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 but with a uniquely indigenous approach - where past, present and future exist simultaneously. As Alice explains, we stand connected to our ancestors and descendants through time but the connection is not linear, it is ever-present.Even if you haven’t caught up on all of our previous episodes this is a fantastic one to begin with. For New Zealanders it’s a rare insight into how Māori conceptualise the future; for internationals, it’s a wonderful introduction to this special aspect of Aotearoa.Thanks to Alice, thank you for listening and as always thanks to The Beths for supplying our beautiful theme music!Victoria________________________________________________________________For more information about Te Korekoreka, visit the website here.To find out more about Alice’s latest project to empower young people with innovative and future focused approaches to creating solutions to the challenges of our world, visit Mō Āpōpō Future-Makers.You can find Alice on LinkedIn here. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefuturesworkshop.substack.com

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 importance of futures literacy, what it is and is not, and how to create an effective literacy lab.I hope you enjoy the conversation with Riel as much as I did! Thanks so much to the Dubai Future Forum 2024 for hosting us and as always thank you to The Beths for the beautiful music. You can find further resources in this Futures Literacy Playbook, which is free to download. These slides introduce the futures literacy lab methodology. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefuturesworkshop.substack.com

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 lie. Then we conclude with some final insights and briefly talk about how to turn those insights into practical next steps for action. You’ll benefit from listening to Episode Nine: Ivana Milojevic on The Futures Triangle, before you take on this workshop episode. And as always, if you’re more of a casual listener to the podcast, feel free to skip over these even-numbered workshop episodes which are focused more on the day-to-day work of futures practitioners. Whatever your background, we hope you enjoy this episode and as always welcome your feedback! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefuturesworkshop.substack.com

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 optimistic “transformed” scenario.We’ve telescoped this workshop more than usual - spending less time on the administrative and practical aspects of the workshop (like thinking time and Post It notes), to give us more time to explore two different scenarios with this tool.Thanks for listening, and remember to subscribe if you’d like to get fresh episodes direct to your inbox when they drop. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefuturesworkshop.substack.com

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 facilitator and you’d like to feed back about what is and isn’t helpful in these workshops, please send us an email. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefuturesworkshop.substack.com

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 skip these workshop episodes and enjoy our interview episodes instead.Thanks for the feedback from practitioners here and on Linked In! Please keep it coming, we enjoy working with you to make these workshop episodes as useful as possible. Useful links:https://www.metafuture.org/ This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefuturesworkshop.substack.com

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. We’re in deep at this point! While episode one (and all our interview episodes) are designed to be enjoyed by the general listener, the workshop episodes like this one are aimed squarely at practitioners and facilitators who might benefit from hearing the tools used in practice.If you’ve signed up to The Futures Workshop out of a general interest in futures thinking, feel free to skip these alternate episodes. But if you are somebody who works with groups (or aspires to), I’m hoping these imagined workshops will be a unique and useful sessions to listen in on.As I mention in the episode, this is an experiment! We’ll keep tinkering with the format in the hope we can create something genuinely valuable for futures practitioners around the world. Your feedback is very welcome throughout - thank you for your support of episode one and we hope you enjoy this follow up on Bill Sharpe’s Three Horizons framework.www.futurestewards.com is the home of the 3H Network. There you will find:* Practice Network page has links to organisations using 3H, and in particular to the resources made available by the main originators of the practice: International Futures Forum and H3Uni* The Resources page has more resources, particularly the Ten Tools for Systems Change with accompanying introductory videos. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefuturesworkshop.substack.com

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 one-on-one (two-on-one if you count my producer/husband who sometimes chips in) with an international guest, followed by a second mid-week mini-episode in which you’ll have the opportunity to experience the tool in practice, using what we’ve learnt from our interview.This podcast is aimed at existing futures practitioners of all levels, at people running strategic foresight in companies and other organisations, and at anyone who’s heard about this area of “futures studies” and wants to find out more. I chose this format because, as a futures consultant myself, I often hear that people want to incorporate more futures thinking into their work but aren’t sure where to start - or they’ve come across a certain tool or approach but don’t quite have the knowledge, experience or confidence to make sure they’re doing it right.This podcast is for you! (And, for me!) Here they are, the tools you need to imagine and shape the future, presented to you with love by the people who created them. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thefuturesworkshop.substack.com