Navigating uncertainty

The ‘crystal’ route asks how to navigate and thrive in uncertain times, sharing a loose catalogue of ways to prototype possible futures, seed new realities, and ‘grow your own worlds’. Presenting alternatives to more top-down, instrumental foresight practices, this route draws together insights and reflections from projects that have mobilised (e.g.) narrative, fieldwork, and the lab format. A section on narrative looks at the use of storytelling, fiction, design, and experiential scenarios to engage people in thinking about different futures and how things could be otherwise. Introducing FoAM’s own work on ‘prehearsal’, we look at how futures practice can be rescaled to better serve small groups, families, and individuals with complex, life-changing questions. Several pieces on fieldwork stress the value of ‘body contact’ with the world, as a source of inputs and engine for sensemaking. Building on our experiences tracking through deserts, forests, islands, and similar, we share techniques for orienting oneself in unfamiliar environments and fast-changing situations, through e.g. landing protocols and ‘shoe leather’ futures. A series of pieces on the transdisciplinary lab format and experiments with business address the real challenges in breaking through siloes and making things happen. These texts draw on first-hand experiences coordinating such spaces, reflecting on how to encourage an experimental mindset and bridge different fields, (successfully) combining different forms of evidence and expertise.

• What tools and tactics can help us prepare for (handle, manage, mitigate, thrive amid…) uncertainty?

• Where is the boundary between risk and uncertainty?

• What are prehearsals, and what can they do?

• How can we subvert or rework existing organisational forms to seed new realities? What can bureaucracy and administration do?

• What are the distinctive strengths of the laboratory as a mode of organisation?

• Can DIY approaches scale?