Metafuture

Most futures work stops at anticipation. Scanning for signals, building scenarios, preparing for what might come. All useful. But the real point has always been emancipation 🌅 It's the future used to free people from the futures they've inherited or had imposed on them, so they can recover their agency and author something of their own 🖋️ A good thing to carry into the weekend! Read the interview this quote came from: https://lnkd.in/g7m6tKHr Sohail Inayatullah #FuturesStudies #StrategicForesight #Foresight #FuturesLiteracy #Emancipation

We are living through the collapse of many systems. In times such as these, a rise in conflict is close to inevitable. Conflict is showing up at every level: international, national, communal, organisational, family, even inside ourselves. When the world feels this unstable, learning to transform conflict into something better becomes a skill we all need. Before a specific conflict is analysed and its resolution is attempted, it is useful to investigate some of the underlying views people hold about conflict and violence in general. For example… 💭 "Humans have always been violent. Violence is part of human nature. Nothing much can be done about it." 💭 "Humans are selfish and will use violence to get what they want. However, we can minimise its impact and how much damage it does." 💭 "Violence is increasing everywhere. Just look at the news! We are also on the verge of ecocide and omnicide." 💭 "There is a general trend globally towards more awareness and less violence. We are living in the most peaceable era in human existence." To transform conflict, it helps to bring these perspectives out into the open. Once that happens in a workshop, the facilitator and the participants start to see the beliefs they have been holding, and can begin to step back from them and examine them honestly. That is the groundwork we lay before we try to create more peaceful future selves, organisations and societies. This is taken from Ivana Milojević's online course, Conflict Transformation — found only at www.metafutureschool.org. #ConflictTransformation #Peace #FuturesStudies #Foresight #StrategicForesight

An online course, however good, never changes an organisation. Come Monday morning, the inbox usually wins. Building futures capacity that lasts is a different kind of work. Over the years, Metafuture has done this with global corporations, UN agencies, multilateral development banks, and grassroots NGOs. The key is to meet them where they're at, and build the work around the organisation. It starts with grounding. For large teams, we scale the pricing so everyone, even the busiest, can build capacity online. We keep our courses affordable and offer lifetime access, so the whole organisation shares a baseline in futures. Next, we create hybrid learning: keynotes and workshops shaped around your industry and your goals. People take what they've learned online and apply it to the real questions and challenges they face, working in groups, online or in person. Learning from one another and breaking down the silos between teams is crucial. Those group sessions also produce some of the strongest material of all — robust, long-term strategy reports grounded in your own challenges, which Metafuture can help shape and write. Finally, the part that tends to matter most — ongoing guidance for leaders and teams, so the capacity holds after we've stepped back. That often means individual consultation, or smaller workshops for leadership groups. If your organisation is weighing how to build this kind of capacity at scale, we'd be glad to help you think it through. You can reach us here, or at metafutureschool.org. #StrategicForesight #FuturesStudies #CapacityBuilding #Foresight #Leadership

It's been a busy few months at Metafuture. There are so many reflections we wish to share. But first, something about what binds us, and the importance of leadership, at this time. Over the last few weeks, we worked with librarians in Busan, Lenovo in Istanbul, and CGIAR's food-futures researchers in Ibadan. These organisations and communities could not be more different. And yet, in the room, they were all asking the same questions. All are trying to work out how to use AI wisely, and on whose terms. All three are worried about staying relevant in a world that geopolitics is redrawing week by week. And for all three, climate has become central to strategy and policy. These have become the questions, or the big hairy problems, every organisation is now living inside. A bit on methods. Across the three, the Futures Triangle was strongest early on, mapping the pulls, pushes and weights that shape where an organisation thinks it can go. Causal Layered Analysis was good for the big collective picture and even better up close, inside a single library, research centre or business unit, getting underneath the headlines to the myths doing the real work. Backcasting then tied the big vision back to the small steps that actually get you there. You will learn how and when to use all of these methods in our online courses at www.metafutureschool.org. What has stayed with me, though, is the differences in leadership needs. Watching these organisations up close, it became clear that each of them, while facing similar challenges, needs a different kind of leader. One needs an inspirational vision-setter. One needs a herder of cats. One needs a convenor of ideas. The method matters, but the leader who carries it matters just as much. #FuturesStudies #StrategicForesight #CausalLayeredAnalysis #Leadership #AI

It's been a busy few months at Metafuture. There are so many reflections we wish to share. But first, something about what binds us, and the importance of leadership, at this time. Over the last few weeks, we worked with librarians in Busan, Lenovo in Istanbul, and CGIAR's food-futures researchers in Ibadan. These organisations and communities could not be more different. And yet, in the room, they were all asking the same questions. All are trying to work out how to use AI wisely, and on whose terms. All three are worried about staying relevant in a world that geopolitics is redrawing week by week. And for all three, climate has become central to strategy and policy. These have become the questions, or the big hairy problems, every organisation is now living inside. A bit on methods. Across the three, the Futures Triangle was strongest early on, mapping the pulls, pushes and weights that shape where an organisation thinks it can go. Causal Layered Analysis was good for the big collective picture and even better up close, inside a single library, research centre or business unit, getting underneath the headlines to the myths doing the real work. Backcasting then tied the big vision back to the small steps that actually get you there. You will learn how and when to use all of these methods in our online courses at www.metafutureschool.org. What has stayed with me, though, is the differences in leadership needs. Watching these organisations up close, it became clear that each of them, while facing similar challenges, needs a different kind of leader. One needs an inspirational vision-setter. One needs a herder of cats. One needs a convenor of ideas. The method matters, but the leader who carries it matters just as much. #FuturesStudies #StrategicForesight #CausalLayeredAnalysis #Leadership #AI

APFN 12 has come to a close, and our hearts are full ❤️ For two days in Bangkok, the Asia Pacific Futures Network did what it always does, gathering a global family to imagine, argue, laugh and think together about the futures of our region and our world. All three of the Metafuture School team, Ivana Milojević Sohail Inayatullah and Adam Sharpe were in the thick of it. Thank you to Jost Wagner and the whole APFN team, to Sasin School of Management, and to every person who made these two days special. The family just got a little bigger. Until APFN 13 in Singapore next year! #FuturesStudies #StrategicForesight #Foresight #APFN #CausalLayeredAnalysis

Metafuture has always been mindful that while scholarship is all about innovation and originality, without genealogy we have nothing So being back at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where I Sohail first met Jim Dator in 1976 was a pivotal moment Alongside Dator, I took courses or attended lectures by Kenneth Boulding, Hazel Henderson. Ashis Nandy, Johan Galtung, Eleonora Masini, Alvin Toffler, William Irwin Thompson, Immanuel Wallerstein, Fritz Capra, and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, to mention a few luminaries In the 90s, Ivana too was a regular visitor at conferences in Hawaii being impacted by Kathy Ferguson and others at the University of Houston. We use their work. We are grateful for their insights. Every framework and masterclass we teach carries their fingerprints. And now the line continues: we look forward to working with futurist Lavonne Leong, DPhil of the Mānoa School, the next generation of a tradition we were fortunate to be formed by. #FuturesStudies #StrategicForesight #Foresight #ManoaSchool #FuturesThinking

Not just another episode of the brilliant podcast FuturePod 🎧 In episode 250, Metafuture School Director of Learning Adam Sharpe speaks about his journey in youth foresight, the futures methods and tools that work particularly in online environments with newbies, including the Six Pillars Approach, and emerging issues on his radar from demographic shifts to global heating. If you haven't yet followed or subscribed to FuturePod, now's the time! #futures #futuresthinking #foresight #strategicforesight

A rare gathering, and some insights worth passing onto our community here on LinkedIn. Recently we sat with librarians from some of the world's most storied institutions, with cases drawn from Trinity College Dublin, Cambridge, and the national libraries of Scotland and Sweden, and put a single question on the table: what is the library becoming? Sohail Inayatullah opened with the long arc: from keepers of the collection, to innovators in the new gardens (digital, maker and more), to the truth tellers a world of mistrust now needs. Then a Causal Layered Analysis masterclass carried the group beneath the surface, from the way the world is to the way it could be. What surfaced is mapped in the graphic below. Three things we are still thinking about: → These librarians do not experience tradition as a burden. They see the collection — the whole inheritance of it — as the material they build the future from. → The library's used future is quietly ending. For today's students, "go to the library for information" has become "ask the AI." So the old images fall away. The monastery, the royal yacht — set them down. What the room reached for instead was the library as a place with many doors: closer to a beehive, humming and open, reaching out to engage rather than waiting to be visited. → And then the new selves. One head librarian said the librarian is becoming a kind of DJ — connecting people, helping them make things, reading a fast-changing world. Another imagined the national library as a lifestyle, woven into everyday life. The group on the futures of reading offered the loveliest reframe of all: the library as brain, as life-protective. A book a day keeps the doctor away. The graphic includes some of the shifts the room made: information as fast food becoming fika, the job for life becoming a campfire, the closed treasure chest becoming treasure for everyone. With thanks to everyone who shared so openly, and to IFLA. More to come IFLA: https://lnkd.in/gBN9ThKk #futures #futuresthinking #Foresight #strategicforesight #libraries #transformation