Atelier WeekNotes w/c 13 Nov 2023
Towards a futures community of practice. Lessons from Undaunted's start-up founders. Aligning for the Climate COP (necessary but not sufficient).
I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (What’s needed, What’s ready? What can we do? What next?). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.
Apologies for the alte arrival of this WeekNotes. I had a full on week and weekend. Normal service will be resumed going forward!
This week covers:
Towards a futures community of practice.
Lessons from Undaunted's start-up founders.
Aligning for the Climate COP (necessary but not sufficient).
Towards a futures community of practice
Step: 2/DISCOVERING. Themes: Futures methods. Academia.
Last week saw what I hope will be the start of a futures community of practice, centred around The Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources (aka BSEER) at UCL. The content of the meeting is confidential (sorry). But there are a few things to unpack in that, specifically on BSEER, Futures and Community of Practice.
BSEER
University College London, aka UCL, "London's Global University" is, to be honest, a pretty confusing set up. I'm an Honorary Lecturer (teaching a module about Innovation and Sustainability in Business) within the Institute for Sustainable Resources (ISR, 'We generate knowledge in the globally sustainable use of natural resources and train the future leaders in the field').
ISR sits within BSEER, which includes three other institutes: UCL Energy Institute; UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering; and, UCL Institute for Sustainable Heritage. (BSEER itself sits within The Bartlett ('The Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment') but then things start to get really complicated. )
The practical consequence of letting a thousand flowers bloom / having many silos (delete according to preference) like this is that it can be hard to find people where there could be collaboration, whether directly on research questions or more upstream on methods and domains. Hence this meeting, to explore whether there were people across BSEER with enough shared interests on futures to be worth starting a community of practice.
Futures
Futures studies is "the systematic study of possible, probable and preferable futures including the worldviews and myths that underlie each future". At least, according to the World Futures Studies Federation. (You won't be surprised to learn that there are disagreements about what futures studies is, what it is for, and how it should be done. But then we've had notions of democracy and justice for over 2,000 years and no one agrees on the specifics there, beyond they are useful terms to use.)
We all use 'the future', pretty much all the time in our everyday -- just not necessarily explicitly or with careful deliberation. Our assumptions about the future shape what we do today in decisions large and small, and individual and collective. Every academic discipline has some kind of stance (or stances) to the future, even if they aren't necessarily aware of what futures studies folks have already done to deepen and critique that stance(s).
That's especially true in 'sustainability', which has an obligation to the future embedded in the key definition from the Brundtland Commission:
"Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." [Emphasis added.]
Specific futures methods are very prominent in the sustainability field, especially the IPCC's climate models. But there are many more ways that models (and the future) is used. Plus there are often futures methods used in a portion of a wider process which results in a research output, a decision, a policy, an investment or whatever.
Most governments and large companies want to have confidence before they make big decisions. But the future doesn't yet exist. So, you cannot collect direct evidence about the future. You have to study it. Which means addressing deep questions of how you can study something which does not exist, yet. Questions of method, and all the assumptions bundled up in what you know and how you can know it (aka epistemology) are close to the surface with futures.
In my experience, large institutions crave certainty when they are making decisions. Which means they don't want to engage with questions of method, just get something that they can trust without question. Which tends (not always, tends) to mean defaulting to familiar approaches and imagining that the future will be like today but a bit more so. Which leads to making decisions which typically reinforce the status quo. This cycle is only interrupted when it becomes very obvious just how much the status quo is struggling, and only then do people try something else. (I exaggerate for effect.)
As such, treating the future as 'today plus a bit' is part of us staying stuck, and a serious barrier to us acting wisely in the face of all the changes going on in the world. There is a need to develop how we use the notion of the future in our decisions and activities now. That feels like a necessary step, even thought it is also insufficient, because of how power is used in decision-making, how much brute inertia there is in the status quo and more.
In my own practice there has been quite a lot of 'futures methods'. There was little explicit use when I first arrived at Forum for the Future in 2003. But that changed with the arrival of a new CEO, who wanted Forum to develop some rare capabilities for having impact (and attracting funding). Core to those was futures. Subsequently, at Forum I did lots of scenarios (eg in 2008 Climate Futures, on how the social and political dynamics of climate change might play out), scenario planning (for PepsiCo, amongst many others) and more.
Since leaving Forum, I've done many 'futures' activities, including: a horizon scan of the green economy for the UNDP and Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership; speculative fiction on the rise of AI in a time of climate change; and designing the participative futures process that is the State of Sustainable Shipping (pilot coming in the new year, fingers crossed!). Plus innumerable use of futures exercises within workshops, and training in Three Horizons approach with International Futuers Forum.
When done well, a futures approach pushes the participants to have a broader, deeper and more rounded understanding of what is going on. It also helps create ‘prepared minds’, that can respond better to events (even ones which are not described in the process).
Futures methods are definitely part of my way of doing things, which I want to sharpen and deepen.
Community of Practice
For the Introduction and Invitation to the Atelier, I pulled together all the items in the studio. There are two categories explicitly in the invite, methods and topics (listed here). But there were two more categories I found. One was inquiry questions (which I will share in the coming weeks).
The other category was the communities that I participate in. I realised again (a re-realisation) just how much I rely on those communities for information, insight, ideas, and companionship as we attempt the unprecedented. Therefore, they needed to be part of how I thought about the operational reality of the studio (which is actually similar to the point about governance for start-up growth in Lessons from start-up founders, see below).
Plus, I also realised afresh that one of the things that want to be part of for the coming decades is a 'scenius' that is work on 'rich transformation' practices. (Scenius being Brian Eno's term for the genius of a scene, when a loose group can generate massive cultural results through a combination of competition and collaboration. And 'rich transformation' being my term of art for change which is more than strong reform or radical resistance but less than preparing good ruins.)
Hence, I was attracted to the idea of being part of a community of practice, one where people will roughly aligned values but different experiences could share their insights and feedback. This is part of wider hypothesis that deep change comes from communities going through cycles of social learning.
Thank you to Richard Sandford for the invitation, and being the prime mover in making it happen.
WHAT NEXT
Deepen this community of practice.
Share my inquiry questions and community groups.
Create a way to put an update across all activities into the regular WeekNotes.
Lessons from Undaunted's start-up founders
Step: 2/DISCOVERING. Theme: start up practice.
Last week, the Greenhouse incubator, of Undaunted (the climate innovation partnership of Imperial College and the Roayl Institution), held a graduation ceremony for Cohort 4. I was a mentor to a vertical farm start-up in that cohort (more here) and so went along to support Leo Roubicek of Acer Farms. The various start-up founders were asked to share an insight from their first year, plus a presentation from Peter Blake (his insights marked * below). Here are the ones that struck me:
Be choosy on your funders*. Yes, you can be desperate for cash. But, if successful, you'll be working together for years. So, some checks for any funders:
Do they share your beliefs (on the world, the problem you are addressing and the rough route to success)? If too different, then no dice. (Too similar can ultimately be a problem too, but is less common!)
Do they still have money to invest? If they are already far through their fund, then seeing a new start-up might just be about hitting their 'pipeline meetings' KPI, rather than genuine interest.
Can they bring expertise for your area? If they are going to price the risk roughly right, then they need to know about the domain.
Don't go alone*. Very much like International Future Forum (IFF) and their phrase of 'no solo climbing'. And something I am very aware that I am doing. One strong recommendation was to use governance to bring in people with the skills and connections you need. Governance should be success and growth. As such, the board should be much more outward-facing than on the shoulders of management.
Disregard positive feedback (unless they are a paying customer). It is easy for people to say they are interested or that something is good. But believe actions more than words. When someone has paid and says its good (and especially when they repeat their custome), then that is positive feedback worth listening to. Otherwise, treat with extreme caution, as people might be just saying what they think you want to hear.
Don't get wedded to your views. A number of the start-ups had pivoted, for instance starting with selling to mass customers but realising they should sell to other businesses. The map is not the territory. If you refuse to change your map, even when it is a poor guide to the territory, then you should expect to fail. Conversely, if you keep checking the difference between your map and your experience of the territory, then you can lean a better map, and then find a better route forward.
Address barriers through safe-to-fail actions. Lots of people face different kinds of barriers through their first year. Rarely was the best way forward more study. It was doing something that tested some aspect of next steps, adn revealed more of what might or might not work.
Double your goals. One group set themselves deliberately over-ambitious targets, They found that this pulled them forward. While I'm a bit cautions about the role of targets, I can hear a deeper logic. If you're in relatively unknown terrain (that 'explore' metaphor again), then you risk setting easy goals, and ones where you don't really learnkey insights. Doubling your goals forces you to truly explore what is possible.
WHAT NEXT
Use these in the next phase of the Atelier of What's Next
Aligning for the Climate COP (necessary but not sufficient)
Step: 7/DRIVING. Themes: climate.
Finally, I just want to share the key points from a briefing by some of the key climate NGOs. It is from Groundswell, a collaboration of Global Optimism (set up by the people who were key architects of the Paris Agreement), the Bezos Earth Fund and WRI Systems Change Lab. (All of these key players in the 'strong reform' part of the Depth of Change spectrum.)
Their edited key points (from here):
The goals of the Paris Climate Agreement are still within reach. This pack is designed to share key insights on some shared messaging frames and on major trends underway across sectors of the global economy to support leaders in uniting behind transformative outcomes at COP28.
Research on the existing climate narrative shows that overwhelmingly, the current media narrative is fear-inducing, creating taboos around climate - obscuring solutions and exacerbating political divisions.
Over-arching vision:
We are way off track.
Later is too late: this is our problem to solve, our opportunity to take.
Change is happening faster than we think.
But success is not inevitable.
COP28 must represent a giant leap for humankind to COP30 in Brazil.
COP28 is the moment for courageous leadership.
What to do:
Transform our energy systems: at least triple renewable energy capacity by 2030; ensure a just transition and phase out of fossil fuels; and, transition heavy-emitting sectors.
Transform our food systems and relationship to nature: conserve what we have; restore what we’ve lost; and, change how we grow our food.
Transform our finance systems: make sustainability grow; make finance flow; and, make it fair.
I agree with all of the content of that. My worry is where people are relying on the climate COPs to deliver anything substantive (more on that here).
I was listening to the Past, Present, Future podcast episode on democracy recently. David Runciman was saying how disappointed he was that the Labour Party in the UK (and left-leaning parties everywhere) were trying to fit their agendas through the small funnel of what can be done in the current institutions. His guest, Lea Ypi, was saying that historically, left-leaning organisations had to fight to be recognised (eg getting the vote for people without property, getting the recognition of trade unions). They expended the aperture of the institutions.
My reflection was that a lot of the efforts of climate actors goes into forcing what we want to happen through the very small funnel of the COP process (where any nation can veto anything, which gives lots of fossil fuel countries a lot of stopping power). The alternative is to work outside the current institutions with many purposes: creating the political power to get things through the current aperture; expanding the aperture of those institutions; and, doing things beyond the formal institutions. That is one way to understand the many citizen juries on climate and other issues.
All of which is to say: let's get behind the Groundswell briefing; and let's not rely on today's formal institutions to get done what needs to get done.
WHAT NEXT
Observe the COP (with some trepidation).
Keep developing in the Atelier ideas of what can be done to increase the aperture of the current institutions, and what can be done without relying on them (in the terms of the Depth of Change spectrum, 'strong reform' and 'rich transformation').