<
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/06/14/announcing-futurecast-a-new-game-framework-for-exploring-pathways-of-change/>
"As you’re hopefully aware, over the last few years, our Copia Institute think
tank, in partnership with Randy Lubin’s Leveraged Play, have been using games
and game-like tools for exploring complex realities in the present, as well as
exploring potential future scenarios. On the latter front, we’ve done things
like our
Threatcast election disinformation simulator, our
Hindsight 2030
game exploring future trends, and our (suddenly much more relevant!)
brainstorming game to explore potential positive AI futures.
Over the course of 2022 we worked on another fun project, this time with the
United Nations’ Global Pulse group, which is the Secretary General’s
“Innovation Lab.” They’ve been doing a bunch of experiments over the past few
years regarding strategic foresight, and asked us if we could build a flexible
game/framework that could be useful in trying to understand “pathways of
change.” The end result, which was just recently released by UN Global Pulse,
is
FutureCast, which is a highly adaptable tool to allow anyone to explore
future opportunities and challenges in many different scenarios. Its main use
is in bringing together groups of stakeholders to explore future scenarios.
We initially developed it to explore how different stakeholders in a particular
country were viewing potential opportunities and challenges in upcoming
elections, but the tool is flexible enough to use in lots of different
scenarios.
Many people may be aware of scenario planning as a strategic foresight tool,
and we’re huge fans of scenario planning, and have used it as a tool in a
variety of projects. But
FutureCast is designed to do something slightly
different than scenario planning (and the two can be used together to great
effect). With FutureCasting, we’re taking basic future scenarios, and using a
process of prompts and responses, to allow different stakeholders to explore
potential challenges and opportunities under those scenarios.
In traditional scenario planning, it’s left up to the creators of the scenarios
to determine the challenges and opportunities. With FutureCasting, we’ve set up
a game-like framework to allow stakeholders themselves to tease out the
challenges and opportunities in a variety of scenarios."
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
