One of the tough parts of futures work is helping people step out of the present. The sheer weight of how we do things and think about things right here, right now, gets in the way of people imagining how things can change for the better.

One method that I’ve used—and I’m very much standing on the shoulders of the futurists Wendy Schultz and Tanja Hichert here—is the idea of ‘Seeds of Change’. The phrase was developed by the Good Anthropocene Project, which developed a Seed Bank as part of its work. Tanja and I presented on this at an Association of Professional Futurists’ conference a while ago.

Maximising difference

The Good Anthropocene project in turn built on Wendy Schultz’ Manoa Scenarios method, which used weak signals or ‘pockets of the future in the present’ as its initial building block. The Manoa scenarios model, which is designed—Wendy’s words—to “maximise difference”, starts by placing a set of weak signals at the heart of a set of futures wheels, and the scenarios emerge from this process.

And a seed is defined like this (by the Good Anthropocene Project) as a small sign of a positive future:

‘Seeds are likely not widespread nor well-known. They can be social initiatives, new technologies, economic tools, or social-ecological projects, or organisations, movements or new ways of acting that appear to be contributing to the creation of a future that is just, prosperous, and sustainable.’

Increasing resilience

The Seeds of the Good Anthropocene project was designed to help communities in Southern Africa identify ways of increasing their resilience in the face of climate change. It combines a number of methods, including Wendy’s Manoa method and three horizons, but its other innovation was to start the process not with a weak signal, emerging at the margins, but with the ‘mature’ version of that seed. What happens, in other words, if that seed has grown in such a way that if has become mainstream. It needs to be grown into a tree, in other words.

In other words, at least for readers who’re familiar with Three Horizons, it has moved from the bottom left of the Horizon 3 ‘visionary’ S-curve to the top.

Or to put it another way: planners have started to add trees to urban landscapes, but not with any intent (these images are from a project about re-imagining Piccadilly Circus for Chatham House, animated by the Platform Group). What if we decide we’re serious about trees?

Change for the better

I used this approach in the Community Futures/Better Futures Wales method that SOIF piloted last year with Wales Community and Voluntary Action. We started with developing mature seeds, and it opened space in the (virtual) room for people to imagine worlds in which change for the better was possible.

Typically you need to combine this with other techniques—both the Good Anthropocene (borrowing from Manoa) and the Better Futures Wales project use Futures Wheels, if in slightly different ways. And although visioning is, I think, an essential component in helping to build agency, you also need to help people start somewhere rather than be left hanging in an imagined future. It’s not coincidence that both projects used Three Horizons as a way to build a narrative about what to do in the ‘entrepreneurial’ Horizon 2.

The question matters

But it’s also a reminder that the way you ask people about the future matters. Robert Jungk tells a story in his book Future Workshops (sadly out of print) about a group of teenagers whose views on the future had seemed unremittingly gloomy when they were asked about them in school.

When he started his work with them, he found to his surprise that they were quite animated about possible futures. He asked them what had changed. Their answer: the school asked us about the future we expected, but you asked us about the future we wanted.

Growing the seeds

Anyway, the handbook for the Better Futures Wales project sets out these steps for building ‘mature seeds’, as well as connecting them to a whole community futures process:

Check your potential Seeds of Change against these simple statements:

• A seed is anything that is innovative, already happens and points to a positive future, but is not well-known or widespread.

• A good seed would have people excited and inspire them to think of how their own community could change.

• It should be novel and not exist at scale in your community but should actually be possible.

• It should stretch the imagination and help the community dream beyond your existing conversations.

• It should energise or even excite the group when they discuss it, and they should feel comfortable using it at the start of the process.

If your potential Seed of Change meets most of these criteria, re-write its description in the present tense, as if it already exists and has grown beyond a mere idea to being mainstream or commonplace. For instance, the seed of a single repair cafe has grown into a place where everything can be repaired, or the seed of a single community bus has become a free transport network! Writing the description about your Seed of Change in such a way makes it easier for participants to understand its impact.

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A version of this article was also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.

In my (volunteer) role as editor of the APF newsletter Compass, I recorded a discussion with Wendy Schultz and Tanja Hichert at the end of this year’s Scenarios 2018 conference. This is also posted at the APF’s blog. The podcast is 32 minutes, and it’s a good conversation, but you probably need to have some interest in foresight and futures history and practice to get the most out of it.

The second Scenario Planning and Foresight conference, held at Warwick Business School in December 2018, was sub-titled ‘Advancing Theory and Improving Practice’. The keynote speakers were Thomas Chermack, talking about his recent book based on his research in the Pierre Wack archive in Oxford, and Rene Rohrbeck, who spoke about his work on the effectiveness of foresight. There were also around 65 other presentations in a number of streams over the course of the two day event.

A number of APF members attended, including Wendy Schultz, Adam Gordon, Tanja Hichert, Andrew Curry, Ted Fuller, Jan Klakurka and Bill Irwin. Wendy, Adam, Ted, Jan and Bill all gave presentations.

At the end of the event, Andrew Curry sat down with Wendy Schultz and Tanja Hichert for a conversation about the conference, its content, and its memorable moments. This conversation is the first in an occasional series of Compass podcasts. 

Selected Links

•  Wendy Schultz on the Harman Fan

•  GBN’s account of the Montfleur scenarios

•  Matt Spaniol’s research page

•  The plausibility problem in scenarios

•  Thomas Chermack’s book on Pierre Wack which is eye-wateringly expensive

•   Rene Rohrbeck’s book on corporate foresight—also eye-wateringly expensive

•  Rohrbeck article on the effect of corporate foresight

•  Review of Rohrbeck book by in the APF Compass newsletter by APF member Alireza Hejazi, in a pre-pub version.

I’m involved in organising an APF event in London next month called “Tools for Hope”. It’s a practical hands-on event designed to help people who’re interested in using futures work to create change. It’s being held in Bloomsbury on Tuesday 7th November.

The thinking behind the event is that futures work can create an overdose of pessimism as we stare at the overlapping crises of the “grandes problematiques“. But there’s a long if sometimes neglected history of futures methods that are designed to give people a sense of agency and purpose. So “Tools for Hope” is about futures tools that help people make change happen.

Speakers on the day include Wendy Schultz (on visioning), Bill Sharpe (on Three Horizons), Tricia Lustig (on appreciative enquiry), and Tanja Hichert (on Seeds of a Good Anthropocene).

• Wendy Schultz: “Preferred futures—visions—are a foundation of futures thinking, research, and practice. Starting with Polak’s Image of the Future, through organizational visions and transformational leadership as vision articulation, to the philosophical and artistic explorations of the possible preferred, visions and visioning are core to futures studies and foresight. How do we identify, collect, and compare ambient visions? What are all the approaches to creating fresh transformative visions? How can they act as nudges to emergence?”
• Bill Sharpe: “The Three Horizons framework is a simple tool for ordering our thoughts about the future. It works with an intuitive grasp of how the future occurs to us: a landscape of uncertainty in which we too are actors. If we can bring that intuitive appreciation to consciousness it is possible to work with the emerging future much more skilfully. In particular we can set about realising our own aspirations in a fast-changing and complex world.” In an interactive session Bill will introduce the framework and lead a Three Horizon mapping exercise.
• Tricia Lustig: “Foresight isn’t foresight until action occurs. Appreciative Inquiry is a tool you can use to make action happen. We will explore Appreciative Inquiry, an engagement and implementation tool which finds and captures the energy for change. We will talk about when to use it, and when not, share some case studies and experience an appreciative interview.”
• Tanja Hichert: “Seeds of a Good Anthropocene is an ongoing project with the aim to collect and develop a suite of alternative visions for “Good Anthropocenes” – positive futures that are socially and ecologically desirable, just, and sustainable. The objective is to counterbalance prevailing dystopic visions of the future that may be inhibiting our collective ability to move creatively towards a better trajectory for the Earth and humanity. This initiative is a collaboration between the Stockholm Resilience Centre, McGill University in Canada, and the Centre for Complex Systems in Transition (CST) at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.”

It’s a lovely venue and I think the event will generate a lot of energy. It’s being held on the day before the Anticipation conference opens in London.

You can register here. And the brochure can be downloaded from here: ProDev Brochure London17_Final1