Week 27 / 2024

This has been a recovery week. Last week was pretty intense with discussions and workshops and travel, and the last month or so has been pretty foot-to-the-floor; sometimes, you've just gotta give yourself a bit of a rest.

(Sometimes, to tell the truth, yourself enforces the rest by signalling its incapacity for much else.)

That said, it's not like I've been sat around on my hands! There's a goodly number of meetings and calls about various projects and appearances, plus a lot of catch-up admyn—though the latter has been somewhat mixed up in a minor refactoring of what passes for my time-management systems.

(Todoist finally dropped weekly calendar views in the web-app, complete with external calendar integrations, and... well, if you know, you know.)

Add in a bunch of brainstorming around the future of this very website, and I guess it's not been as much of an off-week as I thought?

Selah—on with the format!

One Big Thing

I had a fairly weighty realisation during the workshops for PROJECT TEMPORAL last week.

At the end of the first session (which was held two days before the second session), there was a clear sense for both my co-runner and myself that the participants had more to give: the worldbuilding work had been really fun, everyone got properly into character, and the energy was high all the way through. It felt like we could have run for another thirty minutes, or even another hour, and they'd still have been going strong. There wasn't another hour in the schedule, of course, but we probably could have gotten the thirty minutes if we'd asked... and we definitely considered it!

I would love to be able to claim that my decision not to extend the session was an example of my masterful facilitation skills... but in truth, it was mostly because I was running low on juice, and I didn't want to break the "magic circle" of the session by asking an out-of-character question.

But when we returned to the world we'd been working on two days later, the participants got back into it very quickly, and settled into the groove of producing draft content for the prototype we're developing with very little fuss or effort. My co-runner and I both noted this ease, and compared it to facilitations we'd done before. We came to the conclusion that the second session went as well as it did because we'd finished the first one while the participants still had engagement and energy left in the tank: they hadn't gotten burned out or bored of the imaginary space we'd been building together.

This reminded me of a well-worn bit of writing advice, most often attributed to Ernest Hemingway, but repeated by many writers after him (and quite likely many before him, too). Hemingway advised making yourself stop writing for the day halfway through a sentence that you already knew how to finish; that way, he reasoned, you'd return to the project the following day with the confidence and energy that comes from knowing what you need to do next.

I have heretofore mostly ignored Hemingway's advice when it comes to my writing, tending to just motor on until I felt I didn't have anything left to give (or until some other task necessitated my stopping). Having now seen how effective it can be for others to stop while there's still energy left, however, I am much more inclined to give it a try.

One Small Thing

Related to the above, and rediscovered during the same sessions: if you're having fun as the facilitator(s), you increase the chances that your participants are also having fun, which increases the chances of the session going well.

So, plan for fun!

(Oddly, given how self-serious a person I'm told I can be most of the time, fun in the context of facilitation tends to mean performing in roles that make me—or rather the character I'm playing—the butt of the joke... )

A Clipping

The more time you spend here at Worldbuilding Agency—and I hope it'll be a lot!—the more you'll notice how important the concept of hope is to my work.

On the academic side, that's informed by my engagement with utopian studies, and in particular the writings of Lisa Garforth and Philip Wegner; I intend to write about their work here, because I think it has a lot to tell us about what futuring is for as a practice.

Outside the ivory tower, I am influenced by the reliably powerful writing of Rebecca Solnit, whose uses the term in much the same way as the utopian scholars, but in a rather more accessible style of writing. This piece at Lit Hub, where Solnit has a regular column, is a good example:

We make something more likely, more widely believed, by saying and repeating it. Our rhetoric encourages or discourages. Which is why sports teams chant a version of “I believe we will win.” A whole sector of the progressive/left/whatever, however, seems to be eternally chanting “I believe we will lose.” This is not something sports teams do, incidentally.

In life outside games, warnings matter, but warnings are not prophecies. Warnings say, “this could happen, or if this happens, the results will be that,” which is quite different from “this will happen” as a flat declaration of inevitability. From Orwell to Octavia Butler, the people who give us warnings believe we have choices to make; as Butler said: “The very act of trying to look ahead to discern possibilities and offer warnings is in itself an act of hope.”

This has been the Worldbuilding Agency weeknotes for Week 26 of 2024. Thanks for reading! If you've enjoyed them, it's free to subscribe, but please consider supporting this research journal with a small monthly payment—you'll get access to the occasional bit of Exclusive Content ™️, and you'll be funding free subscriptions for those with fewer monetary resources... but first and foremost you'll get the warm glow that only ever comes from enabling fully independent and climate-focussed foresight research to continue.

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Have a good weekend.