The event was held in the wonderful MAGIC PLAYroom at SMARTlab – which enabled the group to make use of an open creative space as well as a range of computers, non-digital resources, floor and wall projectors, fabrication devices…  The tools were available for all to use and the inspiration was provided by a range of experts.  Jessica Charlesworth and Michael Burton showed some work around futures and obesity.  Alex Hall provided insight into how artefacts  of today can be changed in both form and function by a range of future trends (more of this in the New Year).

During the course of the day we used ‘creative note-taking’ – finding ways to capture converstations and ideas beyond text and mindmaps.  The aim of this is to help ‘reframe’ conversations (changing speech to images, images to stories etc) and also provides a point of reference to further expore issues as they are raised.  Having such a wide range of methods for capturing rich conversations also helps in providing those who weren’t there with an insight into different aspects of the day (and in particular the conversations held and ideas developed).

Three very talented creators helped with this, Dave Clark captured the group’s conversations in images and ’scribles’, Toby Borland captured conversations and scribbles as 3D models and Martin Maudsley brought together conversations, images and models into a story.  Video outputs, designs and images will be shared soon, as will Martin’s summative story.

This Link goes to some of the images captured during the day – be great to see/hear what you make of them without any contextual explanation. Be even more interested in what they make you think about.

As an audience we can believe an alien present. It’s like today, only more so. Maybe an alternative version of today. We can also easily be persuaded to believe in a far future. We feel sure that someday, somehow they’ll have massive floating cities, or highways in the sky, instant food, and all the rest. We feel certain about this despite the fact that we can’t fund fast trains between our cities today, or permit genetically modified insect-resistant corn, or take any unified step toward large-scale 21-century developments. Even returning to the moon next decade seems far-fetched.

The near future – let’s peg it 2020 and beyond — is a blank because there is almost no vision of a near-future that seems both desirable and plausible.

There are, in fact, many visions of the period Kelly describes that are both desirable and plausible to some people, but what really intrigued me was this idea of an “alien present”. One of the things I’ve been saying to audiences over the last year or so has been “the difficult present is not the likely future”, meaning that it’s often easier to pick something confusing or challenging about the present to think about than it is to consider things that are genuinely sited in the future.

If the “future” is far enough away in time, it becomes an alternative or parallel world, chronologically separate from our own. “2186″ becomes, not a date, but as much of a location as “Fairyland” or “Toontown”. What Kelly calls the “near future” is somewhere that’s far enough distant from the present to appear different, without being so far away in time that it becomes easy for us to treat it as an alternative world rather than this world. The challenge is to articulate a future in a way that makes the causal and temporal connections to our own clear, and forces us to imagine reality, not fantasy.

Although the deadline is not until some time in 2009 I have been having a look at responses and thinking about how they can be meaningfully analysed. So is it worth relating to the research challenges and cross-challenge activities – as an aside there’s already a strong focus on the environment? However, this does not work with those questions relating to education so does it make sense to use the educational implementations (goals, personnel, institutions, methods, tools, outcomes and beliefs) instead? My hope is that we’ll be able to see what concerns you as stakeholders most about the future and education systems in particular.

I haven’t got very far but thought I would share a couple of first impressions – neither having anything to do with content. Of the 1149 responses by the 11^th November 470 related to the first question: “What are your hopes for the future?”. This could be a) because it is the most interesting of the 6 questions presented, b) because you had to press another button to see all six questions. I am tending towards the order of presentation being vital. My reasoning being when the first (and only) question initially seen was switched at the end of September to: “What would you not want to see in any future education system?” nobody answered the question about hopes and there were 171 responses (of the 173 in total) around the future education system. It’s changed again, so am looking to see the number of responses for the new question “What of today’s education do you want to see in 2025?” – see Continuity for the sake of continuity for the reasoning behind this question. Lessons learnt: if you ever design something similar constantly rotate the first question seen in order to get a similar number of responses to each question.

The second thought is that there has been a slow down in responses. In October 453 planes were added, which means that there ought to have been a 150 in the first third of November if the rate held – or more if it followed the trend from August and increased by around 150 each month. Except so far there has been 42. My own pet theory is that people are more worried about Christmas now so haven’t been making planes, but more seriously there are issues about how frequently people return to the site or stumble across it. Possibly all those interested have already visited and added all their ideas, perhaps it isn’t easy to find unless you already know about Beyond Current Horizons…

And to finish on, I really like the person who wants their community to be: “safe, clean, caring and ideally with a small local post office and school” – so do I.

Despite many invites the attendees comprised a CABE enabler and some teachers who had been involved in the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) process – the three local authorities invited could not attend that day – although they are seen as key users. Local authorities are not only involved in BSF (an obvious case of long term education planning) but extended schools, general ICT procurement which could influence curriculum design, and overseeing curriculum implementation.

The day had two main conclusions. The first was that scenarios were not seen as a useful tool when it came to planning, and the second was the need for case studies.

To my mind the first is counter intuitive; although I have spent a lot of time investigating scenarios recently so may be biased. I would have thought that seeing possible futures would have broadened thinking, and certainly testing ones plans in a variety of situations would ensure robustness.  Yet the concerns expressed are far more immediate, they need something practical for next year, possibly even five years into the future, but they are not looking 20 years ahead. Is this because all the measurement factors are immediate? Is this because they feel they’re recipients rather than leading the process so they don’t need to think about the “big picture”? My conclusion is I need to talk to more people but I do hope that with the CABE now supporting school involvement those in, or about to start, the BSF process feel more empowered.

Case studies, the second conclusion, would illustrate how stakeholders could broaden their thinking, use the tools that are to be provided, and inspire them. Which is evidently lacking when faced with a toolkit to help without examples of how and why it works. I can understand the need for explanation, but am now faced with the challenge of creating them. So if you know of any examples where the testing of robustness of long term plans has been essential, or where there was real involvement from all the stakeholders, let me know. Thanks.

Recently, the doomsayers have been gaining the upper hand.  Curious to find out more about their worldview, I decided to set up an experiment in post-apocalyptic living, to learn what it might be like to live in the dark future they were foretelling. This article gives a brief outline of that experiment.

The utopia experiment, as I called it, started when I put an announcement on my website in January 2006 calling for volunteers to come and help me set up a temporary community in the Scottish Highlands. We would live as if modern civilisation had collapsed, growing our own food, generating our own power, and salvaging what technology we could from the wreckage.  Within a few months, I had received hundreds of applications to join the experimental community. And they weren’t all hippies in their twenties either, as one of my friends had predicted. With ages ranging from 18 to 67, and a roughly equal mix of men and women, they came from a wide range of backgrounds; an ex royal marine turned shoemaker, a computer programmer passionate about vegetables, a retired schoolteacher who had spent time with the Inuit.

It started in Mexico, while I was touring the Yucatan Peninsula.  I had long dreamed of visiting this part of the world, famous for the ruined cities of the Maya civilisation, which flourished in the first millennium, before collapsing rather suddenly around the tenth century.  And when I visited these lost cities, they did not disappoint.

I can still remember vividly the impact that the ruins of Uxmal had on me. As I surveyed the majestic temples and stone colonnades from the top of a steep pyramid, a feeling of melancholy overcame me. I pictured the bustling crowds who must have once thronged the streets and squares, over a thousand years before. In the distance, where once there would have been fields full of maize and beans, all that could be seen now was the green canopy of the jungle, which stretched in all directions, punctuated only here and there by the peeks of distant pyramids, marking the sites of other lost cities.

Nobody who visits these ruined cities can fail to wonder what happened to their original inhabitants, or why they were abandoned. Fortunately, archaeologists have pieced together the answer. The Maya collapse, it turns out, was not triggered by invasion, or any outside force; it was entirely self-caused. It seems the Maya depleted one of their principal resources – trees – and this led to a series of other problems, including soil erosion, decrease of usable farmland, and drought. The growing population that drove this overexploitation was then faced with a diminishing amount of food, which led to increasing migration and, eventually, bloody civil war.

As I sat atop that pyramid in Uxmal, a question began to form in my mind.  If a great civilisation like that of the Mayas can implode, I wondered, might not the same happen to us? There are, of course, some big differences between the civilisation we live in today and that of the Mayas. For one thing, our civilisation is global. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, it can appeal to the rest of the world for help. The Mayas did not have this luxury, because they were in effect isolated from the rest of the world. But on the negative side, globalisation means that when one part of the world gets into trouble, the trouble could quickly be exported and cascade throughout the tightly-integrated international system. If modern civilisation collapses, it will do so everywhere. Everyone now stands or falls together.

If the idea of our great global industrial civilisation crashing seems outlandish, no doubt the idea of their own civilisation collapsing would have seemed equally crazy to the Maya at their heyday. To the crowds who once thronged the now deserted streets of Tikal and Chichen-Itza, the idea that within a few years these streets would be deserted would have been hard to entertain. So perhaps those who refuse to contemplate the possibility of global collapse are simply suffering from a failure of imagination.

That’s when the idea for the utopia experiment came to me.  I would appeal for volunteers to live as if civilisation had recently collapsed.  It would be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  By acting it out in real life, I hoped our thoughts about such an existence would be more realistic than if we just sat around and made it up.

I returned to England from Mexico full of enthusiasm for my new project. The first task was to find a suitable location. My scenario called for somewhere rural, so the volunteers could grow their own food. Climate would be important too – and if climate change was one of the major contributors to the collapse of the old civilisation, the places favoured by the old climate might be too hot or too dry for new settlements. I began to peruse the scientific models forecasting the climate of different parts of the UK, and one area seemed to stand out as more favourable than most – the Highlands of Scotland. While the south of England would become increasingly dry with global warming, all the models predicted that rainfall would still be plentiful in the Highlands, while the rising temperatures would mean that average snowfalls there would reduce by up to ninety per cent.

Having secured a suitable location, the next step was to recruit volunteers for the experiment.  In January 2006, I put up a new page on my website, with the following announcement:

“Volunteers needed for a visionary experiment – from March 2007

From March 2007, I’ll be inviting volunteers to join me in an experiment in utopia in the Scottish highlands.  We will live together in a novel kind of community based on three main ideas:

1. It will be a LEARNING COMMUNITY – each member must have a distinctive skill or area of knowledge that they can teach to the others.

2. It will be a WORKING COMMUNITY – no money is required from the members, but all must contribute by working.

3. It will be strictly TIME-LIMITED.  This is not an attempt to found an ongoing community.  Members may stay for up to three months, but may also come for as little as two weeks.“

To make it clear that this was not just another commune, I made it clear that the aim of the experiment would be to simulate life after the collapse of modern civilisation:

“The main objective of this experiment,” I wrote, “is to simulate life in the aftermath of a collapse of global civilisation and to prepare for such an eventuality.”  The announcement finished by asking potential volunteers to email me a short (200 word) description of themselves and what they could offer the community.

At first I made no attempt to promote the project or tell anyone the announcement was there. I didn’t know if anyone would see the website, or respond. But, the wonders of the internet being what they are, somehow people found their way to this page, and within a few days I received the first application.   It was from a 51 year old man who called himself Agric. 

When I eventually met him in person, he turned out to be a softly spoken man with shocks of white hair and irrepressible energy (a “hobbit on speed”, as another volunteer once remarked), . He lived in Slough and worked in computers – but he was planning to sell his house and become a nomad. It didn’t take me long to realise that Agric was a committed “doomer” – a believer in the coming apocalypse. For him, the scenario we were playing out at the utopia experiment was not just a collaborative fiction. It was preparation for the real thing. He could always back up his gloomy prognostications with lengthy discourses on the stock exchange, the global economy and, of course, peak oil.

One of the main lessons from my experiment was how easy it was for people to make the same ideological transition that Agric had already made – from imagining what it might be like if civilisation really did collapse, to firmly believing that it would collapse.  The experiment was originally meant to be a kind of collaborative fiction, in which we would gradually flesh out an initial scenario and turn it into a plausible narrative of life after the crash.  The problem, as it turned out, was that our thoughts became too realistic.  With the benefit of hindsight, I should have seen this coming.  A similar thing, after all, happened in the famous Stanford Prison Experiment conducted in 1971 by Phillip Zimbardo, when the undergraduates who he selected to live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building started taking their roles far too seriously.  Zimbardo had to terminate the experiment early, and in the end I also decided to curtail the experiment after a year.

For me, one of the final straws came when some of the volunteers started talking about justice.  Without any police force, surely we would have to enact our own – inevitably rough – kind of justice?  That sort of thing is ok to write about in fiction, but it could get very dangerous if you begin to start acting it out in reality.

Besides the transition from taking the scenario as an interesting fiction and an accurate prediction, I also witnessed another strange mutation; the volunteers began to think of the future collapse as something good.  It’s the opposite to sour grapes – Jon Elster has called it “sweet lemons”. This strain of thought has many names.  Luddism.  Anti-technologism.  Anti-transhumanism.  Primitivism.  Bioconservatism.  But they all amount to the same thing.

Part of the appeal of this current of thought is that it provides an easy explanation for a sense of anomie.  Boredom, frustration, anxiety, depression?  According to the Luddites, we can blame them all on industrial civilisation.  If we were hunter-gatherers, living in small bands consisting mostly of family members, in contact with nature, directly satisfying our own biological needs each day, then we’d be happy, right?  Well, maybe.  But that was the past, and we can’t go back there now.  Or maybe we can – if society collapses…. That’s one reason why Luddism is so dangerous: it encourages people to imagine social collapse as something desirable.

Thinking about the future can be done in a sensible way, but only when one is aware of the many pitfalls that we tend to fall into when trying to do futurology.  The utopia experiment taught me about many of these pitfalls.  Besides the tendency to take fiction as truth, and the sweet-lemons phenomenon, I also witnessed what the security expert Bruce Schneier refers as the tendency to focus on “movie plot threats”.  People worry about dramatic threats of the sort that make good movies – and convince themselves that these are probable just because they are dramatic.  As Schneier says:

“We all do it. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats. We imagine anthrax spread from crop dusters. Or a contaminated milk supply. Or terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared”

Psychologically, this all makes sense. Evolution has endowed us with good imaginations.  But these imaginations are often seduced by dramatic images and pay little attention to good probabilistic reasoning.

When I did eventually call an end to the experiment, most of the volunteers returned happily to their former lives, but some of them wanted to carry on.  Indeed, they were shocked that I did not want to carry on with them.  When I explained that the experiment had always been just that – an experiment, a kind of collaborative fiction – they didn’t believe me, even though I had clearly stated that at the outset.  A few of them are, I believe, still thinking about trying to buy some land of their own in a remote part of Scotland so they can live there permanently and prepare for the coming apocalypse for real.   And they are convinced that someday, I’ll see the light, and come and join them.”

The majority of organisations that I have spoken with have, at most a 5 year vision, many a 3 year strategy and all a 1 to 2 year plan – so having conversations about 15 year futures is difficult and often the first conversation is about justifying why long term futures work is important and why it is worth investing the time to talk about it.   In the world of education where there are so many competing time pressures – with such a range of timescales – I thought it useful to state some of the specific values of long term futures thinking.  I’d be please if others added to the list (I will as the programme develops).

1. Who is education for?

The ‘formal’ education in England lasts from 4 – 19, that’s about 15 years of formal education.  Young children making the most of the ‘back to school’ shopping trips for stationery and daps getting ready for the first year in Reception class will be leaving secondary school in 2023, potentially leaving university in 2026 and entering the world of work.  If one of the aims of education is preparing the young for the world and for work then having an idea of what they’re being prepared for might be quite useful!  Investigating the sorts of changes that might occur, socially and technologically is important then in informing the sorts of skills, knowledges and aptitudes that we need to foster in formal schooling.  Having an understanding of the possible future of work and employment similarly could inform the curricular needed, the qualifications understood by industry and the options young people will have.  Preparing young people for the world outside of formal education means that we need to be informed about what that world will look like when they leave formal education.

2. Informing immediate actions

I mentioned in an earlier post that one of the main criticisms of big investments such as BSF is that they’re too short-sighted in terms of investment, essentially rebuilding current schools, rather than really investigating what education and schooling is for at the beginning of the 21st century.  In the same post I mentioned cones of uncertainty – that if we can think hard about long term futures (where our thinking is less certain), as we regress that information in time to shorter term futures, our cones become denser with information and more certain.  The final step then, having investigated the wide range of possible futures, is to make decisions that take into account the preferable futures, probable futures and possible futures so that our immediate actions and investments are as fully informed as possible.

3. Creating preferable futures

Throughout BCH we talk about futures, rather than the future.  This is because our collective actions got to create the future we will inhabit – there is no set future that we’re all mindlessly stumbling towards.  The notion of agency then, the ability to act in the world, is a really important reason to think about long term futures.  Which parts of the evidence BCH is highlighting do you welcome?  Which parts make you shudder?  Then what are you going to do about it?  What actions or investments must we put in place to ensure that the future that is realised is the one that we want?  Having a good understanding of possible futures can inform our actions to create the desirable futures.

4. Systematic thinking informing current actions

Ahh, you say – but you’re not telling us what will be in 2025, you’re making observations of what could be.  How can we make reliable decisions now based upon observations rather than statements of fact?  The short answer is that BCH is a systematic approach to looking at evidence, trends and opinions in understanding a whole range of probable, possible and preferable futures.  It is not about future gazing but about creating informed stories of the future upon which we can test current plans and policies.  Linking back to point 2, if we use a systematic and reliable approach to thinking about the future we can be much better informed about the decisions we need to take now.

5. Rapidity of change

Almost every education/technology conference I go to and most of my RSS feeds remind me of the speed of change, how practices and tools change with new developments, new possibilities and new demands.   Moore’s Law continues to hold true; Web 2.0 tools are being created more quickly that bring a new set of tools to my browser each day; personal communication devices are being developed with more functions etc etc.  Yet balanced with this are the arguments that education is not bringing about the ‘transformation in practice’ that is called for.  We need to be aware of what things are changing quickly and which are remaining constant.  At the heart, we need to ensure that we’re aware of what we want to remain and what changes we want to take advantage of.  To me this is about developing  an understanding of the shared values of education – being clear about its purpose and therefore how different changes might help us realise them.  Starting with the Children’s Plan as a central way of doing this, we can question how the aims of the plan can be realised in different futures, and of course which aims will be challenged.

Other suggestions?  Add a comment or use one of the engagement tools.

As I said in my last blog the creation of scenarios is probably unachievable given the limited time, resources and expertise available – although if you’re interested there are toolkits out there – for example the Foresight Toolkit, scenarios for sustainability, and designing learning spaces. Surely something to inspire teachers about the benefits of creating a longer term vision that would influence their current planning would be of more use. But what tools would this contain? And what would you call such a set of materials? Would you seek out a “long term planning toolkit” when trying to find stuff to help you create a vision and an action plan to get you there?

Then what should go into such, for want of a better word, toolkit? There are sites out there that try and structure the planning – the TDA has a framework to help plan extended school, there are tools for managing change, the Carnegie UK trust has a toolkit to use its scenarios, and Futurelab has given various techniques for talking, exploring, capturing etc.

Thus my life currently revolves around what should go into this “toolkit”? Would it be something as simple as a checklist? Would examples, case studies, and testimonials cause reflection? Could we use pictures or artefacts to inspire people create stories about their possible futures? Should we raid business for examples of generating action plans? Oh the decisions.

And if you do think of a better name than “toolkit” please let me know.

The reason for this is because the Research into Action part of the Beyond Current Horizons project is trying to support all those in education involved in such thinking, be it around designing curricula, building schools for the future, becoming an extended school and perhaps even planning careers. So far my main conclusion is that this type of planning is not easy given, as Peter Schwartz puts it, the “impossibly complex array of factors that affect any decision”.

So what could be done to make it easier? How can all those involved in education be inspired enough not only to create a vision but to make it a viable one? One solution that I’ve been investigating is to use scenarios – as the Carnegie UK Trust report says they can:

• Help define future vision and strategic priorities
• Rehearse different policy or strategy options to and weaknesses, or unintended consequences
• Future-proof a decision that is on the table.

Moreover, scenarios should be engaging, memorable and thought provoking – which ought to be ideal given the various backgrounds of those involved either working alone or in groups when doing the required educational long term planning.

However, the tricky thing is creating them. To VERY briefly summarise the process you decide your area of concern, you list all the possible factors that may impact, by some black art you select the most important and divergent factors around which to develop your scenarios, you create these plausible, coherent and possible futures, and then you plan with them. And this leaves out the consulting of experts to ensure the factors are accurate, commissioning of research as necessary, agreeing and sharing definitions, the critiquing of the proposed scenarios, the refinement, workshops possibly at every stage of the process, and how to create an action plan once you’ve got the final scenarios…

Would this creation process be useful to the education leaders, Local Authorities, consultants, architects, IT suppliers out there that may be involved in long term planning in schools? It would after all require investigating possible changes in the role of childhood, employment, technology, assessment and all the other research challenges which will influence plans. In my opinion, though I’m willing to change my mind on the basis of reasoned argument, is no. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of time in the world of planning in schools and surely what time is there should be spent doing the visioning and planning and not creating a set of plausible coherent possible futures in which these visions can be tested. The more interesting question is how can scenarios be used by education leaders? Which I may blog about in the future – but until then am looking forward to others thoughts on whether scenario creation would be useful in long term planning.

I stumbled across an article that recalls an approach used by Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno to “loosen up our expectations of what might happen in the near future” – in a similar way that Edward de Bono uses random words and techniques to encourage creative thinking, this approach is about stimulating other ways of viewing possible future.  Their approach presents a list of ‘unthinkable futures’ – possibilities that challenge the norm.

BCH is not about predicting the future, but exploring a range of socio-technological possible, probable and preferable futures to understand the implications for education – and it is important to consider how these wild cards can not only dramatically impact upon the way in which we live, but also how, over time, smaller incremental changes can lead to very different ways of living – which means that thinking about different futures needs to be imaginative yet considered; suprising yet expected.

The Long Now Foundation holds open seminars to share information, ways of thinking about the future and providing the sorts of stimulus that enables this wider exploration of futures.  For those not able to travel easily to San Fransisco, summaries and recordings of previous seminars can be found towards the bottom of this link

However, some methods do make bolder claims about predicting ‘the future’ – from the use of entrails and tea  leaves as indicators of the future to more ’scientific’ exploration of data and trends.  One challenge here is the ability to hold to account the strength of any prediction (the ‘predictor’ presumably long gone before long term futures are revealed!)  But if you’re feeling more confident about your interpretations of developments and trends (or want to see some others who are) – maybe Long Bets is where you can stake your claim.