Artefact 238
Sending up a flare
Hello there
We are gathering for our next Steps Collective event tomorrow, Tuesday, 1.30pm GMT, online only via Zoom - the link is here for tomorrow.
The Steps Collective, if you don't know, are a group committed to sharing provocations which get people thinking, doing and making in the regenerative space, which we started this year (sign up to follow).
Tomorrow, Lizzie Shupak and myself are speaking, before opening up for questions and reflections as per usual.
Firstly, I've seen Lizzie's slides, and I am pretty sure you'll love her talk. She will (and I'll use Lizzie's words here)...
...be sharing some thoughts about how we come to do regenerative work at all, and how we orientate ourselves, practically and psychologically, through our respective practices. She also explore ideas around emergence, bias, complexity and the role of inner regeneration, as well as considering how we counteract the traditional paradigm of designing for productivity, efficiency and consistency, which has led to organisational brittleness and ecological collapse, and instead move towards a more resilient model that embraces diversity, a plurality of “solutions” and rejects intellectual and actual supremacy of any kind.
Awesome, right?
Meanwhile, I'm... still writing my talk.
Though I kind of have an excuse.
I have been out in Lisbon, taking part in the inaugural edition of Future Days, 'a festival for futures and systemic thinkers, innovation-seekers, creatives, purpose-driven organizations and policy-makers to collectively create the futures of urban lives, equitable societies through and beyond technology'.
What has made this particularly interesting for me is that now, after the festival, the Future Days team are working to convey the insights of the festival into an annual report with actionable opportunities for the city, having been briefed beforehand by the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa.
The challenges the city set the team were a familiar complex entanglement with local flavours:
Given I gave a short lunchtime talk recently for a client exploring Participative Futures, and described a set of three working principles for it, I thought I could explore (fresh back from Future Days) the role for participative futures in the regenerative journey.
Part critique of the signal scanning exercise we ran together, and part an exploration of what we might do different with this sort of thing in future, leaning in to those three working principles.
I'd better finish the slides though, I guess. See you on Tuesday if you fancy it, at 1.30pm GMT, over here if you want to hear Lizzie's excellent talk and my... possibly incomplete one.
ttfn
John V Willshire
25.03.24