Friday, April 19, 2013

#hubfutures Interpretation session 16 April 2013


Copyright: Tony Smith (@ynotds)

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant.

We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift."

Albert Einstein


In Tuesday's session we played a bit with our intuitive minds to get deeper down in the collective intelligence and creativity of the #hubfutures group. 

After a brief introduction by Adam on the interpretation phase of the generic foresight process, we continued our dialogue around surprises from the past week. 






The fragments, sentences and key thoughts that were mapped on the 'iceberg' in last week's session were then used to prompt further insights and surprises. 

Jan Jelinek's "Music for Fragments" served as background music during eight minutes of reflection and individual work.

We all then spoke about what came up for us during this , and used images to explain new insights, surprises and possible stories for the future of Hub.


Some of the metaphors for Hub that emerged are illustrated in this image:


Until next session we will continue to explore and find questions. Questions which will be answered by scenario logics...

Friday, April 12, 2013

#hubfutures ANALYSIS session 9 April 2013


The purpose of our Hub Futures analysis session was to make sense of all the scanning we had done in the past month. Some of the scan hits are found in a shared Google Spreadsheet which is continuously updated with new observations and insights.

The analysis phase in a foresight process attempts to answer the question "What seems to happen?" and our objective of this session was to come up with a list of fragments which will later form stories, or scenario logics. The image here by Neil shows the process and how our thoughts from the scanning phase will lead to patterns, clusters, convergences and hopefully later; questions which will be the base for our scenarios. 


After a dialogue process with rapid two-minute pitches of scanning work to Brad, followed by general discussion we came up with lots of fragments. These were put on a whiteboard and clustered in a Causal Layered Analysis.

This futures method, by Sohail Inayatullah, allows us to take a layered view of the scanning fragments, and to get a deeper understanding of what lies beneath them. As the "iceberg" figure below illustrates, there are four levels of deepening. The litany level deals with the unquestioned, official view of something. The second layer looks at the underlying systemic drivers and trends, such as socio-economic, technical, political and environmental factors. The next layer concerns values and worldviews, and finally, at the deepest level, causal layered analysis looks at deeper myths and metaphors.

The analysis as shown here is what came to mind in Tuesday's session. The scan hits can be placed differently as they will mean different things to different analysts. Some hits were not placed on the iceberg as they came up in discussions after the dialogue, or didn't fit into any of the layers at the time.

Use the keyboard short cuts CTRL+ and CTRL- to zoom in and out as the font is quite small in this image....


Some ideas, clusters started to emerge:


 Until next time (16/4); look for surprises... they might be convergences, contradictions or other...