working notes of Future Fabulators

• prediction_markets
• can we use predictions to help separate/isolate important, predictable events within a “A Nonpredictive View of the World”? (cf. fragility → robustness → antifragility)
• what is the question? can it be answered decisively at a particular point in the future? what is at stake? what are the consequences or impacts?

• divination / invocation

• Christine Wilks talking about text as a way for developing character depth; http://www.riders-project.net/research/videos/christine-wilks-taking-text-out-of-the-box.html (This probably belongs elsewhere, but…)
  • performing text on screen
  • Varytale http://varytale.com
  • “Text becomes the equivalent of subtitles” - is this a good thing?
  • Very based around computer games.
  • “Character is a black box” - in PNs, we can only be based on interpretation based on behaviour and its artefacts, not on explicit exposure, unless we have things like “Dear Diary…”
  • Note: Prehearsals are first person narratives, PNs are third person. Thus a Prehearsal can have “more” introspection in some sense.

A lot of the scenario planning process has to do with Formalised Decision Making and how this is done in groups.

20140206 Having done several scenario workshops, it seems that the most powerful aspect of the process is the realisation that people usually live in multiple scenarios today - which makes them laugh in recognition, but also helps distill the issues very quickly. How 'futuristic' or accurate the scenario narratives end up being doesn't seem to matter so much. The realisation about their present situation already gives a sense of awareness what's going on and where they'd like to be. It makes the future more open or malleable in a way. So for us the question is how do we emphasise and support this renewed sense of agency? Prehearsals, scenario testing, 'how do we get from here to there' excercises are a good start, but more research is needed.

Here are a few possible research questions and directions (some quite broad, others very specific), collected from various debriefs

How to improve the prehearsal pocket guide? (notes from February 2014)

General questions:

• 'but why…' (experiential futurism)?
• how do we encourage a sense of agency amongst the participants when discussing and developing 'possible futures'?
• how do we clarify that what we’re doing is not about predicting the future, but about empowering people to be more aware of their present situation and clarify what they could do today to shape their actions to encourage a preferred possible future?
• what other forms can 'experiencing possible futures' take?
  • what is the shortest and/or longest time in which we can complete meaningful scenario workshops and/or prehearsals to come up with interesting results while keeping the process enjoyable for the participants?
  • what other methods, aside from scenario building, are used to discuss possible futures?
  • what can we borrow from other fields, such as; improv, role playing games, LARP, disaster drills, meditation… to improve prehearsals?
• how can we help increase the commitment of the participants to work towards their preferred future(s)? how much follow-up is needed?
• how could we enable participants to use digital tools to enrich the process, while avoiding distractions and displacements of email, social media, etc? what collaborative digital tools could we use to share the same digital working surface (something like Reactable for example)

Preparation beforehand

• what can participants prepare for a scenario workshop beforehand?

Commonly the people organising the workshop will “Work on identifying major drivers, trends and events should be initiated ahead of the first workshop: this is an opportunity to draw on relevant horizon scanning work and other analysis. Ideally this work will be synthesised into a format which can be accessed easily by workshop participants, either as preparatory material or at the workshop itself. Material researched at this stage should include a mix of thematic material, together with analyses of broader trends.” The Horizon Scanning Centre (pdf)

• what are the ideal settings (e.g. room size per person) for a scenario workshop?

Millenium project used questionnaires and interviews, then a computer analysis of answers to get to the

Key question

• what are good questions to ask?
  • The art of powerful questions
• how to better structure/encourage designing the core question?
  • questions game
• how can we encourage an 'inquiring state of mind'?
• why does it seem more difficult to phrase questions rather than stating problems?

“In nearly all cases it should be possible to formulate the purpose of the scenarios work as a question. If this proves difficult, this is often an indication that the work will not be taken up when completed, even if it is of a good quality.” -The Horizon Scanning Centre (pdf)

Mapping the present situation

• what are different ways to map-out the present situation surrounding the key question?
  • KPUU Framework
• when is this step necessary? when can it be reduced/removed?
• does it help to talk about things that are fixed, or constraints that exist?

Key factors

• how to best visualise and cluster the relationships between key factors
  • “interrogate anomalies: data or incidents that seem anomalous - that somehow “don’t fit”, seem weird or don’t make sense, should receive immediate attention. They could be pointers to a shift in the system as a whole” From: http://silberzahnjones.com/2012/10/04/crafting-non-linear-strategy-the-nature-of-the-problem/#more-799
• are we talking only about success criteria here?

Macro trends

• how much analysis is appropriate for the types of scenarios and prehearsals we’re making?
• how can we make assumptions and guesswork more apparent (i.e. indicating how drivers can be based on an assumption, guess or 'fact')?
• what is the relevance of facts and data related to macro trends in experiential futurism?
• how can we have a more constructive discussion about the macro trends which results in something more meaningful than a list of assumptions?
• how do we look at drivers as dynamic forces? should we be looking at responses to trends rather than trends in general? (nouns → verbs)
• what are existing ways of discussing trends with groups of people?
  • horizon scanning
  • Online collection of trends
  • TrendWiki
  • Futurescraper
  • Three horizons
  • Synbio Tarot downloadable from this page
• should we make our own STEEP cards to avoid the 'business bias'?
• are there other well understood methods to group trends other than the customary STEEP (in which cultural changes seem to be clumped in with social or political)?
• is there another way to look at large scale changes aside from trends (without having to do a PhD in each of the changes)?
• how effective are these methods and how can we usefully evalute them?
• what does a 'futurism without prediction' look like?

Ranking critical uncertainties

• what are different ways in which this is done by others?

Scenarios

• when to use one, two, three or more axes?

• Two axes method: Scenarios generated using the ‘two axes’ process are illustrative rather than predictive; they tend to be high-level (although additional layers of detail can subsequently be added). They are particularly suited to testing medium to long-term policy direction, by ensuring that it is robust in a range of environments. Scenarios developed using this method tend to look out 10-20 years.The Horizon Scanning Centre (pdf)
• Branch analysis method: The ‘branch analysis’ method is suited to developing scenarios around specific turning-points that are known in advance (e.g. elections, a referendum or peace process). This approach works best for a shorter time horizon: generally up to five years.The Horizon Scanning Centre (pdf)
• Cone of plausibility method: offers a more deterministic model of the way in which drivers lead to outcomes, by explicitly listing assumptions and how these might change. Of the three techniques, this approach is most suitable for shorter-term time horizons (e.g. a few months to 2-3 years), but can be used to explore longer-term time horizons. It also suits contexts with a limited number of important drivers.The Horizon Scanning Centre (pdf)
• Cause & Effect Scenario Generation
• http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTED_06.htmForce Field Analysis
• Backcasting
• Morphological Analysis
• Field Anomaly Relaxation

• how to better structure building scenario skeletons with guiding questions (which questions could be generalised?

From scenarios to story-worlds

• what techniques can we use to flesh out the scenarios into interesting stories
• what elements do we need in a scenario database?
• how to create rich characters and meaningful plots?

Scenario testing (signals, how to get from here to there)

• how is this done by others?
• what are important things to focus on?

Visualising

• which methods could we use to visualise possible futures?

Prototyping

• which methods could we use to prototype possible futures?

Prehearsals

• how to design them?
• how to host them?
• how to evaluate them?

Follow-up

• How can we follow-up what happens to the groups after we finish the workshops (especially to understand what happens to commitments to actions and preferred possible futures)?
• How much do we need to be involved in the follow-up?

20140205 While editing scenarios on the libarynth it became apparent how tricky it is to keep a consistency in information and layout of the scenarios. The scenario database we're planning to make should make this easier. Components that seem to be needed in all scenarios:

• what is the question?
• what are the scenario axes?
• sometimes we have a short answer to the question (usually created after making the scenarios)
• how far in the future does the scenario take place?
• scenario description
• genaral image(s)
• more specific/clarifying images
• links to the pages of related scenarios (and a 'parent' page that describes the workshop goals etc. - not sure if we should include this in the database?)

should we try to contextualise the scenarios directly in the database?

• a section with links to projects/theories/examples of (the beginnings of) this scenario already taking place today
• section on how the scenario is turned into a prehearsal (could be in the form of a 'day in the life of…“?
• reflections on the prehearsal
• etc.

or should we keep the database only as a 'short story collection'?

• open formats > closed formats
• utf-8 > ascii/latin-1/etc+
• documents
  • utf-8 text or ODF (libreoffice, openoffice) for editable docs
  • pdf for reference & archiving
  • VUE for diagrams
• semi syncronous; email, twitter, irc (freenode → #ff ?)
• asyncronous; dokuwiki, django, gitlab
• algorithmic sketching; racket, common lisp, python, git
• online
  • libarynth for text, tangents and collation → http://libarynth.org
  • flickr for image matter → https://secure.flickr.com/photos/foam/
  • vimeo for video matter → http://vimeo.com/fo4m
  • zotero for library and references → https://www.zotero.org/groups/foam_library
• potentially
  • tumblr, cargo, diasp, other?
  • prediction book
  • wikipedia