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

In two previous posts (Part 1 here, and Part 2 here), I have discussed the recent work about divergent political attitudes between young men and young women. The TL:DR version of that: loss of status, and lack of economic opportunity, breeds resentment. But this also has qualitative aspects: what does ‘good masculinity’ look like? —- My starting point here is a long article about masculinity in the Washington Post from last year by Christine Emba. The usual discourse around masculinity, if it’s not immediately linked to the word ‘toxic’, is about a current “crisis of masculinity”, and Emba use ..read more

This is the second of three pieces on gender, politics, and young people. Part 1 is here. — There is some unfinished business from the previous piece on the gendered of young people. ‘Young’ is 18-29. So let’s start, briefly, with the politics of young women, radicalised in the last decade (in the UK, Germany, and the US), and the last half decade in South Korea. In his FT piece and associated ex-Twitter thread, John Burn-Murdoch notes that this radicalisation isn’t just about gender issues. He uses attitudes to immigration as a measures for this: Young German women have become markedly ..read more

With a small nod to International Women’s Day, I am republishing here over the next three days three pieces that were originally published on my Substack newsletter, Just Two Things. — The data journalist John Burn-Murdoch is consistently one of the most interesting writers on the Financial Times. A recent FT article, which was also the subject of a long thread on ex-Twitter, points out some dramatic changes in political and social attitudes between young men and young women. In fact, this piece is likely to be mostly a set of charts. Here’s the headline data for the changing social and p ..read more

The magazine Stir to Action, and the project that sits behind it, has been one of the most effective popularisers in the UK of the idea of community economics and community wealth building. This is Stir’s ‘mission’ (though it doesn’t use this word): We work to create a more democratic economy in workplaces and communities, in particular through new infrastructure, business support, research and policy, and partnerships with local government. Curiously in the digital age, the project started as a print magazine, and over the decade since then this has been used as a platform to build a p ..read more

I co-wrote—with my sometimes colleague Emma Bennett—a short piece on why focussing on uncertainty is not a useful way for organisations to imagine the future. It’s been published to the SOIF website, so I’m also sharing it here. Talking about VUCA—Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity—is an unhelpful way to think about the future. It creates anxiety and it makes it harder for us to act. In practice, every purpose-driven business knows where it needs to get to to have a sustainable future. The challenge is how to get there. Unsticking ourselves from VUCA The world is mor ..read more

There’s a new report out from the International Monetary Fund that says that globally 40% of jobs will be affected by AI. That’s a big number, and frankly when you look across the trend in the literature on the impact of AI on work, it’s also a bit of an outlier. Sure, back in 2013 Frey and Osborne produced a model that that said that 47% of US jobs “were susceptible” to AI. But generally, these numbers have been coming down in other studies over the last decade. So I thought it was worth trying to understand the IMF analysis a bit better. Because, on the face of it, it’s at least possible tha ..read more

It’s been Davos week, which means that the world’s political and business elites are flying in to the Swiss resort by helicopter and private jet to mingle with each other. The worst thing about the annual World Economic Forum event is the temptation to take it seriously. It produces its own reports—its annual executive survey of risks, for example—and every management consultancy in the world of any size feels to knock up some kind of “thought leadership” to show that it has its finger on the pulse of the world’s CEOs.[1] Fortunately, that temptation was dispelled this year by The Browse ..read more

There was an article in Nature from late 2022 on degrowth that got some sudden attention over the holidays because economists and tech bros noticed it and turned out on social media to do some hating. In fact the lead author, Jason Hickel, claimed on Ex-Twitter that as a result the paper was the most-read on Nature during the break. Regular readers here will know that my main issue with the idea of “degrowth” is the name—that if you’re trying to change behaviour around an idea that is deeply culturally embedded in 250 years of modernity, it’s best (a) not to do it head-on, and (b) not to frame ..read more