Discounts, Cocktails and Climate Change
Happy February! Another quick newsletter with a few useful items:
Bring Colleagues to Strategic Storyforms
One of the things that made our first Strategic Storyforms Masterclass enjoyable was the unexpected presence of teams from several organizations—3 in fact. This gave us a great dynamic of independent and specialist folks blending with groups who were familiar with each other. The independents learned from the questions and insights shared by the colleagues from bigger organizations, and vice versa. Everyone came away with something new, and the groups of colleagues could take a new common practice back to their respective organizations.
We are, of course, used to working with mixed groups, and facilitating in ways that help increase the knowledge exchange. We also like to mix groups in various activities to spice up the conversation and creative outputs. For future Masterclasses, we’ve also added time for more discussion, as we mentioned in our previous newsletter.
All of this is to say, we are now offering a discount for organizations who want to sign up for our upcoming Strategic Storyforms Masterclass for US and Canada. If you are signing up two or more individuals from the same organization, we can offer a code for a 20% discount on all registrations for that organization. Contact us directly and let us know how many participants you plan to register, and we will send a discount code for your organization to use.
Also, if you have three or more people joining from one organization, we can set up invoicing as well. This also goes for organizations such as NGOs who require this process for approval.
We’re already filling seats with a diverse group, and hope you can join us. European dates will be announced soon, with a view to a later summer session.
Uncertainty Club: Uncertainty Cocktails
A few messages back we talked about experimenting with conversations on different platforms. Social audio app Clubhouse is one of those. There are as many opinions about Clubhouse as their are users (something north of five million by recent counts).
We ran a few sessions in late 2020 in a space we founded called Uncertainty Club, and had some fun conversations. We took a break for about eight weeks due to work commitments, but have decided to dip a toe back in and run a few more sessions this month. We’re calling this new series Uncertainty Cocktails because they fall at 6PM CET on Friday afternoon, and it seems like a good moment wherever you are to take a sip of something relaxing and join an easy conversation about interesting topics. Apologies to our friends at Near Future Laboratory, who also hold Office Hours in that time slot. Maybe we’ll merge a session :)
Our first chat is this evening at 6PM CET with designer and writer Alex Deschamps-Sonsino, talking about her new book Creating a Culture of Innovation, which explores the history and dimensions of creating collective innovation spaces and practices.
Next week we’re having a conversation with writer, producer and curator Samantha Culp to talk about her recent piece for The Atlantic on the legacy of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock and the evolution of pop futurism. Same time, same channel.
If you have ideas about future sessions, let us know. Typical format is <90 minutes, Q&A and open discussion.
The Future of Climate and Insurance
One last quick note. This time last week I was privileged to moderate an hour-long webinar called Insurance 2040: Rethinking risk in the age of climate change for our friends at AXA. Not only was this a great conversation with Olivier Desbiey of AXA Foresight, Andrew MacFarlane of AXA XL, Deborah Balk of CUNY, and Greg Lindsay of New Cities Foundation, it was a milestone in a longer process that stretched back a year, to pre-pandemic times.
Beginning in January 2020, Changeist was invited by AXA’s Foresight team to help refresh that group’s applied futures skills as outlined in our book, How to Future. With the pandemic, what was originally a 3-day in-person intensive session quickly became a distributed, multi-part online workshop across several months, the core of which was an applied research project on environment, technology and socio-economic futures. The initial output of this is a fantastic report, the first part of which was explored through last week’s webinar.
We’re grateful to the AXA team for the chance to work with them in challenging circumstances, and do some important work on the future of risk. Do check out the discussion above, and keep an eye out for more output from the AXA team in due time.
That’s it for now. We look forward to hearing from you, and wish everyone a safe and healthy spring.
—Scott
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