The Futures Workshop

Kia ora workshoppers! We’re back after a big break and kicking off a new season with Alice Dimond of Ngāi Tahu, a South Island Iwi (tribe) from Aotearoa New Zealand. Alice talks to us about Te Korekoreka, a Māori approach to futures that she and her Iwi have developed to connect their people through the “four realms of creation”. Like other tools we’ve explored, this one uses metaphor and story bu...

Kia ora and welcome to episode thirteen of The Futures Workshop! Most of the tools we’ve looked at so far rely on scenarios - imagined future scenes which we then use to work out the implications for us and our organisations. But today’s guest Andrew Curry says scenarios aren’t always the best approach. It can be cognitively tricky to get groups to fully embrace a speculative future and make the l...

Welcome back to the Dubai Future Forum podcast lounge, from which I’m delighted to share another special episode of The Futures Workshop. For this episode I was joined by former Head of Foresight and Futures Literacy at UNESCO Riel Miller, who shared his reflections on the Forum before taking a deep dive into “futures literacy” - a concept with which he has become synonymous. We talk about the imp...

This week, a special episode of The Futures Workshop: my conversation with Professor Paul Saffo, recorded in front of a live studio audience at the Dubai Future Forum in November 2024. Also special is today’s topic. After ten episodes exploring different tools and how to use them, Paul challenges us to think about the proper place of tools in futures work. He says we should use them in the same wa...

This week we’re following up our conversation with Ivana Milojevic with an imagined workshop. We show you how you might use the Futures Triangle tool with a group - guiding them to identify the pull, push and weight forces that affect the way we work towards a preferred future. We then look at how those forces might interact with each other - particularly where the tensions or obstructions might l...

Today we’re in conversation with Ivana Milojevic, another of the world’s leading voices in the area of futures. Ivana has worked extensively around the globe, and shares some of her most memorable experiences in a wide ranging discussion, with a focus on the Futures Triangle tool. In this interview Ivana explains how by understanding three invisible forces - the weight of the past, the push of the...

Welcome to our latest episode, in which we take the tool introduced by Jake Dunagan in Episode Seven , and try it out in a workshop setting. Jake’s specialty is “experiential” (or “design”) futures and central to this is the Create-a-Scene tool, which uses various facilitation techniques to bring a future scenario to life. In this episode we imagine a dystopic “collapse” scenario, and then a more...

In this episode I talk to one of the pioneers of design futures (or if you prefer, “experiential” futures) about how to emotionally engage people in futures thinking. By creating immersive scenarios, Jake says we can help people connect with what they’re imagining. We talk about some of his most memorable scenarios, how to bridge the “cognitive gap” that stops people emotionally connecting with th...

Welcome to episode six, another workshop episode we’ve created to assist facilitators and practitioners. In this episode we imagine a workshop where the goal is to eliminate food deserts in Auckland by 2050. Using backcasting, we imagine our goal then work our way backwards, looking at the series of steps and milestones it would have taken to get there. We hope you enjoy it! If you’re a facilitato...

I’m excited to share our next conversation in The Futures Workshop series: my interview with Sarah Mecartney (Regional Director of Melanesia for the Pacific Community). Sarah has chosen to talk about Backcasting, one of my favourite futures tools. She makes it sound much less intricate than this diagram! But as a visual aid it may be helpful for you to refer to during or after our conversation. We...

Following our episode three conversation with Professor Sohail Inayatullah on his Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) tool, in this episode we imagine using it in a workshop setting. Like all our even-numbered episodes, this one is aimed at practitioners and facilitators who want some practical examples of tool-use to assist with their own skill-building. If you’re a general listener you may wish to ski...

In this third episode we chat with Professor Sohail Inayatullah, who is one of the planet’s biggest names when it comes to futures studies (actually, when it comes to any sort of studies - he’s in the top two per cent of scientists worldwide as measured by citations). CLA, or Causal Layered Analysis, is a tool Sohail created to get to the hidden layers that drive our thoughts, beliefs and actions....

Something I often hear from international practitioners is that they want more access to futures tools - to find out what’s new, what’s working and how it might work for them. That’s one of the reasons I created this podcast - to “spread the word” about the amazing things happening in the futures space globally, and to share my interpretation of how each tool might be used in a workshop setting. W...

In episode one we meet Bill Sharpe, who tells us about his Three Horizons tool. We talk about the origins of the tool, how Bill uses it in practice and what tips he has for faciliators and practitioners looking to adopt Three Horizons in their own work. This was an interesting and inspiring conversation! As with all our interviews it’s designed with the professional futures practitioner in mind, t...

Hello and kia ora to futures thinkers around the world. I’m Victoria Mulligan from Aotearoa-New Zealand launching, with great excitement, my new futures podcast out into the world. In the coming weeks I’ll share my conversations with the world’s leading futurists, challenging them to each select one futures tool to share with our global audience of practitioners. Each episode will feature a new on...