Work / Toolkit
Futuring, complexity, and ways of thinking are usually taught separately, by different people, to different audiences, using incompatible vocabulary. That is a problem, because the situations educators face need all three at once. I am working on bringing them together into one coherent toolkit — few enough moves to be learnable, structured enough to be teachable, and honest about where each way of thinking stops being useful.
Foresight methods are good at one specific thing: making it possible to take seriously a future that is not an extrapolation of now. Scanning, scenarios, and back-casting all exist to break the assumption that tomorrow is today with better hardware. Without this, planning quietly becomes an exercise in defending current arrangements.
Complexity gives an account of why well-intentioned interventions produce the opposite of what was intended — delays, feedback, unintended consequences, and the difference between a complicated system you can decompose and a complex one you cannot. It is the antidote to the belief that a school is a machine with a broken part.
Design method, systems mapping, critical questioning, and the rest are what turn an insight into something a team can do again next Tuesday without you in the room. They are the most portable of the three and the most easily hollowed out into a workshop format with sticky notes and no argument.
Tension
The system exists to make tensions productive, not to smooth them. Naming the conflict is more useful than pretending the three agree.
Scenario work asks you to describe several coherent futures in enough detail to plan against. Complexity says the interesting behaviour of a system is emergent and not reliably forecastable, and that confident description is exactly the error. Both are right about something. The reconciliation I find defensible is that scenarios are useful as rehearsal rather than as forecast — they are for building the capacity to recognise a situation, not for identifying which one will arrive.
A framework earns its keep by being simple enough to hold in your head under pressure. Complexity earns its keep by insisting that the situation is not that simple. A framework that has been made complex enough to be faithful is no longer usable, and a framework usable enough to teach has already thrown away most of what complexity was pointing at. I do not think this dissolves. I think you name it, and you teach people the failure mode of the tool along with the tool.
The horizon that makes foresight worthwhile is longer than the horizon most teams are accountable for. A department planning next year cannot act on a 15-year signal, and pretending otherwise produces a nice document and no change. The honest version connects the long signal to a decision that is live now, or admits it is doing sensitisation rather than planning.
Structure
TBC
The current shape of the toolkit, for FIG 02
The figure above is a placeholder standing in for the real structure. It shows the three strands meeting on a shared situation, which is true but not yet specific enough to be useful. This is the one piece of the site that cannot be drafted for me.
Unsettled
The most credible section on this page.
Get in touch
I would rather talk to someone who has tried to teach this and found it hard than to someone who agrees with me. If you are building something in the same territory — foresight for schools, systems literacy, design method for educators — I would like to hear how you handled the tensions above, particularly the second one.
Where to find me