on better futures

Bringing about the world we want to live in, the world we want to leave to our children is, substantially, the work of the imagination, or what educational reformer John Dewey describes as ‘the ability to look at things as if they could be otherwise’.18

“We think creatively (not predictively) about the future in order to decide what to do now in order to make possible different futures. There is no reason to be ‘future-oriented’ other than to try to change things, from now on . This means that you must be very careful when trying to ‘future’ to ensure that you are not unwittingly reproducing

How do we spot ‘glimmers’ of the futures we all dream of? What forms of knowledge, and whose voices do we need to be attuned to, to ensure we are seeing these possibilities for what they are?

Many of us have clear visions of what kind of world we don’t want to live in, but are struggling to imagine the kind of world we would live in - let alone how to build that world. We need new narratives to illuminate what’s broken in our society and hands-on solutions for a more sustainable, equal and resilient world.

‘It is one thing to say ‘Another World Is Possible.’ It’s another thing to experience it, however momentarily.’

We should be optimistic not because our problems are smaller than we thought, but because our capacity to solve them is larger than we thought.

Worldbuilding, for me, was a form of expansive hope—a necessary imagination for being alive.

Experts have ambition. They are driven to accumulate more credentials and experience that will help them to achieve even greater influence and power than they currently have. But they’re not excited about the unknown – if anything, they are in denial or resisting the unknown.

The most fundamental task is to help each other to reorient our life and work through a sensibility that is prefigurative of the better aspects of our emerging future.