John Mahaffie

I made the case in my previous post Experiencing the future Part 1: Getting beyond analysis and changing minds that experiencing the future is vital to good foresight and benefits organizations. I don’t claim to be a practitioner of the most exciting and advanced experiential futures, but I have decades’ experience getting real business execs in real organizational situations to engage the future better, adding experiences that fit what business seems able to embrace and make useful.

Below I offer some “how to” suggestions for making foresight more experiential. For more on the leading edge, have a look at The Sceptical Futuryst, Stuart Candy’s blog—his topic list is chock full of intriguing and valuable ideas about helping people experience the future. And try a Google search on “experiential futures”.

The ideas below range from the simple to the somewhat more challenging and complex.

Better scanning – See Talk to the Frog and the ideas I share in Ideas on effective environmental scanning in the digital age which make the case for understand how the world is changing better, where possible experiencing that change first hand. The philosophy there is, “get out from behind the mouse.” This is the key to getting a more visual, tactile, and experiential sense of future possibilities–where the first clues or examples of them are in our world now.

Clear ideas about the future – The best foresight concepts are evocative descriptions of future possibilities, which begin to get our heads into something new. For example, the concept of virtual reality. This kind of futures experience is in our thoughts, but that is already more powerful than just engaging with data and analysis about change.

An image of something that may become big in our future. The Espresso Book Machine produces books on demand

Images – There are, by definition, no pictures of the future. But we can do at least two things about that:

1). Create pictures of the future as an artist can, or you can do without art skills, simply doodling, collaging, etc. and

2). Finding pictures of things that may already exist, but aren’t commonplace, and represent something we may see much more of in the future. For example, a picture of a goods-producing kiosk such as the Espresso Book Machine is inspiring of a wide-range of future ideas about goods produced on demand.

On these first two points, I’ve shared some advice for when you are presenting to groups in Giving presentations on the future.

Role playing – Having people get their heads into a particular identity, different from their own, is a powerful way to begin to shift their understanding and give them a different experience. And you can get a group to do this together, putting them into a simulated situation where their identities and circumstances are different, showcasing what might be true in the future. We also like to work with the “TOPs” (technical, organizational, and personal) multiple perspectives method with groups. This concept, described in detail here, was originated by futurist and systems science expert Hal Linstone. It helps a group understand the common perspectives that shape and are shaped by an organization’s decisions. We’ve had great success asking a group to break into three groups, each taking up one of these perspectives to confront issue or ideas about change.

“suffering” – A version of role playing is to have people lose something, or simulate losing something to highlight a potential future change. We had this experience with a futures team who decided to have those participating in a dinner be fed in three ways: normal food, a lavish feast, and plain rice and (simulated) dirty water. Each group had something to think and talk about, from different, simulated perspectives. You can also consider the opposite of “suffering”–Why not try out some utopian ideas and get people to describe and play with what the future would be like if something great happened, such as the end of hunger or cancer.

Getting people to see, touch, experience the leading edge of change: Packaging Executives visit a Center for Hard to Recycle Materials

In the world – It’s particular powerful with office-bound people to get them “out from behind the mouse” and out into experiences different from their own. That can mean seeing things that exist today, but that represent a change we will likely see more of. For example, we put a group of packaging executives on a bus and took them first to a standard municipal recycling plant and then to a center for hard to recycle materials (aka a “CHaRM”). The CHaRM is a rare facility–at the time there were only a few in the world. But it may represent a vital future in their business. Despite their being in the packaging business, some had never been to a conventional recycling facility, let alone to a CHaRM. It was eye-opening for some and idea-provoking for most of them. I reflected on this kind of experience in an earlier post, Offsetting your suburban, middle class, white collar bias which advocates for you getting loose of whatever built-in perspectives and biases you might have.

Scenario building – I’ve written several times about the scenario method and my fondness for it. Its power in really getting people’s head into the future is remarkable and reliable. Scenarios go far beyond basic trend analysis and forecasting to depict in words and/or pictures whole futures, with the changes we are thinking about portrayed in real situations. The greatest power of the method is in experiencing the process, though the outputs can be terrific tools for communicating about the future and sharing the experience with others.

Farmville and other mobile/web games teach people about big complex systems

Gaming – Games give players the power to shape future outcomes. They are a way to bring alive the forces and countercurrents possible that we try to convey in scenarios. Consider for example the power of fantasy ball teams in bringing to life the meaning and power of strategic decisions. More games are about life and decisions than ever. The mobile/computer game Farmville is teaching its virtual farmer users about climate change, for example.

Other tools, techniques and methods

Virtual worlds – online and console gaming can simulate futures in elaborate and immersive ways, including allowing players to game out outcomes of decisions.
Experiential scenarios – a method for bringing future possibilities more alive for people’s learning and understanding, debate and discussion. It goes beyond art and narrative storytelling to, for example, create experiences in the real world, such as simulating a pandemic’s effects on a city, as was done in Coral Cross.
Artifacts from the future – a long-time feature at the back of Wired magazine that features similated objects; consumer products, for example, from some future year. See: Found futures.

No matter how far into the experiential to reach, you’ll gain something from working to bring the future more alive with your colleagues. It’s worth the effort and the risk you’ll take. Give it a try!

Images: Espresso Book Machine via ondemandbooks.com, CHaRM by jbmahaffie, Farmville by tankgore1 via Flickr

It’s not possible to directly experience the future, it hasn’t happened yet, you cannot go there. And it’s also not possible to directly experience the past—we don’t have a way to go back. The situations have a lot in common–our understanding of past and future are challenged in much the same ways.

I’ve played with the problem on both ends. Before I became a futurist, I was intent on becoming an archaeologist, and studied archaeology at the bachelor’s and master’s levels. Over those years, I met a lot of archaeologists who went beyond books and field research to understand the past better. They tried out ancient technologies and lifeways. They were experiential archaeologists.

Mayan Eccentric Flint — Eccentric Flint, Late Classic Maya

My own experiential effort was brief—I tried flint knapping—the shaping process used to make stone tools from cryptocrystalline stone (flint or chert). That gave me an appreciation for some of the finer specimens of stone axes, blades, spear points and arrowheads we were excavating at a Woodland Indian site in southern Illinois, and the amazing Mayan eccentrics (see picture) I learned about when working in Belize. The main results of my experiential effort were cut and blending hands. But I gained an appreciation for ancient technologists.

A recent article in the New Yorker brought this back to mind (abstract here). It tells the story of Lucy Worsley the Chief Curator, at Historic Royal Palaces, a non-profit that runs the Tower of London, Kensington Palace, and Hampton Court Palace, Kew Palace, and the Banqueting House at Whitehall.

Worsley’s work is about bringing to life the lives of Britons (mainly royals) from centuries ago. Among the big experiences she has worked on is recreating and eating a meal served to George III on February 6, 1789.

Leading edge futurists are doing things like this too, and their efforts are a superb way to bring the future alive—to get people beyond the analytical to ideas (experiences) about the future they can actually feel and understand.

Futurist Stuart Candy is one of the field’s leading practitioners. He frequently blogs about experiential futures at The Sceptical Futuryst. Stuart has developed techniques around experiential futures scenarios and recently completed a PhD on that topic, “The Futures of Everyday Life: Politics and the Design of Experiential Scenarios.”

Lucy Wolsey—the experiential historian—has caught a lot of flack from more “serious” historians who think her efforts are silly, misleading, etc. The experiential futurist risks the same thing, with the most likely push-back being from business clients who think their people won’t tolerate things like role playing, and that good business behavior is about PowerPoint briefings in a meeting room, not going places, seeing things, and trying things.

There is at least one blog that focuses on what’s wrong with “experiential archaeology”, it’s called Bad Archaeology. Its authors make the reasonable point that “We cannot shake off the contemporary nature of the experience” when trying to simulate the past. And further, “When we experience places like Stonehenge, Giza or West Kennet, we are experiencing 21st Century, contemporary places.” I think these guys go too far, and they’ve painted themselves into a philosophical corner. There’s plenty of learning and insight to be had by standing at the foot of the Great Pyramid.

The same problem applies to the future, our presentist tendencies are unavoidable as we try, pretend even, to experience what the future might be like.

But I’ve seen over the years that to shake people loose from their fixed thoughts about the future, and to get them to examine their assumptions, you have to try to take them new places, and analytical thinking won’t always get that done. Experiences help change minds.

Lucy Worsley, debating the validity and value of experiential work, told a scholarly audience: “I don’t feel my job will be done until history is as popular as the ‘The X-Factor.’” I am sure they hated that thought, but she’s right, you get more done if you engages people’s minds and hearts, whether trying to have them understand the past or the future.

Not being from a traditionally, academic-based discipline, futurists are less persnickety than historians about the value and validity of experiences. But these efforts can still be a hard sell. It’s worth trying.

Note: A little more on my overarching point about experiences is in my post Two sides of foresight work.

I’ll follow up straight away with ideas on how you can build the experiential side of foresight.