Atelier WeekNotes w/c 3, 10, 17, & 24 (!) June 2024

IN THE ATELIER: Wāhine Māori in tech delegation; Influential Trajectories; Hard Investigations. DETECTING: International Futures Forum Stirling Gathering.

I am writing newsletter of #weeknotes of starting the Atelier of What’s Next (a studio for initiatives at the frontier of generating a better future). For my rationale for starting the Atelier see here.

Apologies for missing three WeekNotes. The last month has had another burst on my family crisis, which has taken up my time and energy.

This update covers the 4 weeks of June, but in I've summarised most things.

IN THE ATELIER

- Wāhine Māori in tech delegation

- Influential Trajectories

- Hard Investigations

DETECTING

International Futures Forum Stirling Gathering

- My connection

- This moment in IFF history

- 'Where are we and what time is it?'

- Kitbag, emotional resilience, suicide prevention

- What do you most want to stand for?

- Graham Leicester: helping many people make a place to stand over many decades.

- The dynamism next time

- The shadow sides of a 'Second Enlightenment'

How can the Atelier of What's Next be of service to you, and your purposes? We'd love to hear from you. Perhaps you have a challenge or idea to put in the studio. Maybe one of our existing topics appeals to you. What if you love to make new things happen by being part of the studio? Or if you have feedback or comments that would improve this deck. Either click the button below or email davidbent@atelierwhatsnext.org.

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IN THE ATELIER

Wāhine Māori in tech delegation

In the w/c 27 May WeekNote, I mentioned organising a breakfast for a group of indigenous female tech entrepreneurs from Aotearoa New Zealand, which came about because of my Edmund Hillary Fellowship connection.

I'm glad to say it was a success, and very moving as well.

The recent UK-NZ Free Trade Agreement is the first agreement of its kind with a chapter on indigenous trade. This lead to a delegation of ten wâhine Mâori leaders in tech to London Tech Week on a trade mission and knowledge exchange.

We had about 8 or so people who advise tech entrepreneurs from the UK ecosystem, some sustainability-orientated, and others not. I had reached out to mission-driven VC and incubator Zinc (where I am Fellow), Imperial College's climate change innovation centre Undaunted (where I am a mentor) and other networks.

A few of the delegates came up to me afterwards saying they had met exactly the person they needed (eg someone who does IP law in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand). I could see why these women had been selected: strong personalities with strong businesses. A convivial and stimulating time was had.

Huge thanks to The Conduit, a "collaborative community of people committed to creating a just, prosperous and sustainable future" where I am a member. They made the space and breakfast materials available for free.

The most moving moments, though, were right at the start.

One of the ladies had a 'moko kauae', a tattoo on the chin which indicates a woman is recognised as an elder by others (bit more here). She spoke an opening powhiri (prayer) in first Maori and then in English.

Then the ladies started to sing. It was clearly a song deeply familiar to them. It was quite beautiful, reminding me of the Taize multi-part short songs: simple but profound expressions of intention and togetherness. It brought a tear to my eye.

WHAT NEXT. I'm hoping to connect the programme lead with EHF, so there is on-going expertise available to the female tech entrepreneurs, if they want it.

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Influential Trajectories

A few updates about the Influential Trajectories method. First a reminder:

Purpose: To create shared commitment to investments and initiatives that drive towards ambitious outcomes.

How: Imagine different trajectories from today to a future goal together (informed by latest systems transition theories), test each to see if the pre-conditions for exist, and then invest based on the results.

Acknowledgment. We are very grateful for the opportunity provided by Sustainable Shipping Initiative, and funding from Lloyd's Register Foundation, for the first pilot use in the State of Sustainable Shipping (SoSS).

A first rehearsal. I was able to do a rehearsal of the workshop(s) with a group from a school called HOME, a "gathering place and a learning community for those who are drawn to the work of regrowing a living culture". One part of the community meets monthly to explore different kinds of things.

I was able to use the June session to walk through what doing Influential Trajectories would be like. (the main limitation: we were online, and I don't have the materials ready to do a virtual workshop.)

Lots of great feedback, supportive but not holding back on critiques. The journey to minimal viable product continues!

A new paid-for project. As well it needs to. The first pilot remains the State of Sustainable Shipping (SoSS) with the Sustainable Shipping Initiative (SSI). New this month: there is a second use. It will be with [currently redacted] bank, on electrifying the major economic sector of an OECD nation. More on this when I can share.

WHAT NEXT

• Developing the method (steps, workshops, presentation materials, information capture templates).

• Deliver on SSI and mystery bank projects.

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Hard Investigations

I'm contributing to a Hard Investigations, a project within Hard Art.

Hard Art is "a cultural collective of artists, activists, and scientists standing in solidarity in the face of climate and democratic collapse." Earlier this year, they organised the Fete of Britain, a "four-day celebration of collaboration and imagination in the face of the great challenges of our time". Several thousand people attended at Factory International in Manchester.

Hard Art is planning another Fete of Britain for late next year, with citizen assemblies alongside cultural activities. One way of expressing the aim is to create the cultural pre-conditions for the deep transformations we need.

All of which might sound very worthy and hand-wavy. But. The core includes Brian Eno, the noted cultural pioneer, and Clare Farrell, one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion. A track record of being ahead of the curve, convening and organising people, and of getting change to happen. (I think XR was vital in getting Theresa May to commit to Net Zero, for instance).

Plus, there is the history of cultural and political change. The existence of an artist movement is both a signal of what creatives are picking up from their work, and a possible vehicle for influencing wider change. (Which isn't the same as every cultural movement succeeds in its wider aims.)

Finally, there is the Margaret Mead quote: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has." (Which isn't the same as all small groups are successful.)

My connection is through Clare. She lives locally to me, and we bonded when talking about Jem Bendell's Deep Adaptation (note: I think it is a useful but flawed concept). I interviewed her for my podcast 'What can we do in these Powerful Times?' here.

Hard Investigations is one part of Hard Art. It is diving into complex, vital topics, as part of preparing for the next Fete of Britain. I can't say a lot more as it is currently confidential.

My reasons for getting involved.

1.Having a pro-sustainability cultural shift is important. Any long-lasting programme for 'industrial revolutions on a deadline' will need political will, plus wide and deep support.

2.Avoiding more of a nativist turn is also important. Even if a cultural movement doesn't foster all the pre-conditions for a full-stack paradigm shift, maybe it can be successful in keeping the authoritarian nationalists from taking up more powerful positions. (I'm writing during a general election campaign where there is open speculation about Nigel Farage becoming the next leader of the main right-leaning UK party.)

In 2017 I wrote a scenario where countries choose either to deliver 'security through renewal' (using mission-orientated policies to drive deep socio-economic change), or ;security through protection' (turning inward to maintain the fossil fuel status quo; think Children of Men). The best kind of results from Hard Investigations are moving us into security through renewal, but there is still value in resisting security through protection.

3.Learning from the creative process. A background in physics and accounting gives one kind of training. But, as the co-founder of the Atelier, I could do with improving my design and creative methods, including the slightly mysterious negative capability of just exploring forward in roughly a useful-seeming direction without knowing how things will play out.

WHAT NEXT. Workshop next week (which I am running) planning the next phase of Hard Investigations.

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DETECTING

International Futures Forum Stirling Gathering

I've spent most of this week in Stirling, Scotland (which was, with great determination, not having a heat wave) for a gathering of the International Futures Forum (IFF) community.

My connection

Here's how IFF describes itself: "IFF is a registered charity with a mission to enable people, communities and organisations to flourish as effective agents in powerful times...We address complex, messy, seemingly intractable issues – local, global and all levels in between – generating agency,  hope and an expanded sense of what's possible."

Regular readers might recognise the phrase 'powerful times'. Yes, the IFF mission was the inspiration for the name of my podcast on what inspirational people are doing and why, called "What can we do in these Powerful Times?".

As I explain in my first post about the podcast, I was always really struck by the phrase 'powerful times’. It is very ambiguous. So the times are powerful. And that implies that they’re full of challenge and turbulence, but also full of potential if only we can figure out ways of acting ways of being that will make that difference.

The phrase is Machiavelli quoting Lord of Siena tells him: “Wishing to make as few mistakes as possible, I conduct my government day to day and arrange my affairs hour by hour, because the times are more powerful than our brains.”

My view has always been that, as true as the Lord of Siena's sentiment may feel, I don’t think we need to resort to only being reactive and only acting hour by hour. I think there is something more and different we can do, individually and collectively.

IFF was founded in 2001 with that ethos. The start was a "two year inquiry into how to take effective action in a world we do not fully understand and cannot control". The output was Five Principles for a Second Enlightenment (later built out into 10 Things to do in a Conceptual Emergency). These give a great flavour of the IFF ethos:

• From Subject-Object to Subject-Subject

• Expand What Constitutes Valid Knowledge

• From Organisation to Integrity

• Shift in Our Relationship With Time

• From Fragmentation to Wholeness

These have a huge overlap with Action Research (which was the heart of my Masters in Responsibility and Business Practice; sidebar: the Wayback Machine is a marvel). And with a lot of green / sustainability thinking.

Through the 2000s, IFF used its work to create a fabulous set of methods and practices.

My first touchpoint with IFF was with one of these, when the futures team at Forum for the Future started using the Three Horizons method to engage people in creating the future. (More explanation in my summary of this fantastic book here.) Among my Forum colleagues, even now we use Three Horizon terminology as a shorthand ("Part of the shock of the real world for Barbie in the movie is when she sees how the toy is actually part of maintaining the patriarchy, all very H2-.")

In 2017, I attended Transformations, "the third in a biennial series of international interdisciplinary conferences focusing on transformations towards sustainability". Two key IFF folk, Graham Leicester and Bill Sharpe, facilitated some of the conference, using Three Horizons. The results were published as "Transforming knowledge systems for life on Earth: Visions of future systems and how to get there" (I am one of the 160 or so co-authors; it is…possible I’ve never read it).

Soon afterwards, I had coffee with Graham and started to attend the Transformation Innovation Network Breakfasts. Soon after, Graham invited me to be trained in the IFF tools as a Practice Advisor. In parallel, I was invited to be a Future Steward, which involved being trained in Three Horizons by Bill.

So, since 2018, I've been regularly using Three Horizons, the Prompt Cards, the thinking in Graham's Transformative Innovation book, including the Permission Slip (as used in AWN w/c 6 May). I also have done the Competence in Complexity course (based on the book Dancing at the Edge: Culture, Competence and Organisation in the 21^st Century).

All of which is to say, IFF has been an important source of methods, mindset and support over the years.

As it happens, this is the prompt card I got by email today:

"What new perspectives does this prompt offer you in relation to a current concern?"

This moment in IFF history

My version of IFF's history would be: first ten years of a group creating new tools; next ten years shifting to enabling others (like me) to use those tools. (This is obviously to miss out a lot.)

The Stirling Gathering was marking a change in leadership. Graham Leicester, one of the original group, is retiring. The event marked the exact moment that he stepped away from the handover period, and Rebecca Ford now fully in charge. (I happen to know both Graham and Rebecca read the Atelier WeekNotes: hello!)

A pivotal few days, and emotional too.

'Where are we and what time is it?'

Overall, it was a very reflective and serious few days. People were drawn from the design world, the system change world, leadership and organisational development, civil service plus a lot from healthcare. (Not mush from business.) People generally in their 50s and older, with a big gender bias (3 women: 1 man).

One of the initial exercises can give you a flavour. We were asked to use the 'just enough structure' conversation approach of the breakfasts to consider 'where are we, and what time is it?', landing our reflections as questions.

My notes of the questions raised in just my group have:

• How can we act for change and not burn out as heros?

• What does this time call for from all of us, especially as witenesses?

• How can we highlight the everyday hope and kindness we see (and is easy to be crowded out by bad news from the big picture)?

• How can we expand the depth of practice that is needed in the face of all the waves that are coming at us?

• How can we generate hope while still staring reality in the face?What ius the practice of acting beyond just improving teh status quo?

• How can we act with coherence in a world which is getting more incoherent around us?

Kitbag, emotional resilience, suicide prevention

The most profound session, for me, was one which applied all those serious but abstract concerns to a real situation: the youth and male mental health crises.

The speaker was from Be-Inn Unity, a "Social Enterprise who exist to inspire and educate communities so that individuals are empowered to thrive". They work in schools, and with veterans, to support their emotional growth, out of trauma and attachment disorder.

The founders had some incredible stories of the relational poverty they had faced in childhood, and the long-run mental health challenges that had come from that. (I'm not giving more details as I'm not sure what level of confidentiality the session had.)

At the heart of their methods was the IFF Kitbag. It is a cloth bag with cards, egg timers, finger puppets and more. Used in the right way, these create a space to become calm, share feelings and grow quality relationships.

The starting insight for the Kitbag was that, when the world changes, our psyches ge stretched and bruised. We can’t treat our way out (there aren’t enough psychotherapists, for one thing). But maybe we can grow our way out.

That sounds fluffy. Until. Until you hear how these had been used by veterans who had been contemplating suicide. Or a group of teenage school children talk about how one session a week had, after the initial awkwardness, played a massive role in their lives.

One of the Gathering participants, in their 50s, spoke about their experiences growing up in an industrial town in the UK. As the industry shut down, so the community struggled. A huge proportion of this person's school friends were dead already, through suicide, substance abuse or whatever.

For me it brought to the surface two things:

1. How much avoidable suffering there is in the warp and weft of many every day lives.

2. How relatively simple and definitely cheap activities would make a huge difference (including 'a stitch in time saves 9' on public spending), but there isn't the ability to drive that through from mainstream institutions.

So, both hope -- things can make a difference -- and huge, sad frustration at the opportunities missed.

What do you most want to stand for?

For the final day we were asked to articulate 'what do you most want to stand for?' This was a way of getting everyone to articulate their purposes, and then connect them in ways that illuminate the purposes of the IFF community.

What I wrote:

What I most want to stand for is...the joyful, fierce, messy profound absurdity of accepting today's realities and growing tomorrow's possibilities.

There's a lot to unpack in that. Briefly:

• 'joyful, fierce, messy...': life is not just a rational experience*.

• '...profound absurdity...': I'm increasingly of the view that life is ridiculous, in the sense of arbitrary and contrary to reason, and yet also, at the same time, of some kind of deep meaning*.

• '...accepting today's realities': in the Stoic sense, that we need to be grounded in what is.

• '...growing tomorrow's possibilities': it is that engagement with reality which allows for more useful effort in the art of possibility.

*=bit more on these in the last section.

Graham Leicester: helping many people make a place to stand over many decades.

The closing ceremony was the other deeply emotional moment. We were asked to give to Graham the gift of saying what we most want to stand for.

Everyone spoke, and everyone gave a beautiful sentence, like mine, but deeply grounded in their own approaches and intentions and ethos and life.

In effect, all the places to stand these people were giving was just a sample of the impact Graham has had through IFF over the decades. Quite the testament to a work life well lived (with more to come). I feel very lucky to have Graham in my professional life.

The dynamism next time

Of course -- of course! -- there were challenges and frustrations with the event, with IFF.

I had come with an expectation that this was a gathering for renewal for the future. The tenor was much more that of a gathering of the present. I left will little notion of what the next phase of IFF might be.

Most attendees were very positive about the quality of the other people, how rare the inclusive atmosphere was, how amazing the culture and feel were, how these matched with 'the work' (as in 'relationships are the work').

I had a different view: while good, there are other spaces and groups I am part of which have similar qualities and quality. Perhaps I am lucky not to work in large organisations, and to (mostly) choose my colleagues. But there was a luxuriating in 'just being' which I was...out-of-sync with.

Yes, in a world which values efficiency and busy-ness, slowing down brings difference that makes a difference. But too much of that is also a vice.

Too many threshold moments (between sessions) were allowed to become too fuzzy, which leant us towards a Sunday afternoon culture. If you start a session late, let the first part massively over run, and then have to rush the participation, then you've missed a rare opportunity to work with the people in the room.

So, I would have liked more dynamism and purposeful energy to the whole thing. Maybe that is my mis-judged expectations. My fear for IFF: the same again in a year's time will be an indicator of community that is sticking with the past.

The shadow sides of a 'Second Enlightenment'

My other kinds of reflections were about the parallels between many IFF and my own approach.

One of the founders said their stand was about combining Enlightenment, objective, universal scientific knowledge with the other kinds of knowledge based on specifics, experiences, emotions and meaning-making (I am paraphrasing).

Of course, my educational heritage is very much the former: Oxford, physics, accounting.

One reflection I had was the faded usefulness of the 'Second Enlightenment' framing. I can completely understand why the (mostly) male founders, all from establishment backgrounds, wanted a second Enlightenment.

The first one is usually portrayed as a great thing, shining a light on superstition and powering the industrial revolution. Who wouldn't want a second version of that? One foot in the past, one foot in the future. Great, right?

The risk is that the past keeps crowding out the future. For instance, that it is all too head-y, based on being able to articulate things in language quickly. Or that the 'more-than-rational' has too little space. That things fit onto three horizons, and we miss out on the mess.

Or miss out on the power dynamics and contradictions within and between groups. The standard IFF way of speaking about the world (which is also mine!) has a universal 'we'.

I was reminded of Branko Milanovic's review of Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics:

In many instances, Kate writes in the first-person plural, as if the entire world had the same “objective”: so “we” have to make sure the economy does not exceed the natural bounds of the Earth’s “carrying capacity”, “we” have to keep inequality within the acceptable limits, “we” have an interest in a stable climate, “we” need the commons sector. But in most of the real world economics and politics, there is no “we” that includes 7.3 billion people. Different class and national interests are fighting each other.

Or, relatedly, miss out on the class dimension. The folks in Hard Investigations are creatives, but from a working class background. The feel of those interactions is very different to IFF: more robust swearing, more heart-on-sleeve emotion, more 'the point of a creative process (which can meander and need silence) is action'.

Or that transformation can be rational, controlled, contained.

All the stuff in this section is as much a reflection on myself as IFF.

Hence the opening part of the place I most want to stand for (in bold below):

The joyful, fierce, messy profound absurdity of accepting today's realities and growing tomorrow's possibilities.

WHAT NEXT

• IFF:

  • Wait on next steps from Rebecca.

  • Look forward to the community learning new ways of being and doing, building on the legacy but not confined to it, as IFF steps up to the challenges in the world today.

• Getting beyond 'Second Enlightenment': not sure. Some of creative process of Hard Investigations might help.