Happy May to everyone, wherever you are, and under whatever conditions. This is a missive to update you on a few things and to ask for your input on others. So, let’s get straight to it.

Online Courses Expanding

We dropped a previous short newsletter about six weeks ago letting you know about our online courses for organizations, with groups larger than eight required. We’ve run a number of sessions this Spring already, and have learned a tremendous amount about bringing inherently social learning into a digital space, and become more ambitious designers of digital learning spaces. A big thanks to my colleagues Susan Cox-Smith and Lily Higgins for bringing their expertise to the shape and delivery of these experiences.

Bringing a large group together to collaborate on screen for hours at a stretch is like doing a participatory workshop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Things move a little more slowly, and complexity can be harder to communicate in 2D space, and of course, extra attention must be given to the cues we take for granted when we’re physically adjacent.

Over the past four or five years, we’ve received many requests to provide open courses and workshops for individuals. This is tricky in physical space, though many do it well. You need to be in the right city, find affordable and useable space, wrangle catering and hospitality, etc. However, the necessary move online has provided two important benefits—it allows us to be in many places at once, and focus on the content and delivery. Hence, we can better bring together individuals or small groups in adjacent timezones to work together. Great, right?

This means we need a little feedback in order to better focus what we offer. We’ve created a short survey that you can reach by clicking the button below. If you have a strong interest in participating in one or a series of our online workshops, please take a moment to fill in this anonymous survey.

Click for survey

We are experimenting with several course structures (naturally), and your feedback will help us work our the what, when, and where we provide these. Thanks in advance for your input. Also, if there are other things you would like us to try to deliver remotely, from particular group talks on topics of interest to specialist workshops, let us know by responding to this email. We’re pretty adventurous, and take your ideas to heart. Now’s the time to ask!

Book Update

At the time we sent the last update, the publication of How to Future: Leading and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange was still on the original schedule with Kogan Page, our great publisher. In fact, we had just submitted final edits, and off the book went to production. Well, as with many businesses in the UK and worldwide, KP needed to slow some processes to rightly deal with the widening impact of COVID-19. This has resulted in our 3 July publication date being moved back to 3 September. While we were greatly anticipating getting the book into your hands mid-summer (and the contents couldn’t be more applicable than in this moment), we are fully on board with ensuring everyone’s health, safety, and stewarding business carefully. Now, we can enter an autumn of rebuilding, and new directions, with the HTF in hand.

For those (many!) of you who have kindly pre-ordered, thank you, and thanks for your patience. A big thanks to those who have ordered a number of copies for your team or colleagues—we’re excited at the types of great, community-facing organisations who will be spreading HTF around and putting it to use. If you have a special order or are interested in a version customised for your organisation (quantities over 100), get in touch and we’ll connect you with the people who can make that happen.

One last note here on supporting businesses directly. If you can, please consider ordering directly from Kogan Page, and support this terrific, close-knit team as they continue to bring relevant and informative books to market. They ship internationally, and price in GBP and USD. If that doesn’t make sense for your location or wallet, we’ve provided a long list of booksellers around the world who may be closer to you, in terms of shipping or currency. Both options can be found via the howtofuture.com site we built for the book.

Remote Advisory

Since we announced Remote Advisory in March, several groups and companies have already come to us for an hour or more of insight into critical topics where a clear forward view is needed. Naturally, topics have been tied to COVID-19 and its impacts, but have ranged from discussions of long-term social and cultural impacts and disruptions to discussions of how work patterns may change permanently, what the economic and political landscape may look like in five or ten years, so more. The conversations have been great, and we’re now experts at another three or four videoconferencing tools.

If you’re looking for fresh input, people to challenge your assumptions, or take a longer view of the landscape, connect with us. We’re here to think with you. We might even break out a whiteboard.

Underfutures Podcast

You may know of our Underfutures podcast series, which we began last January, and ran for six episodes. After an initial season, we lowered the volume on Underfutures to focus on finishing the book, and to refresh the approach. We’re happy to say Season 2 is in early stages of creation, and will be coming your way in with the first episode in May. We’ll use it to dig deeper into topics we’ve discussed in the book, and ties those back to the world around us. There will be new guests, and a larger lineup on our side as well. Find Underfutures on your favourite podcast distribution platform, and hit ‘Subscribe’ if you don’t already. It will be worth your time.

The Future Actually Is Now

Since the last newsletter, I wrote a quick reflection for NewCities about our work late last year with Nesta in the UK. For this project, we used scenario-based speculative artefacts to close the imagination gap around community resilience in emergencies, and help both people and institutions better understand the challenges of adapting to new models and extraordinary conditions. Several of the scenarios feel very relevant in the midst of this pandemic, as among them we explored alternative relationships with delivery platforms as a way of building up and distributing reserves of critical supplies, and contact-tracing-like grassroots public health testing and outreach, just to name two. Check them out, and let us know what resonates with you.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading, and don’t forget the survey above. Stay safe.

— Scott

Afterburn

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