“Learning that you have been blind is the best thing that could happen to you”
Olafur Eliasson
Revolve Evolve
I started telling my mother 'We need to talk' at 2 years old. It's one of my earliest childhood memories. We were in the bathroom and I was not pleased with something. I wasn't afraid to speak up. Today, I'm channelling that very frank child to exchangewith you about a question that has been central to my work, for a long time:
Why does future foresight fail at creating systems change?
To wrestle and ponder over this question I’ve turned today's dispatch into:
Prompts informed by Biomimicry x Futures Intelligence x Systems innovation as part of Future Wild
A behind-the-scenes look at my own Biomimicry training workbook's raw notes. It’s a work in progress. I share my own answers to the tasks I was given by Learn Biomimicry (1). The team kindly allowed me to share workbook prompts their students use.
A learning journey withthe THINK partof theTHINK / FEEL / DO teaching framework Learn Biomimicry taught me. They're one of the leading Biomimicry schools in the world, and their Biomimicry Confluence summit is coming up by the way. (link in the Cross Pollination segment below). FEEL / DO comes in the next issue.
Teaching is helping people unearth and surface the thinking, understanding and aspirations that are often already there inside of them waiting to jump out. It’s about active listening and asking questions.
Here’s what is on the menu today, and you can dip in and out as you choose:
Why we're starting with the hard stuff
The whole THINK process with Learn Biomimicry's prompts to define the challenge
My Biomimicry training workbook notes
Read your rings: a 20-minute activity offering a Bristlecone pine tree lens on your foresight practice
What is your zone of proximal development?
Plus Trend Atelier news, Cross pollinations and our usual Parting Thought
Fair warning: this is a long one. I’ve compiled it with love and hard work, to reflect my professional, educational and lived experience studying Biomimicry whilst bridging it with the challenges in future foresight work I’ve investigated, experienced, reported on and talked about for years now.
If Future Wild isn't for you but you enjoy the Futuring Dispatch, don't unsubscribe. Just click here so I can make sure to only send the relevant sections going forward.
As always, thank you for being here. I appreciate your time amid the onslaught of newsletters and social posts. I hope what I've crafted for you today creates a positive surplus. I’d love to know what you think of my workbook notes and references, or anything I didn’t mention you’d like to share. I'm on the other side of this email, open to suggestions, feedback and exchange.
For us to architect regenerative futures and systemic change through our future foresight work, we have to understand history, dynamics and root causes of why future foresight - in the hard to define creative industries (2) - fails at creating positive systemic change. As a field and a community of practitioners and ‘users’, why do we get stuck in surface-level change? We have to diagnose the 'What is' and assess what's broken in our current foresight model, so that we can more mindfully dive into the ‘What could be’. These aren't failures of intelligence or creativity, they are failures of implementation.
This is the reality check. It can be confronting, even outright depressing. But it's not doom and gloom. I think it helps to reconnect with that inner, very frank and bold child inside us all. As children we learn through constant exploration and assessment, and in doing so we sometimes experience discomfort, even pain. But it's how we orient ourselves and learn to get better at things. Different but related, I see how my son hates having his nails cut and cries like the world is ending. It's a necessary evil, it doesn't feel nice but it stops him from scratching his face off, Wolverine style.
At the time of developing Future Wild I felt inspired by the Systemic Design Framework by the Design Council (3). I also wanted to create a learning journey and seed for a community of practice, for boots on the ground challenges experienced by many professionals and humans who want their work, their teams, their impact to fuel the paradigm shift we need for the greater good of the people and planet.
In the Regenerative Futures Ikigai, the Explore & Assess phase comes after Orientation & Vision, then we internalise Leadership & Interdependence. At the time of creating it, I didn’t want to start the learning journey with the harder conversation.
But the Ikigai is modular (a big principle in Biomimicry), and my hunch is telling me to start today with the darker stuff (as a true Scorpio). Healing our futures starts here, so we can rebuild our Why.
Healing is love found in dark corners.
Love is holding each other through the hard stuff.
Explore & Assess is the first step towards rebuilding future foresight so that it's regenerative and functions in harmony with our mother nature, not just in service of markets and/ or nice, attractive ideas that gather dust or are just outright performative. This phase is also the bridge to learning to forecast as Regenerative Futures Architects.
About THINK / FEEL / DO before we get started
Something that was an unlock and helped me learn in a way that felt more organic was the THINK / FEEL / DO teaching framework. I loved this part of my Learn Biomimicry training and hope you will too. It helps internalise what we study, unpacking gradually with our minds, souls and bodies. You’ll see it pop up in the future as we continue our foray into Future Wild and the Regenerative Futures Ikigai together.
This is also very useful for foresight practitioners whether we're writing or presenting, leading workshops, or working within teams. Because deep down what our work boils down to with our forecasts is a form of teaching, whether with our clients or our audiences.
THINK: Defining ourchallenge
In my Biomimicry training, we started the 6-month program with defining our challenge because Biomimicry is about creating real-life solutions inspired by nature's genius, and to quote my training workbook prompts "an effective solution emerges from a deep understanding of your challenge."
“The first step of your Biomimicry Educator journey is to understand what the underlying challenge actually is, and to gain a deeper, more meaningful insight through uncovering and debunking assumptions along the way!”
Learn Biomimicry
I am going to take you through what I wrestled with in the first part of my training and my raw workbook notes (with edits for clarity and brevity).
FYI,I use what I call Futuring Provocations to surface solutions to challenges. I’ll also invite you to think like the natural wonder that is the Bristlecone pine tree (4) a bit later in this dispatch.
Futuring provocation
Why does future foresight in the creative industries fail at creating life-affirming systems change?
FYI: Life-affirming means creating conditions conducive to life thriving on earth.
Learn Biomimicry's Context questions
These are the prompts I was asked in my workbook’s first assignment. They define the context in which the challenge (or futuring provocation) is happening.
What is happening that shouldn't be? What is not happening that should be?
Where is the challenge happening?
When is the challenge happening?
How is the challenge happening?
Who is it happening to?
Why is the challenge happening?
Action: Take a moment to think about them. Write down your reflection, raw notes and ideas.
Tip: Learn Biomimicry encouraged me to ‘zoom in’ and get as specific as I could get with answering these questions.
Workbook notes
What the challenge is
Future foresight holds a key place in the creative industries, and fashion which sits within it, to determine future products, services and marketing. I mention fashion as this was my base for many years and I still serve this industry, even if my scope has broadened to other sectors, because fashion influences and inspires so many layers of society, the shape of taste and culture, as explained in Stewart Brand’s seminal work, the Pace Layers framework (5), a tool he created for understanding how complex systems work.
A large spectrum of creative professionals work with future foresight and forecasting trends as a key part of their process and decision making in Design, Research and Development, Manufacturing, Strategy, PR and Marketing, Sales and Retail all the way to Beauty and Culture. This is to ensure market success and adoption. This includes creative team leaders as well as intrapreneurs and heads of agencies.
However, the principle of foresight being useful and a guide to change is broken when it comes to serving life-affirming foresight, trend and innovation direction. We are facing an emergency in a world rife with:
Climate crisis and the loss of biodiversity
Tech overlordship
Flattening of culture
Loss of respect and compensation for the creative and foresight industry
Mental Health Crisis
Geo-political instability and wars
DEI and sustainability commitment rollbacks
The rise of Authoritarianism and the extreme right
Growing income gap and cost of living crisis
Our problems are so complex we need a paradigm shift. Paradigm shifts are the hardest to implement in terms of leverage points. Donella Meadows describes leverage points (6) as places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. Her list moves from the relatively low power of constants, numbers and parameters up to the level of the mindset or paradigm under which the system operates. Paradigms are the second-highest leverage point. The very top one is the power to transcend paradigms altogether.
Challenges within the challenge
Again, from my workbook:
There isn't a follow-through process for turning future insights into organizational transformation. This is due to market pressure, status quo expectations of where foresight sits within bigger workflows, siloed strategies across teams and/or with clients, surface engagement with future foresight, lack of methodology and discipline based on client and financial needs, with long term priorities often taking the back seat over short-term gains, especially in the fields of fashion, media and marketing.
Strategists and forecasters are used for delivering insights, but are rarely given the power to be involved in implementing what they advise. So we end up delivering insights without any guarantee of proper follow-through. That's the status quo, and the roles are siloed. This gets in the way of truly creating change. Many of us are dealing with a broken innovation flow, in industries that focus on the short-term.
“A perennial concern of futurists and foresight practitioners is whether or not foresight work is having the desired impact and is viewed as credible. Recognizing the need for strengthened foresight practitioner evaluation capacity as well as increased assessment of foresight projects and activities, the APF Foresight Evaluation Initiative is developing resources to guide evaluation of foresight initiatives.”
Definition of Strategic Foresight From Evaluation Thinking & Practice to Foresight by the IFTF (7)
However valuable future insights are to an organisation, most foresight on meaningful and sustainable trends lacks implementation, because the creative and fashion industries are so focused on short-term gains rather than long-term change. This is true whether it's delivered by a well-intentioned internal team, an external consultant or an agency. Often the insights are mainly seen as valuable for marketing, rather than for effecting true change. This is why, when the going gets tough, we have seen initiatives such as sustainability and DEI so easily dropped by companies. They were more a marketing stunt than true organisational and systems-wide change. Linking trend decisions to environmental impact remains a cultural conversation, rather than something tackled in the actual trend decision process.
Creative leaders and intrapreneurs, who are often at the forefront of change, lack a strategic framework and organisational workflow to help them implement transformative future insights. Forecasters are rarely, if ever, involved in implementation. There isn't a follow-through process for future insights to deliver transformation and innovation with clients, brands and organisations, let alone contribute to systems and organisational change. These gaps stem from little to no strategic foresight training, an area of foresight that is different to trend forecasting and better adapted to implementing systems change.
The research, evaluation and forecasting frameworks we use in the creative and fashion industries can perpetuate practices that hurt our natural ecosystems and a positive production of culture. Many of us are still using frameworks that align with hype and trend chasing, and lead to overconsumption, draining our natural resources, worsening biodiversity loss and heating our planet.
We are not always willing to see that the trends are not changing. The same key trends, even macro trends, repeat over and over. It's a "crisis of boring," to quote Thomas Heatherwick and his book Humanise (8).
There is a tremendous gap in our ability, as people working in foresight, to evaluate the impact of our work. This leads to an implementation issue in how to effectively apply future foresight methods. It's something the Institute for the Future has been working on through what's called Evaluation Design, pinpointing some of the issues.
There is also a psychological component, and a power dynamic that can become toxic. Clients or internal teams commission a forecast, then behave as if (without saying) "Well actually, I know better than you, even if you're the expert, and I'm not going to implement this change." This can happen with internal forecasting departments as well.
On our side, as forecasters and strategists, we don't always speak our clients' language or understand their needs, and we're not always incentivised to change this dynamic.
Within our field, there's a culture of delivering surface-level trend direction and analysis, rather than forecasts that are actionable, rooted in systems thinking, and that understand the chain of events needed to make a tangible impact.
As a field, we can lean too much on attractive presentations, well-worded ideas and cool semantics, and I include myself in this. They showcase our creative thinking, but our soft science also needs discipline and methodology.
We can lose connection with real-world issues, with end users' realities and everyday needs, let alone the planet's needs. This makes implementation a steep ask for those of us who are more at home in blue-sky ideas than in action.
We have the visionary thinking, but we don't always have the strategic skills to help implement systemic change. For feedback on the true value of strategists' work, there's an interesting survey by strategist Alex Morris, author of Stratscraps (9).
There's been a massive reassessment of our toxic and very willing relationship with fashion trends, stemming from both fast fashion and social media. As a result, fashion trend forecasters have lost credibility. The fashion foresight industry itself, along with people passing as trend forecasters (I call them trend casters, more like TikTokers passing as trend experts), pushed an extreme focus on viral microtrends to please market and media demands and chase fame, rather than deeper and more meaningful cultural shifts. That's a big change from when I started. Fashion trend forecasting has sometimes become the punchline, something even SNL made a sketch about (10).
Where the challenge is happening
The challenge is happening in the global north and in 1st world country organisations in the creative industry and fashion within it. Their context is also usually within cities and often working with or within the creative class (11).
When the challenge is happening
When in the temporal sense: continuously. Future trend research and future forecasts happen and are developed all year long. Creative leaders and intrapreneurs manage this on a constant basis within their teams, with consultants and with agencies.
When in the process sense: At the planning stage. There is no planning for implementation and follow through of future insights to deliver organisational and systems transformation.
When in the event's sense: There can be a big trend, or a big socio-political event that might trigger the acceleration of certain forecast requests. For example, more recently with AI, there is an explosion of forecasts focused on this and the changes it is causing. There are certain events or triggers that have disproportionately large impacts or influences. When a trend goes viral online or on social media. Also during major social shifts for example when there was the rise of gender fluidity in the 2010s and diversity became a trend and we saw this impact campaigns focused on the LGBTQ+ communities, and other marginalised communities, only to engage with it on a surface level and pull back a few years later. Or more recently when we saw the obsession with 90s and early 2000s nostalgia.
How the challenge is happening: the 5 places the problem starts
This is a systems wide issue unfortunately and it is the whole system that needs addressing. As explained earlier the problem starts:
With the creative leader and intrapreneur that works within a system that is flawed but I believe they have the vision, the authority, will and drive to change it.
With the client or management that is incentivised by short-term gains.
The roles throughout the foresight system are siloed therefore a consulting future foresight agency or independent consultant might deliver forecasts with very strong and meaningful directions for the future but have absolutely no involvement in the correct implementation of these insights. This also is true for internal forecast teams that work within organisations. There is a sense that ‘oh you're just great for the ideas and giving us inspiring insights on innovation but you're not good for anything else.’
Many forecasters and strategists are frustrated but remain in love with the delivery of attractive future insights with often surface directions. This cultivates their own status quo or dare I say bad habit of overly leaning on theory and trend signal clustering, not putting themselves in a position where they are required to be systematic, methodical and disciplined and deliver a strategy of implementable and actionable direction towards life-affirming foresight, trends and innovation direction.
Who the challenge is happening to:
In the creative industry and fashion within it. I think we all have influence regardless of hierarchy. But the problem would be solved faster from the top. Innovation leaders, management leaders of creative teams, executives and intrapreneurs, consultants, as well as agency directors. They lead:
Design teams in fashion, design products, materials, colour
Strategy teams in communication, media, pr, creative directions and campaigns
Researchers and strategists who work in agencies or as independents as well as businesses and teams
R&D in manufacturing
Consultants in future forecasting such as trend forecasters, futurists and freelance strategists
Why the challenge is happening
There isn’t allocated time for training on strategic foresight and change implementation, as well as how systems change works for creative leaders and intrapreneurs. This has a trickle-down effect.
NO time is allocated to make mindful and well-informed choices around trends and create an implementation and collaboration flow across teams and stages of work. The issue of time also comes up as in how fast trends churn. The notion of time is warped. Collections, campaigns are churned out fast, in an incessant chase.
It's structural. Foresight, trend and innovation direction has never been expected to be followed throughfrom the time it's presented to the time it's implemented, regardless of whether the foresight was delivered by a consultant or by an internal team. Yet all these pieces need to be interdependent and work together.
The business model and values are based on the bottom line and cost margins and sales numbers.The value of a trend is measured against short-term and quick gains: based on its virality with consumers and on social media, regardless of the cost on our planet. Sometimes aligning with an aspirational disruption factor (for some organisations and professionals, not all) for example NFTs or the Metaverse, AI, sustainability and working with marginalised communities, but then the long-term commitment is often lacking.
This is then one of the reasons why we see such an easy roll back on commitments, because there was never a systemic change and deeper implementation mindset that was decided on from the get-go, it was more treated as surface engagement with a ‘trend’, and trying to capture its audience, rather than a deep foresight strategy impacting the evolution of a business, an industry and its role within society.
A Bristlecone pine tree’s lens on your foresight practice
The Great Basin Bristlecone pine is one of the longest-living trees on our planet. It lives at high altitude in harsh conditions, tends to occupy new open ground and doesn’t do well in less-than-harsh environments, making it hard to cultivate but a great example of resilience. It grows extraordinarily slowly but it lives for thousands of years. Each year leaves a ring so thin it's barely visible. Yet those rings hold a record of the climate going back thousands of years. Bristlecone pine trees provide the longest continual climatically sensitive tree-ring chronologies on Earth.
Our foresight work leaves rings too. This activity invites you to read them.
1. Gather your rings.
List three to five forecasts, trend reports, presentations or innovation directions you've delivered or worked with in recent years. Choose ones that were geared towards positive innovation: directions that could have made life more sustainable, regenerative or life-affirming for people and planet.
Optional: draw your rings. One circle per project, thick for those that lived, thin for those that faded. It's a simple way to see your practice at a glance.
2. Measure their growth.
For each one, note:
Your role in it, and the tools you used to create it.
How long it took to create.
How long it stayed alive. Was the positive innovation implemented? Is it still shaping decisions today, or did it gather dust?
3. Spot the pattern.
Which ones grew fast and died fast? Which grew slowly and are still alive? What do the long-living ones have in common? And which of your tools helped them survive?
4. Find where the flow broke.
For the ones that didn't survive, mark where the positive innovation implementation perhaps stopped: in the research, the report, the presentation, the decision, or the implementation.
Then zoom out. Sketch the system your work sits in: the people, teams, clients and partners involved, and where the power to decide lies. Consider the history, the societal values and the assumptions of that system. Where does it let positive innovation flow, and where does it block it?
Here's my own organigram, showing where implementation of future foresight direction breaks down in the creative industries. You're welcome to add your comments: https://canva.link/yxxwm5e6max2vcw
5. Ask the Bristlecone question.
Choose one forecast. If this positive innovation direction needed to live for 100 years, what would have had to slow down? What would have needed to be stronger at its roots?
You don't need to fix anything. This is about seeing your "What is" clearly, what’s happening right now. Keep your notes: we'll come back to them in the next issue.
Trend Atelier News
Bringing the Regenerative Futures Ikigai to London College of Fashion
I'm grateful for learning that proposing a shift, when presented with care, can have great outcomes.
Every year I give a future trends session for the Project Proposal unit on the London College of Fashion Buying and Merchandising course, to inspire students at the start of their year. I've always focused on trends related to sustainability or questioning the status quo of the fashion system. But it was still from the perspective of a brief asking for "5 macro trends."
This year the brief called for a wide sweep across trends, technology, consumer behaviour and ethics. In full transparency, I explained that this wasn't the kind of session I could lead anymore. My practice has moved on from trend overviews. My work is now radically regenerative, even more so than before, and motherhood gifted me this. I now work through a regenerative foresight lens, which I'm developing into a dedicated philosophy and methodology called Future Wild. It blends Futures Intelligence, Systems Innovation and Biomimicry's Life's Principles. I also shared that the traditional foresight model is broken, and that students wouldn't get a fair understanding of foresight without a regenerative perspective on futures thinking.
Instead, I proposed a 2-hour session in three parts:
Artisans of the Future: 6 archetypes reflected in innovations, mirroring roles the students may see themselves in. I started creating this format in early summer for 2 guest lectures at Vogue College.
Futuring Provocation activities.
35 minutes on regenerative foresight, where I introduced the Regenerative Futures Ikigai.
The archetypes give students concrete territories to think with, through the lens of macro trends unfolding and their roles in shaping fashion's future. The methodology gives them a framework for how to approach foresight itself. It felt like a strong pairing for a Final Major Project brief.
The answer was a resounding yes, and the lecture took place late September in London. The program leader was very responsive to this new and more radical material. That meant a lot, especially because Buying and Merchandising students may not have much exposure to alternative ways of approaching future foresight.
I love teaching students and professionals on the business, sales and communication side of fashion and the creative industries. You'd think a design course or team would be a more obvious fit. But I like injecting ideas where there's less exposure to emergence and more pressure to conform to the market.
If you'd like this for your students, or adapted as a workshop for your team, get in touch at hello@geraldinewharry.com. Sessions like this draw on the frameworks I've developed through The Trend Atelier.
Getting to know you
I see increasingly the line blurring between foresight and education, even if it’s not conscious. There is a big desire out there for passing information and solutions. All I can share in the now 12 years since my first seminar at the British Library is that it’s extremely helpful, necessary and humbling to learn about the craft of teaching and learning design. I was very fortunate to work with some learning designers along the way.
I hope Future Wild: When Nature Becomes the Futurist won't be just another failed framework. I'm working hard towards this and need your feedback. Iteration, adaptation, local context, modularity and decentralisation are all key parts of Biomimicry and how nature successfully evolves. I can promise you this: there will be some models and frameworks along the way, just designed in a way that you are the learner taking action, not passively ingesting.
I have some questions for you so I can better serve my mission.
What is your zone of Proximal Development?
During my Biomimicry training I had to work on my learner’s zone of proximal development (12).
“The zone of proximal development (ZPD) is a concept developed by psychologist Lev Vygotsky. It describes the gap between what a learner can do independently and what they can achieve with guidance from a more knowledgeable other, such as a teacher or peer.”
Future Wild aims to rebuild the practice of foresight into a force for architecting regenerative systems and futures, learning from Nature as our greatest futurist. My goal, even if it's not meant to ever be finished, is to integrate nature’s genius into my foresight practice so I can build and share the journey (and my own) into becoming a Regenerative Futures Architect.
If you're new to Future Wild or the Dispatch, here's a quick introduction. Future Wild bridges the Trifecta of Futures Intelligence, Biomimicry's Life's Principles and Systems Innovation, drawing on nature's 3.8 billion years of solving and adapting to tackle the systemic issues within future foresight that keep us stuck in surface-level change. This is predominantly targeted at the Creative Industries but can easily cross over and be applied to other sectors.
I think Future Wild is for you if you practise or use future foresight in or alongside the creative industries, and you're fed up with superficial engagement with innovation that is necessary and urgent for the greater good of the people, all living species and our (one and only) planet. You’re a designer, a researcher, marketer, strategist, forecaster or [fill in the blanks] and working with the assessment and forecast of trends and signals is a key part of your work, your thinking, your approach to creating new work or adapting what’s existing.
For you, there is no Plan B or going to Mars. It would suck to live there; and we agree on that. You love this earth.
You want systemic change that regenerates our planet and our ways of living, designing, making goods and doing business and believe future foresight is a key part of making it happen. But you're not seeing your futures directions implemented, and change isn't happening fast enough. You want to do more than tell people what the future is/ could be. You want to help them build it, which means changing the script and the agreement, becoming an architect of new systems and levers of what we value in trends and foresight work.
Am I right, or wrong or almost there but missing something?
Just hit reply I'd love to hear from you.
Behind the scenes at The Trend Atelier
Two things now run in parallel
Forecast Like a Futurist is our structured foresight training, covering the foundations. It's running and we're welcoming new students regularly, which I'm really pleased about.
Future Wild is the deeper, emergent journey I've been building and am sharing with you in the Futuring Dispatch exclusively for now. It's the next step, becoming a Regenerative Futures Architect, and it's embodied in the Regenerative Futures Ikigai.
Right now, the Trend Atelier website doesn't reflect this shift. Our mission used to sit prominently in the Trend Atelier Community pages. When the monthly membership was paused, I removed those pages from the live site, and some of that messaging went with them. I never got to update it because I got married and, very shortly after, became pregnant! It's finally happening now. I'm working on it behind the scenes with our web designer, and I look forward to sharing it with you.
In the meantime, you can explore Forecast Like a Futurist here: https://www.thetrendatelier.com/. We also offer a discount for academics and students.
How my work fits together
Universities and organisations invite me as Geraldine Wharry, Fashion Futurist and Regenerative Futures Architect. The Trend Atelier is the school and community I founded, and it's where my frameworks and courses live, including Forecast Like a Futurist and Future Wild.
What's becoming clear in my journey into now becoming a biomimicry educator is that Biomimicry transcends problem-solving through nature's solutions. It's intimately woven with culture and social sciences, acting as a hidden pattern. Everything exists within a web of interdependencies, where each element relies on others for survival and function. Understanding these connections reveals the constant feedback loops between elements, allowing us to observe and thoughtfully intervene in system dynamics. That’s why I’m working on creating a learning journey into Becoming a Regenerative Futures Architect. I’m living proof as a prototype (quoting the amazing Samar Younes), and I’m starting to share this at universities and on other platforms (stay tuned). And I hope to share it in an educational space when Trend Atelier gets updated too.
I've been revisiting something I wrote a few years ago: "Think in systems, not trends." I didn't phrase it right. Systems thinking shouldn't replace trend thinking. Trends behave like systems, so we can't properly be trained in future foresight without understanding systems dynamics and change.
Systems behave in ways that mirror trends. According to the School of System Change it’s through 4 qualities:
Nestedness: smaller sets of elements sit within larger ones, each a subset of a bigger whole.
Interconnectedness: a web of relations whose effects reverberate.
Emergence: interactions between elements and their wider environment produce emergent properties.
Aliveness: systems react to disruption and reorganise themselves dynamically.
The last one, Aliveness, is key in my subjective view as a Regenerative Futures Architect and from the perspective of my work building Future Wild.
If trends behave like systems, and systems are alive, are trends alive? And if so, should we treat them as living beings, dynamic forces reflecting the vitality of nature?
That’s a whole other thing to explore at a later date together.
The Stepping into Systems series by the School of System Change is worth watching if you want to learn more about systems change. Each film is fairly short, very clear and comes with a helpful short workbook. The series introduces ways of thinking, acting and being that embrace complexity and enable us to effect lasting and deep transformation.
"Foresight is considered a type of systems thinking since it examines the relationships between drivers, trends, events, and signals of change. Systems thinking approaches and looking at an initiative as a web of relationships enables evaluators to understand an initiative in a holistic, dynamic way, and not overlook aspects and changes that are not included in a linear model. Using a systems lens has the potential to capture unintended changes as well as surface recommendations for program improvements and identifying levers for change. While systems thinking and thinking about relationships and connectedness goes back many decades, evaluation tools are still being developed. For example, Kumu, an online systems mapping tool, is readily available, as well as Netlogo, an open-source tool widely used by complexity researchers. Evaluators are adapting systems concepts and principles to characterize their initiatives and inform development of theories of change. Regardless, it’s helpful to have some mastery of systems thinking concepts and tools and see how they apply to foresight work.”
Definition of Strategic Foresight From Evaluation Thinking & Practice to Foresight by the IFTF (7)
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I help people and organisations decode macro shifts, through an ecosystem of strategic foresight, education, speculative design, systems intelligence, all attuned to nature's genius. In service of architecting a world that regenerates how we shape culture, do business, and honour all living systems.
