Today is Groundhog Day, when the spotlight turns to a groundhog named Punxsutawney Phil. His handlers in the western Pennsylvania town today announced he did not see his shadow, and so we’re due for an early spring. 

I already knew this because I bought a massive puffa coat/wearable duvet on Wednesday, thus ensuring that – thanks to Sod’s Law– we are guaranteed to have the mildest winter any of us have ever experienced. You can thank me later.

Some things I did this week

Kicked off a new project. This client is in many ways similar to another we’ve been working with for a while. So what’s been interesting already is the extent to which, despite them having so much in common, their culture is different, and just a few days in it’s clear the approach we’re likely to take will have to differ too. 

There are never any rinse-and-repeat projects in this line of work, and this has been a lovely reminder why we spend time understanding the organisation, its needs, its users and any parallel change happening before we start to look at solutions. It’s what keeps it interesting after mumble-ty years in the industry.

What I’m reading

After three rather depressing reads in a row I needed a pick-me-up. I found it in the form of  Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming And Feel Ready For Anything, Even Things That Seem Impossible Today. In this much-needed positive read futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal builds on lessons from the pandemic and encourages readers to use their imagination to envision future possibilities.

I took McGonigal’s How To Think Like A Futurist course at Stanford back in 2019 and it left me energised about the potential for the world to change for the better, and my own ability to design and drive that change. I incorporated many futures thinking techniques into my work, and can’t help spotting signals of change around me.

When, two years later, I found myself trapped in a shoebox flat in the middle of a pandemic, in a foreign city where I barely knew anyone, I signed up to the updated-for-unprecedented-times Coursera version of the course.

In that course – and in this book – McGonigal stresses that both individually and collectively we’re capable of a lot more than we think. During the pandemic things that were previously unthinkable suddenly became possible. The unimaginable became… imaginable. 

We changed the way that we live, we work, we socialise. And if we can do that, we have the capacity and imagination to deal with all the other change we face.

McGonigal combines insights from futures studies, game design, and psychology in this call to arms for us all to actively shape the future instead of passively waiting for it to unfold. 

We can do that. All of us. Think how much your life has changed in the last ten years; when you see how far you’ve come, you see how far you can go in the next ten.

By taking the time to consider what the future might look like, and how it can be different, we can challenge our assumptions and play an active role in imagining, in creating a better future.

Connections

It was a quiet week on the social front, but I had a brief catch up with Eve Warren, the creative brain behind the DWXS brand, while she was in Amsterdam the other day.

Something I learned

Thinking about the future activates several brain regions. Picturing and planning for future events activates the prefrontal cortex (responsible for planning and decision-making) and the limbic system (involved in emotions). This activation can enhance cognitive functions like planning, problem-solving, and emotional regulation.

That’s one of the reasons many of us were low-key depressed during the pandemic; we had nothing to look forward to aside from it just being over. The things we had planned kept being cancelled.

The specific future event lighting up my prefrontal cortex is a very-much-not-work break in Portugal next week. Which is my roundabout way of saying there might not be a weeknote for week 6.