Our operating principles

1. 01People construct their social reality with other people.

   We believe that ‘futures’ is a process of social knowledge production, which moves from abstract ideas to usable and shared meanings. This means that ‘futures’ processes shift people’s understanding of, and relationship to, the present, as well as constructing imagined futures. From this new position, they can be and act differently, which creates new possibilities.

2. 02Good futures processes challenge the ‘scaffolding’ people use in their decision-making.

   We use our knowledge of how individual and social cognition works to lift people out of their default thinking into active engagement. People tend to think in similar ways day-to-day, because the brain is metabolically lazy. If it can take shortcuts, it will. But if we want to co-create new social realities, we have to challenge people's defaults. Our tools help people get into the practice of doing this themselves.

3. 03AI is only a tool to help us imagine our futures.

   AI is the latest method that people use to help to understand the world. But a machine can’t and will not construct social reality for itself; a particular technology can’t ‘do’ futures. Humans have used tools to enhance their imagination for millennia, but we believe that offloading cognition to a machine is wrong. To construct our futures, we have to take responsibility for how we use tools like AI, and how we let them shape us.

4. 04People make their own futures, but not under circumstances of their own choosing.

   Our co-founder, the futurist Andrew Curry, paraphrases Marx: “We make our own futures but not under circumstances of our own choosing”. We believe that futures builds on the latent possibilities in the present and that people have agency, but that none of us start with a blank sheet of paper.

5. 05Those circumstances are going to get worse.

   We believe that societal collapse of some kind is coming, and that a better version of the current status quo is not viable. We are all going to have to deal with the consequences of climate change and biodiversity crisis, and the resulting dislocation and disorder. An orderly transition is no longer possible. We don’t want our work to contribute to these crises. Our use of AI is designed carefully to minimise its resource consumption.

6. 06We will need to do things faster, learn more quickly, and adapt to the turbulence.

   To thrive in turbulent environments, people and organisations need to learn more quickly than the environment is changing. Many conventional futures processes are simply too slow. There is not a conflict between speed and rigour, as long as methods are chosen carefully. We will use artificial intelligence carefully, to accelerate the pace of futures processes, and to get to valuable conversations more quickly.