What exactly is Futures Thinking?
Guess what? Futures thinking has everything to do with your present and is much less about some science fiction vision of you, 20 years onwards, seen through a glittery crystal ball!

It’s also a discipline that is often described in lofty terms, and a part of our mission is to make what we feel is a great tool for life, available to everyone.

“The ‘future part of the brain’ is like a muscle that rarely gets exercised. But the more we use it the better we get at leveraging the powers and energies of the future’
(Thomas Frey, Futurist)

The Futures Thinking model that we work with follows a step by step approach. It begins by scanning your present, looking for early signs and signals of change in your life.

Using those signs and signals, and a big dose of your imagination and desires too, you’ll design a series of scenarios, or ‘stories’ which bring to life some possible versions of the future for you.

Lastly, we focus deeply on working back in time from the future scenarios you’ve designed, to your present, establishing a path of actions, and experiments you can take to ensure you are on track to occupy that future, but also, that the transformation begins right now in your present!

“The future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed” (William Gibson, Science Fiction author)

In fact, when we have seen Futures Thinking misused; often in the enterprise world, it’s characterized by a certain impatience, which ignores scanning the present reality, all its limitations and opportunities, and skips happily to ‘predicting’ the future vision in isolation.
And then we wonder why that beautiful vision never materializes? It’s simple, because it never had any roots in the present reality!

“The future cannot be predicted, because the future does not exist” (Jim Dator, Futurist)

Do I have to be a designer to get the most out of the workshop or coaching?

The design we love at Wild Flowers Wild Futures is the kind of design all humans have been doing since forever. There is an innate human propensity to design our lives, our surroundings, what we eat and how we act.  But many would argue that we have, in the midst of all the chaos of the world, being busy, and being subject to a lot of ready made designs in life that we can pay for and subscribe to, forgotten that we are able to do it.

How do humans design?
Humans that design (all of us) are doing it when we engage our critical thinking (we all have it), we look at our present and think, hmm, I’d like this to be different (who hasn’t done that?), and then, we devote time and imagination to figuring out how it could be different and then, crucially, as design is an ‘active’ concept, we use our practical and relationship building skills to get that ‘different’ to come to life.

We work with what you’ve got
Some other key characteristics of the type of design we promote in Wild Flowers Wild Futures include a big bias towards using what we have around us right now, and starting from the present we currently inhabit. This is important because we want to work with you to bring a future to life that feels natural, and a bit wild, but, foremost, doable! Famous Futurist Jim Dator recommends, “Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous” but he also then concedes that not every ridiculous idea is ‘useful’. We take this to mean, have fun, but be realistic too!

Creativity in Numbers:
We also heavily believe in the power of collaboration as a key tool for design! Many eminent design theorists claim (we feel correctly) that collaborating with others helps us to act more powerfully alone! Yes you read that right! By broadening the diversity of influences around us, and letting them ‘in’ we broaden the ideas that could help bring our future into reality, and the people that help make it such. It was when I reached out to my sister and her network, that the Wild Flowers you see here, began to really take shape.

Ok we lied: there is some design:
Whether you’re a coaching client or a Garden Party with a Difference guest you’ll notice from the get go there are pens, drawings, and it’s a visual experience. We do, of course have a lot of making, doing, sketching, creating and bringing ideas to life using our hands in our approach. This requires no previous artistic qualification, and is all included because it’s proven to help build your design muscle so to speak, and frankly, it’s a lot of fun. When was the last time you got to create something for yourself?

Is there a link between Design and Futures Thinking?Absolutely there is. The easiest way of expressing this link is that to have fun and be effective at Futures Thinking, nurturing a Design mindset will be essential. The design mindset will heighten your confidence with using such tools as scenario creation; imagining alternative worlds; researching the issues that are emerging in your present which may be important in your future. So, simply put, Design is the training camp for Futures Thinking, but since Design is highly executional it is also crucial to making sure that stuff actually ‘gets done’.