from this period of reflection is that my 'title', a form of signalling to the world, isn't a fit anymore and, in fact, perhaps never was.

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At first, I felt self-conscious. My knee-jerk reaction was: ‘Who do you think you are to create your own title?!’. But I was reminded of Veronica Fossa, an inspiring Trend Atelier community member who created her title and fascinating job: Gathering Designer.

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Then I realised something that doesn't quite make sense in my mind:

We’re always saying the jobs of the future are nothing close to what we can imagine. And I see the truth in this. But these jobs, can’t we claim them now?

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So here's to grabbing the future by the 🎱 and a job for a future I can’t wait for any longer.

Regenerative Futures Architect 🗺️

1 min read

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I ran my new title by a few people including Alice Wilby who is a Sustainable Fashion Tutor at UAL, the Co-Founder at Fashion Act Now and a consultant. She said it gave her goosebumps so I took this as a good sign. Prior to that Joanne Jorgensen, a Design and Innovation leader, as well as a fantastic coach and human, encouraged me to own this and share it with the world ... ASAP.

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My fears and self-consciousness somehow turned into positive energy. I announced my Regenerative Futures Architect role and title last week whilst presenting Rewilding Futures, at the Venice Sustainable Fashion Forum hosted by The European House Ambrosetti.

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It made an impression, more than I could have imagined, so much so that Jalaj Hora named himself Regenerative Futures Engineer the next day at the Forum. You can watch his talk here.

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The need to reframe our titles and jobs is in the air. Paul Foulkes Arellano just released a LinkedIn poll worth checking out. 'The jobs we have today will not exist in 2040'. He asks 'What will you retrain as?'.

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My role as a Regenerative Futures Architect reflects the following tapestry of evolving work helping author futures for the greater good of the people and planet:

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Rewilding Futures

The speaking track 'Rewilding Futures' emphasizes the importance of integrative ecological thinking and radical imagination in foresight, design, innovation, and business, whilst proposing emergent foresight models.

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It comes at a time when the creative industries, especially fashion, media and marketing, are having a reckoning with the fact we've built a culture of information and physical consumption completely incompatible, not only with our planet's operating system but with our creativity operating system as well.

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The ideas shared at the Venice Sustainable Fashion Forum could have been received as too niche, but following my presentation on 'Rewilding Futures' and its implications, I received an overwhelmingly positive response from a diverse audience that included policymakers, financiers, designers, and various stakeholders across the supply chain. There is incredible openness to systems change in the fashion industry, even as sustainability commitments are being rolled back across industries. Make no mistake. Change is happening.

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To bring some further context, the Italian Fashion and Luxury industry generates 100 billion euros in turnover, providing employment for over 500,000 individuals across 60,000 companies. The Venice Sustainable Fashion Forum is dedicated to the sustainable transition of the fashion supply chain, bringing together the companies all along the supply chains from materials to brands, to identify the priority challenges, and indicate an agreed roadmap of change.

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The assessment at the forum:

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🔴 The fashion industry is in crisis, the problems are systemic.
🌻 The priority is Re-generation, the roadmaps and innovations were at the centre of every event.
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Here is the replay of Rewilding Futures (20 minutes).

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I unpacked what Rewilding Futures means in 5 steps.

My time speaking at the Forum was limited to 15 minutes, so I created a bonus one-minute intro video for you, explaining these steps. I will go into more detail for #1 and #4 further below.

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Regenerative futures Architect

#1 on the list explains the 3 core pillars of being a Regenerative Futures Architect. Here is a 6-minute video tutorial, not shown at the forum, explaining the diagram that introduces the key focus to becoming a Regenerative Futures Architect.

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Rethink the metrics of trends with a new Trend Taxonomy

#2 introduces The Regenerative Futures Wheel, a new type of Trend Taxonomy that could help us validate trends from the principles of biological strategies and biomimicry.

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I have been mulling over this type of model for quite some time now and started experimenting with it in 2022 with the World Building Framework. Since then I have evolved the models, inspired by the Planetary Boundaries framework. This is part of what I am teaching in my Rewilding Futures workshop.

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Here is the 5-minute video introduction to the Regenerative Futures Wheel, and the thinking behind it.

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Rewilding Futures: Workshop waitlist now open

Only a few spots are available for my online workshop in 2025, gathering the insights, research and feedback from almost 3 years of researching, teaching and touring Rewilding Futures.

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Join the waitlist today to receive the details. I'll be sending these in the last week of November.

The Thought Leadership Nexus: Becoming a Decoder in Action

‘Trends are dead …. vibes are dead', 'trends kill originality!' 'Trends feed overconsumption'. These are all valid commentaries. But the language indicates this happened TO us. Trends become a nebulous magnetic field from beyond. The problem lies in the fact that if we continue to fixate on these semantics, they become a smoke screen, ultimately hindering our ability to acknowledge our responsibility as forecasters and strategists in the current mess.

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We should aim to actively change the philosophical and creative principles, methods, tools and metrics with which WE approach trends and their success.

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Fashion is serious business. As an industry, some figures estimate it is equal to the 7th largest GDP economy in the world. Let's get serious with fashion trends and our trending comments on trend forecasting. Foresight is serious business and a key skill as outlined by the UN’s quintet of change 2.0.

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This means taking action towards change. While the stage of questioning trends has been necessary, if it lingers much longer without action, then the whole thing becomes an act of micro-scamming ourselves out of our credibility.

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I’d like to add to that: Commentary is waste without action. Let's not comment on the death of trends, and then persist in releasing seasonal and micro-fashion trend reports, thus fully participating in the madness and incoherence that has broken the fashion system in the first place. The whole thing lands nothing short of double standards.

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To help partners own their power of influence and visualise it, I developed a simple tool called The Thought Leadership NexusI I share with clients and showed at the Venice Sustainable Fashion forum. In the model below, you can see I highlighted the role of The Decoder, crucial in society and innovation.

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The Decoder guides us through the noise and helps us feel safe enough to adopt new codes. The Berkana Institute describes a similar role as the 'Illuminators' in their Two Loops model.

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It's key to note that as humans, brands, and institutions have turned into content and platforms, The Decoder role has become a coveted spot. It's also a natural inclination because the global human project is navigating change.

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But here is the clencher: The Decoder falls flat on its face if it does not back up its insights with action towards retiring old systems.

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Rachel Arthur, one of Hypercycle's contributors, (you can read her great Substack Owning it here) brought up in the report I authored in collaboration with Gung Ho the idea of Trend Emissions, inspired by the work around Advertised Emissions and Marketing's Brainprint. This made me wonder, could we create a collective and measurable sense of commitment in our niche industry of Fashion Foresight? The Sustainable Development Goals for Foresight. This may seem a bit farfetched.

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But I think we are building a new world of future foresight, even if it's meeting resistance in industry, advertising, culture and commerce.

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For shedding and rebuilding, we need new roles, tangible strategies and tools, possibly more than insights at this stage. There are great places and communities to reimagine our roles in foresight and our power, such as RADAR and the RSA 's Circle to the IFTF's Urgent Optimists to the independent and diverse voices out there. As part of my ongoing training, I’ve opted to become a Biomimicry practitioner next year.

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To conclude, Rewilding is not a romantic idea. It plays a strategic rebalancing role. In certain parts of the world, rewilding as a conservation method has meant difficult periods of culling, as nature took back control and sought to restore its ecosystem and biodiversity. You can read more about this in Rewilding by Cain Blythe, and Paul Jepson.

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What does Rewilding mean applied to foresight? The Rewilding Futures journey by definition cannot be tamed. But the goal is fixed (for now):

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To action a new era for the practice of future foresight.

All in service

of the greater good

of the people and planet,

within a living systems perspective.

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We all aim to support thriving culture, innovation, businesses and communities. Underpinning this, who do we work for, first and foremost?
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A big thank you for reading! Say hello and please share with anyone who may find this inspiring!

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