2020 is the year of the future, the date and year for which so many future scenarios were written, especially in the early years of the new futures programs, 2009-2012. While no different in terms of time passing, 2020 is a branded year, one that we’ve been forecasting for the past five decades. Now that we’ve all arrived in it, and world news immediately landed with surprises and shocks, we can sense the confirmation of an existential crisis.
Foresight scenarios are meant to facilitate an organization’s effective adaptation to uncertainty. Yet how do we prepare ourselves as uncertain human beings to cope within our own lives, as well as our organizations and communities?
That said, how can we cope with the present and align our hopes and fears with a desired future? How might we envision the future, while being aware of our worldview limitations?
Design with Dialogue started its first session of the year with the Diamond Star workshop, co-created by SFI 2019 graduate Jananda Lima (see her Medium article here). Diamond Star is a personal foresight process (originally designed by Peter) to construct personal imaginaries for life hopes and career goals, in line with values, to envision pathways toward preferred futures.
This workshop introduced a creative exercise to discover individual possibility using a combination of foresight perspectives, including Causal Layered Analysis and values clarification, and discovering temporal arcs, within the Diamond Star framework.
One aim of the workshop was to help to address fear/anxiety of the future utilizing values assessment to align one’s vision with deeply held values toward preferred futures that launch from present commitments. The approach helps to unpack the elements of personal futures desires, and to orient the collective unconscious toward a better awareness of the options and paradoxes we face in our futures.
The Diamond Star has been used effectively in many visioning contexts: By couples and friends imagining their new year’s plans, by business leaders envisioning plans and possible outcomes in alignment to values, by consultants and advisors, and SFI students in connecting the dots between their major research to the unfolding of their possible futures.
Jananda’s SFI report on the Diamond Star is now available to download on ResearchGate.