Culture, Creativity and Courses
Giant Rock, CA — December 2021
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New Year greetings to all. Wellness and happiness are relative states in early 2022, but we hope as many of you as possible are in a place to make change and manage uncertainty.
Recapping 2021
We haven't updated you with a newsletter since Spring of 2021, so it felt that it's about time to bring you into the picture. Our silence wasn't from lack of activity, but lack of time and ability to share what we've been up to. Much like 2020, we spent a great deal of 2021 working with organisations large and small to build their skills and open their horizons. Miraculously, in a year when many groups were still far-flung and limited in mobility, we were able to get back out into the world (carefully), and start seeing colleagues on both coasts of the US, in the Gulf, and Spain. Look for us to continue travel and connection where possible and permissible through 2022.
Workshops
We started 2021 with our open Strategic Storyforms course experiment, which ran twice in the first half of the year, in addition to several six-week intensive How to Future courses with global clients. Through a tight window of timing, regulation, and the wonders of vaccines, we were actually able to run some of the latter activities in person again, which was refreshing for our team and the client as well, and proved again how much good sensemaking and creativity is a social activity, enhanced by physical proximity.
Future Experience Design
We also spent a sizeable part of 2021 being stretched creatively ourselves, working on two briefs that engaged Changeist as part of a larger coalition of design, engineering, narrative and spatial planning talents to imagine large-scale future living environments. This was refreshing because it reminded us of how much we like doing what we do best, sensemaking and creative storytelling at scale, thinking about problems that haven't been thought about before, and considering socio-cultural as much as technical challenges to future experiences.
Sensemaking Tools
Mid-year, we were engaged by an innovation foundation to build out some of the concepts framed in our 2020 book How to Future into a custom trends collection and analysis platform. This was another challenging task due both to the size of the knowledge base we scoped with the client, and the need to reflect a particular sensemaking culture in the resulting platform, toolset and workflow.
With the assistance of our friends at Smithery, we extended some platform ideas we'd built for ourselves, and arrived at something both powerful, and flexible. The tools are already being put to use in the field, and hopefully elements of it will be publicly viewable before too long.
Future Explorations
Another project that quietly threaded through the year was a large public sensemaking exercise for global arts and culture sectors. What started as a tweet from Annette Mees in the summer of 2020 gradually snowballed into a steering group which included Changeist, Annette, Artistic Director of Audience Labs and a visiting Senior Research Fellow in Culture and Creative Industries at King’s College London, our good friend Honor Harger, Vice President of Attractions at Marina Bay Sands, formerly director of ArtScience Museum in Singapore, plus Arup Fellow Tateo Nakajima, and Dr. Robert Hanea, CEO of Therme Group.
Working with this steering group, Changeist developed and delivered the research for this Future of Arts and Culture project. Over the summer of 2021, using the Futurescaper online foresight platform, we reached out to almost 300 professionals from leading museums and galleries, exhibition spaces, performing arts, arts funding, and curation fields to cut through the pandemic fog and find out just what key issues and impacts they foresaw for the next decade. We took some time late in the year to review the data and understand the key themes that emerged, and the results are now ready to share with the public.
To that end, we will be joining a public discussion online next Tuesday, 11 January, at 2PM CET with the steering group team and attendees to go through the highlights of the study, including key scenarios, drivers and possible impacts, as well as strategic questions raised for these sectors. If you would like to join, or find out more, you can register at futureofartsandculture.org and get the streaming details. If you can't make the live discussion, you can stream the event later. Register to find out more.
If you participated in this project as a respondent, thank you for taking the time and sharing your insights.
Click above to register or find out more.
How to Future
Building on our decade of experience in this arena, we are still offering our How to Future applied futuring course throughout 2022, now with extra capabilities in the US. But, we are taking what we've learned in 2021 and making some changes to how we deliver it.
Due to various requests over the past few years, we developed and offered a condensed 10-hour version of the course to a number of organisations as a way to meet pandemic-driven demand for a baseline of critical futuring skills. While these short courses by and large met their objective, we found that some of the most important "dark matter" of learning, such as time to research, develop and socialise insights, gets shorted as we fit the instruction into these organisations' already cramped agendas. With all the competing pressures of changing work schedules, pandemic-driven strategic 180s, shifting staff and other factors, time given to scanning and sensing on which good futuring is built is diminished, and the critical value of the overall process lessened.
To that end, in 2022 we are encouraging any new organisations who would like to engage in skill building through our How to Future programme to consider the longer, intensive 18-hour programme designed to give participants time and space to learn, apply and explore the tools and concepts we share more thoughtfully and collaboratively. If you have other needs in mind, contact us, and we can co-develop something valuable with you. While we can deliver this programme online, we will be looking for creative ways to do as much in person as possible given conditions.
Anaglyph
As a last item, we also formally spun out a side project in 2021—a small content and concepting studio we call Anaglyph that emerged from our ongoing narrative and world building work. Through Anaglyph, we are able to collaborate with writers and producers, and eventually media platforms of different kinds, to bring to life story concepts we develop for TV, film, audio, print and live experience. Some of these stories live in the near future, some explore "today" through other lenses, and some reach back into recent decades to play with alternative histories.
We're pretty excited about the concepts that have emerged, even as we've imagined and sketched quietly. We're bringing it to light now because our first scripted audio concept, FREEPORT, was just awarded for Excellence in the English language scripted series category by Filmarket Hub, a European marketplace for new media concepts. As our first foray into writing for immersive audio, it is gratifying to be honoured by the review panel from some of the largest European media platforms. The story was inspired by an exploration of the shadowy world of freeports by Rahel Aima, and presented us with a way to play with the locked-room nature of these structures that largely sit outside international legal and financial scrutiny.
If you're interested in bringing this story to life, or want to talk about other ideas we have cooking, drop Susan a line.
That's enough for now. Wishing you a safe and steady start to the year. We look forward to connecting with many of you soon!
All the best,
Scott & Susan
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