For Creatives Seeking Emergent and Regenerative Future Foresight
Thought this week
“We can learn to come home to this planet.”
Janine Benyus
Revolve Evolve
Do you get a fuzzy feeling when you come home after being away for a while?
For me it’s when I get off the Metro stop at Breguet-Sabin, in the Bastille quarter where I grew up, or when the plane lands in New York where my mother's side of our family lives. Home is the smell of the detergent used to clean my aunt’s building entrance in the North Bronx.
I get that ‘I’m home’ feeling nowadays under a tree in our back garden, holding my son, teaching him to see the sky through the leaves, or when I reunite with old friends. Looking back, I also felt at home 12 meters deep with a young turtle whilst scuba diving. Or maybe that was just the feeling of being touched by her grace.
Home can be a fleeting moment, a once in a lifetime experience, or it can be in the every day.
Deep down I think the ‘I’m home’ feeling comes from recognising, even if briefly, the beauty of being here on Earth. Her spirit reaches out and holds us, gently, like a mother's embrace. We land where we belong.
Recently 'I'm home' has also meant coming home to my work after giving birth to my son. And I want to deeply thank everyone who replied to the re-introduction of the Futuring Dispatch when I shared the story of becoming pregnant and what my life has been since, and what becoming a mother has meant. I was very nervous sending it as it’s the most personal I’ve ever gotten so I was deeply touched by your messages. They filled my heart, as well as my eyes, with tears of gratitude. I’m still answering messages and am so thankful for your encouragement and support.
Today, I will re-introduce you to Future Wild by sharing for the first time The Regenerative Futures Ikigai.
It's the map to journey through Future Wild as a Futuring Ecology of interconnected experiences. This isn't a framework to file away. I'm not handing you a report. Over years of advising, teaching, researching and forecasting how people lead change and innovate, I've learnt that real transformation doesn't come from information, it comes from being walked through something, together, slowly enough to actually change how you see and act.
From now on, the Futuring Dispatch will continue to share its usual insights and essays, but it will also teach. It will travel with you through Future Wild and the Regenerative Futures Ikigai, mindfully and slowly, so that by the time we're done, you won't just understand regenerative foresight, you'll have practiced it.
If you decide Future Wild isn’t for you, don’t unsubscribe, just click here so I can make sure to only send what’s relevant to you going forward.
As always, thank you for being here and making the time. It means everything.
What is Future Wild?
What kind of practice is it? It's a Futuring Ecology
Future Wild rewires how we think about future foresight. It is an integrative ecological approach that reveals the systems and ways of being that emerge when we navigate future foresight the way nature does, not as metaphor, trend or campaign, but as a mutualistic and rigorous practice. Nature produces no waste. Every exchange serves the system's survival, its own quiet, exacting version of return on investment.
As cultural producers and decoders, we can restore balance to our thinking, creating, and implementing, in unison with the living systems that sustain all life on earth. The critical juncture humankind finds itself in demands we evolve.
Future Wild is built on my Biomimicry training(1), mentorship from Biomimicry experts, and months of dedicated research, interviews and user testing, layered onto 15 years advising brands and institutions, teaching at universities and the work of Trend Atelier, the school and community I founded. Biomimicry is a leading regenerative discipline in design and systems, and foundational to the Doughnut Economy model. I chose to train in Biomimicry because it offers solutions for solving wicked interconnected problems, with natural systems successfully performing solutions for 3.8 billions of years.
Everything in nature, every creature, biome, living system, exists within a web of interdependencies, where each element relies on others for survival and function. Understanding these connections reveals constant feedback loops and solutions we can learn from in order to intervene in system dynamics.
Why does it matter? The Future Wild Question for You
What would future forecasting be like if it operated like a natural ecosystem and exclusively in service of life affirming innovation, strategy and design?
What is it built on? The Future Wild Trifecta
- Futures Intelligence: The global collective working within foresight, or with it as a core tool, have tremendous influence on shaping our collective futures, from what we design and consume to adopting new cultural codes. As practitioners we serve as decoders(2) and griots(3). Our accountability lies in creating new forms of intelligence, not flooding systems with plug-and-play insights.
- Life's Principles: Nature is our greatest futurist. We are nature, to quote Dr. Ian McCallum. Biomimicry's Life Principles(4) are deep patterns all organisms meet to sustain themselves and life on earth. Incorporating these into methodologies and system strategies creates regenerative results with practices that can course correct the unlimited growth economy to which foresight is currently tethered.
- Systems Innovation: Real change doesn't come from improving individual parts, it comes from transforming the fundamental structure, functions, and relationships of a whole interconnected system. And changing its goal. Most of the problems we face are too complex and interrelated to isolate and fix one at a time. Systems Innovation asks us to understand the whole living system and take a holistic yet large-scale approach to shifting it, ranging from identifying and addressing deep-rooted causes all the way to testing and implementing lasting outcomes.
How is it mapped? The Regenerative Futures Ikigai
Embodying the ‘Future Wild’ journey, the Regenerative Futures Ikigai is inspired by the Japanese concept of how an individual defines the meaning of their life. It outlines 8 mindful stages in becoming a Regenerative Futures Architect, incorporating Biomimicry's 3 Seeds which are Ethos, (Re)Connect, Emulate, alongside Life's Principles.
In upcoming Futuring Dispatches, we'll learn how to operate as living systems to drive regenerative futures. Over the next months or more (who really knows), I'll invite you to move through the Ikigai phases with me. Though modular, each phase can also stand alone and is home to activities, actionable tools, reflection prompts, insights and research, delivered as Futuring Ateliers. Along the way I'll also share my own doubts and explorations, and your feedback, as there will be spaces for exchange and growing a community of practice.
Download the The Regenerative Futures Ikigai here
Primer for 8 mindful stages
ORIENTATION & VISION→ This stage is about creating a hopeful vision, and our why, as systems changers and Regenerative Futures Architects. Here we also get acclimated with the whole Future Wild journey.
LEADERSHIP & INTERDEPENDENCE→ This is the nature connection phase, establishing Biomimicry foundations and regenerative leadership in foresight, from slowing down to quiet the cleverness, to what I call Transcendence foresight.
EXPLORE & ASSESS→ This is the reality check, diagnosing the 'What is': what's broken in our current foresight systems. We understand history and root causes to create new connections.
(RE)CONNECT→ This is the mapping and envisioning stage, the 'What could be'. We map all stakeholders, human and non-human, learn systems design, remap our ideal foresight system and organigram, and choose our own role and identity.
ETHOS→ This phase applies Biomimicry's Life's Principles and Nature as Measure to remap the system's opportunities, in order to successfully implement regenerative foresight.
EMULATE→ This is where we learn 4 regenerative future foresight tools I've created, showing how nature's intelligence is actionable and built into everyday future foresight methods.
IMPLEMENT → This is the phase we take action. It makes the Future Wild vision and Regenerative Futures Architect role tangible, by implementing the regenerative foresight tools shared so far in our work. This is about creating positive intervention, tracking progress, iterating and adapting.
ADAPT & EVOLVE→ This phase teaches us how to sustain change individually and in a community of practice, supporting the work and impact over time in our organisation or body of work, whilst continuously testing, adapting and iterating, as nature does.
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Rebuilding our Why (a preview of the next Futuring Dispatch)
It's key to create a hopeful vision. I've always maintained that hope is rebellious. However in the Explore & Assess phase of the Regenerative Futures Ikigai, we diagnose the issues openly. That can be a reality check but rebirth is often uncomfortable and the fertile soil for rebuilding our Why.
My assessment, and it is shared by many but all too often behind closed doors, is that Future foresight fails at creating life-affirming systemic change(5). I mean this in the sense our industry, especially where it serves the creative fields, is failing our home Mother Earth, by feeding systems that are depleting her living systems.
I recently came across The Public Ledger for Design Crimes by the School of Critical Design (6). These are confessions from the people who built the dark patterns we all live with now. I think it's brilliant. It gives a name and a structure to something that has run through most of what I've built and said out loud, for years: the speaking, consulting, lecturing, writing, community work, advocacy and activism. Calling out the Hypercycle. Naming the gap between what we advise and what actually gets implemented. Different rooms, different formats, same throughline. The Ledger just says it more plainly, and more publicly, than I ever have. Many entries are anonymous, which allows a safe space to share what we may not feel proud of.
It made me ask: what would a Public Ledger for Foresight Crimes look like? I know I have my entries for this because of projects I worked on to pay bills, or thinking I could create change from inside the beast.
In the next Dispatch, I'll go deeper into what's actually standing in our way, the implementation problem that's kept so many of us talking about change without making it happen in our work and with clients. For now, sit with the question.
What would you confess to, if the foresight industry had a ledger?
Footnotes
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Parting Thoughts
This is the best thing I've watched recently: an interview of journalist Amy Goodman from Democracy Now on Novara Media, about the new documentary profiling her important work over 3 decades 'Please steal this story'. It reminded me of how journalism interconnects with our work in future foresight covering the 'news', and the accountability we have. Any journalistic work is essential for keeping society and humankind in check.
