Future Times Aotearoa

  Hi again, Yvonne and Loo here! We've just been reading New Zealand futurist Robert Hickson's Nov 2nd 2020 blog post: "Improve mental models not metaphorical balls"  and we think it's a brilliant illustration of  the importance of not-knowing and breaking our own frame - ideas we wrote about in  our manifesto .   Robert's blogpost  is a response to an article in Foreign Affairs magazine called   "A Better Crystal Ball" , which suggests more powerful methods to predict the future. He writes: "In the magazine  Foreign Affairs , Scoblic & Tetlock highlight that the US spends over a trillion dollars a year on national security but is continually being surprised by events. This, they put down to taking the wrong approach in thinking about the future. The tendency (not just in the US) is to extrapolate from (and so plan for) past events, and/or focus too much on some issues, and dismiss others too quickly." The article goes on t...

Futuring in Aotearoa: Stepping out into the unknown Stepping out of the box and into the unknown: Illustration by Loo My name is Yvonne Curtis. Welcome to my inaugural post.   I have been involved in futuring, being inspired, frustrated, delighted and impassioned about the discipline, for over 30 years.   And, sometimes, I feel all of these concurrently, which makes for interesting times!   This stepping out into the unknown is where futuring can really make changes for us as communities and countries, and indeed as a species.   It takes courage and time to allow this process to develop, and I have watched, sometimes with despair, as these processes have been shut down prematurely and a shorter planning cycle from a much narrower base determined the outcomes.   Where the process is allowed to play out, moving naturally, from a wide scan to a more narrow focus and possible actions, possibilities emerge that literally seem to come from “out of the blue”.   R...