‘War Game’ follows a ‘soft simulation’ of an insurgency in the USA on 6th January 2025. The game is designed to find out how the system responds under pressure ..read more

Cybernetics may be making a comeback. Stafford Beer’s Viable System Model can help us diagnose organisational failures—and improve the conditions for success ..read more

18% of Britain’s school students leave school without any qualifications—all but unemployable. A new coaching and mentoring programme seems to make a difference ..read more

I’ll write more here soon about the some of the structural questions raised by the UK General Election, notably the continuing decomposition of the 2024 Conservative party. But one of the lessons of the general election campaign has been is the inability of politicians to talk about difficult issues, especially about economics. Because this chart (taken in this version from the Financial Times) is really the only thing you need to know about British politics at the moment. (Source: FT analysis of UK data) What it shows is that after 2008, or so, the British economy fell off the track of ..read more

The Rethinking Migration and Mobility report that I co-wrote for the International Organisation for Migration has been published. My fellow authors are my SOIF colleagues Paul Raven and Iman Bashir. It’s a thinkpiece which is intended as a contribution by the IoM to the United Nations Summit of the Future As I think I have mentioned here before, Iman and I facilitated a workshop with a group of migration experts in Istanbul in October. This provided an initial set of ideas for the report which we then developed with some supporting research and analysis. The report can be downlo ..read more

I first came across the work of Stafford Beer in the 1990s, first around the edges of some reading about the Allende government in Chile, where he and Fernando Flores tried to build a cybernetic information system for the government2. And then, because these things come in pairs, I was able to commission a workshop on behalf of a UK government department (in 1998) that used Beer’s Syntegration model as a way to get an expert group to make some decisions about the future of digital media. (Photo: Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) Once you’re exposed to these ideas, they become ..read more

I’m a member of the Agri-Foods for Net Zero network, and it runs a good series of knowledge sharing events. (I’ve written about AFNZ here before). Last month it invited one of Britain’s leading systems academics, Gerald Midgley, to do an introductory talk on using systems thinking to explore complex problems. All of the images here are courtesy of Gerald Midgley, who generously shared his slides after his talk. AFNZ has also shared a video of the talk online. The questions he addressed were: What are highly complex problems? What is systems thinking? Different systems approache ..read more

As May Day approached this year I finally got round to a small project I’d been meaning to do for a few years now. This was to read Peter Linebaugh’s book The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day, which is a collection of pieces he has written over the years—some pamphlets, some articles—for and about May Day. Peter Linebaugh is a radical American historian, probably best known for his books on English history—on 18th century capital punishment in The London Hanged, on the history of the commons in The Magna Carta Manifesto. He’s clear which side he’s o ..read more

A sometimes colleague asked me a question about the Seven Questions interview framework, and when I had a look at it I realised that although the framework, or versions of it, is widely used by futurists, it’s not much written up. The framework itself is published by the UK’s GO-Science in their Futures Toolkit (p.29), and looking at some of my recent proposals, I barely send out a proposal that doesn’t mention it—we use an adapted version—as part of the overall project method. The reason that it is widely used is that it was used by Shell in their scenarios process, and it is writte ..read more

I’ve been aware of the concept of “literary futures” since I attended a workshop at Lancaster University’s then Institute for Social Futures in early 2020.[1] Emily Spiers ran a narrative futures component in an all-day workshop that was, presciently, about biohazards. That work has been taken further by Emily’s former colleague Rebecca Braun, now at the University of Galway, and she has just published a paper called ‘Literary Futures: Harnessing fiction for futures work’ with two Galway colleagues. It’s an interesting approach, and I am going to point to some highlights here. The wh ..read more