A story to read
Six Minutes is told through the documents a family leaves behind: a birthday video, a bill, CCTV from the pub, and the robot’s own reasoning, entered as evidence.
Read Six MinutesStrategic foresight
and scenario development.
I develop original future scenarios, design fiction and decision games for strategy, policy and innovation teams. I follow the incentives, institutions and human choices that could make an unfamiliar future real.
The futures your process won’t produce.
You may already have forecasts, trend reports and scenarios. I can work alongside them, or start with a question that hasn’t found a place in your planning yet.
“When Antony speaks in our futures meetings, there’s a change of gear. He connects ideas across sectors and opens up possibilities we might otherwise miss. He gets the best out of the people in the room, challenging familiar assumptions and bringing difficult but important questions into the open. His scenarios get people to experience possible futures and work through what they would mean for the decisions they face today.”
Six ways to work.
Take one, or combine them.
- Commission a futureAn original scenario, a set of contrasting worlds or a big idea, built out with its assumptions.
- Speculative writingAn auction catalogue for a hunt sold before the animal is born. A robot’s reasoning, entered as evidence.
- WorkshopsA day of design fiction, or Archaeology of the present, built brick by brick.
- WargamesPlay the decision through against rivals, regulators and the public before you make it.
- SpeakingTalks and screenings on futures, conflict and finding the story.
- Inside your teamFor futures teams and consultancies: a residence, or ongoing sparring.
Looking for a documentary? See how film commissions work
Commission a future.
One question, one finished piece. I find the future your subject leaves out and build it out: who wants it, how it spreads, what it commits people to and what it changes for your decisions. The assumptions come with it.
What you can commission
You keep coming back to the same futures.
You understand the technology. You need someone to imagine what people will build a business around, and what that will do to yours.
An ageing population becomes a military resource. A zoo becomes an arcade. Advertising becomes the reason to watch.
You need to get past the comfortable conversation.
An outrageous premise, developed far enough to argue with. For away days, innovation sprints and strategies that have stalled.
A restaurant sells the pleasure of moral disapproval, and its enormous bills really do fund conservation.
You can see the developments. What do they add up to?
I follow an idea across industries until separate futures add up to one shift: the kind that creates a dozen businesses, not one.
A robot skills store, a food cartridge and an invention engine all point to the same scarce resource: permission. That’s the Permission Economy.
You have the idea. What kind of world grows around it?
Who would want it, what they would build, how they would pay and why others would join in. For scenario teams, consultancies and writers’ rooms.
A robot deer leads to a multiplayer zoo, spectators, betting and a new relationship with wildlife.
Your people know the evidence. They haven’t felt the choice.
A story to read, an exercise script to play or a film treatment to shoot, with the evidence and assumptions alongside. For teams facing decisions nobody can solve with a slogan.
An argument about electricity became a live-action game: you decide whose advice the minister takes, then live with the future you chose.
Take one part, or the whole journey
Find the original idea.
Bring a subject, a technology, a question or a body of research. I look for the overlooked possibility and the assumption worth reversing.
Develop how it could happen.
Who would want it? What would they build? How would they pay? Why would others join in? The world develops through understandable motives and choices.
Follow the connections.
Carry the idea into other businesses, institutions and daily lives. The connections can reveal a larger paradigm, or change the original idea.
Find the people inside it.
A grandmother under pressure to enlist. A family paying for a cool room they have never used. The owner taking sides in an argument between basil and tomato.
Make something from the world.
A story, an exercise script, a film, a game, a front page, a recruitment campaign or a contract, from inside the world.
Develop strategy and policy options.
Options to compare, assumptions to test and developments to watch, tested in workshops and wargames against rivals, regulators and the public. For negative territorial power: who insures the farms, who protects the villages, and what an alliance must promise before the first robot lands.
How a commission works
- Bring the question.A subject, a technology, a decision or a body of research. A few lines is enough to start.
- Agree the scope and the output.Which parts of the journey, what you receive (a scenario, a set of worlds, a story, a workshop, a game) and when.
- Develop the work together.Working sessions with your team as the world takes shape, then the finished pieces, with the assumptions written down.
Stories, scripts and playable futures for difficult decisions.
Your experts can brief the evidence. The hard part is making people feel a choice before they have to make it. I research the issue, build a plausible world around it and put your people inside a decision they can’t solve with a slogan.
Every piece comes with the evidence and assumptions behind it, so your specialists can check each step.
A script to play
Exercises and wargames in which your people play the rivals, regulators and public as well as themselves. I designed them for UK government and NATO audiences for five years.
Workshops and wargamesA film to watch, or play
Balance of Power turned an argument about electricity into a live-action game, and won the Energy Institute’s Public Engagement Award.
See Balance of PowerIt takes four kinds of experience that rarely meet in one person. Physics and modelling (statistics, system dynamics, agent-based models), to interrogate the premise. Five years in credit derivatives, to follow the incentives, contracts and ownership. Documentaries from a year on a Soviet test site to Donetsk, to find the people and the conflict. And five years of strategic games at Dstl, to turn that conflict into decisions.
Teach your team to flip the script.
Your team builds the newspaper, the manual and the product catalogue from your own future. Then it plays your competitors reacting to them.
Morning
Make the strange start to make sense.
Work backwards from a design fiction. Find the changes and choices that could make it ordinary. Then take your own field beyond its first obvious answer.
- Visitors watch the lions. The lions hunt the visitors.
- The young go to war. The country recruits pensioners.
- Adverts interrupt the programme. They become the attraction.
Afternoon
Give everyone a different stake.
Teams take the roles of different organisations, develop their responses and discover how their ideas collide. Then they change roles and go again.
You finish with design fictions from one possible world, and a map of the relationships and consequences that emerged.
Workshop
Archaeology of the present.
Why does a supermarket ask for your car registration?
Nobody designed the world you live in. Teams dig back through the problems and solutions that put that machine there, one brick at a time, then build forwards into a future of their own. One rule: add a brick only when the bricks below give a reason for it.
It works on any subject: a hospital ward, a supply chain, a border.
Wargames and decision games.
Play the decision before you make it.
Your people play rivals, regulators, customers and the public as well as themselves, then follow each other’s moves into consequences. I designed exercises and wargames for UK government and NATO audiences for five years at Dstl.
- A tabletop exerciseAn exercise script, the injects and the evidence behind them.
- A role-play wargameA day of moves and counter-moves, and a debrief on where the plan broke.
- A playable filmAn interactive drama that puts the audience in charge of the decision, like Balance of Power.
Speaking.
Talks, keynotes and screenings followed by questions.
I’ve spoken at Chatham House and Ministry of Defence forums, and screened my films at festivals and universities from Sheffield to Toronto.
- The robots that make you leaveWhy the next robot war may be fought with nuisance rather than killing, and what that does to sovereignty.
- Your country needs your granHow to find the futures your strategy leaves out, and build them until they look obvious.
- Archaeology of the presentNobody designed the world you live in. How millions of local fixes became the system.
- What close observation reveals about powerWhat filming people inside political and social change taught me.
- Exploring decisions through experienceScenarios, design fiction and games that make consequences tangible.
Inside your team.
Embedded
Futurist in residence.
A set period inside your team. I run the sessions, write the worlds and leave your people able to do it themselves.
Talk about thisOngoing
Futurist as a service.
Monthly time for sparring, research and scenario work as questions come up.
Talk about thisAlready have a futures team, or run a consultancy?
Bring me in for the ideas, the worlds, the wargame or the film, inside your process and your client relationship. I work with your research and specialists, and bring the futures your process wasn’t going to produce.
Talk about collaboratingFrom ideation to implementation.
For the whole journey, I work with Simon through Speculative Edge, a futures consultancy. You can join at any stage.
- Business anthropologyWhat your organisation believes about the future and its place in it, where it’s right and wrong, and the tribes inside it. Simon and I have both done this for multinationals.
- Futures and scenariosWhat could be coming your way, and what you need to be ready for. I lead this stage.
- Courses of actionYour options for getting ready, the dilemmas they raise now and later, and what follows from each.
- ImplementationPutting the futures strategy to work inside your organisation. Simon leads this stage.
- The narrativeStories for staff, customers, investors and the public: authentic, coherent with each other and true to your strategy. I bring the storytelling; Simon brings the corporate depth.
Tell me what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.