Hopeful Speculations
Hopeful Speculations
Hopeful Speculations
Created by
Created by
Created by
Partnership
Partnership
Partnership
Format
Format
Format
Role
Role
Role
Morgan Bath and Alicia Richins
Morgan Bath and Alicia Richins
Department of Imaginary Affairs and The Climateverse
Department of Imaginary Affairs and The Climateverse
Bimonthly, online, open to anyone
Bimonthly, online, open to anyone
Bimonthly, online, open to anyone
Co-creator and lead. Session design, tool selection, facilitation, and published recaps.
Co-creator and lead. Session design, tool selection, facilitation, and published recaps.
Co-creator and lead. Session design, tool selection, facilitation, and published recaps.
Overview
Overview
Foresight methods mostly live in two places: academia and workplaces. Both require a reason to be in the room; a program you enrolled in, a project you were assigned, a budget someone approved. That leaves out almost everyone.
Alicia Richins and I wanted somewhere to use these tools that was neither. Somewhere people could pick up a futures method because they were curious, and leave still holding it.
A book club turned out to be the answer. Speculative fiction is already full of built worlds, already read widely, already argued about. It asks nothing of a newcomer except that they show up having read something.
So we paired the two. One novel, one foresight tool, every session. Read the book as a world, then use the tool to open it: what had to happen for this world to exist, what beliefs hold it up, what pressures are shaping it. Then turn the same instrument on the present, and let the comparison do the rest.
We run it online, because a room in Toronto reaches Toronto. Zoom reaches whoever wants to be there.
The aim is futures literacy. Not teaching foresight exactly, but giving people enough hands-on experience with the methods that they can reach for one on their own afterwards. Nobody has to arrive knowing what a Causal Layered Analysis is. By the end of a session, they have run one.
Alicia and I built Hopeful Speculations together before it had an organizational home. Department of Imaginary Affairs & Climateverse later gave it one. It is a DIA program now and I lead it, but it started as something the two of us simply wanted to exist.
Foresight methods mostly live in two places: academia and workplaces. Both require a reason to be in the room; a program you enrolled in, a project you were assigned, a budget someone approved. That leaves out almost everyone.
Alicia Richins and I wanted somewhere to use these tools that was neither. Somewhere people could pick up a futures method because they were curious, and leave still holding it.
A book club turned out to be the answer. Speculative fiction is already full of built worlds, already read widely, already argued about. It asks nothing of a newcomer except that they show up having read something.
So we paired the two. One novel, one foresight tool, every session. Read the book as a world, then use the tool to open it: what had to happen for this world to exist, what beliefs hold it up, what pressures are shaping it. Then turn the same instrument on the present, and let the comparison do the rest.
We run it online, because a room in Toronto reaches Toronto. Zoom reaches whoever wants to be there.
The aim is futures literacy. Not teaching foresight exactly, but giving people enough hands-on experience with the methods that they can reach for one on their own afterwards. Nobody has to arrive knowing what a Causal Layered Analysis is. By the end of a session, they have run one.
Alicia and I built Hopeful Speculations together before it had an organizational home. Department of Imaginary Affairs & Climateverse later gave it one. It is a DIA program now and I lead it, but it started as something the two of us simply wanted to exist.
How it Runs
How it Runs
Six sessions a year. Three tools. Each tool used twice.
The repetition is the point. Using a method once shows you what it does. Using it twice, on a different book with a different group, shows you what the tool was doing as distinct from what the book and the room were doing. The second run is where the method itself becomes visible.
Year one: the Futures Wheel, the Futures Triangle, and Causal Layered Analysis. Next year, three different tools.
Horizon scanning & Trend Analysis. Each team member ran an independent scan, surfacing signals across social, technological, environmental, values, and political domains. These consolidated into six trends, each documented with signals of change, related trends, implications, and full source references: Reimagine Food, Waste Has Value Too, Grassland Restoration, Redesigning Food, Climate Change and Food Security, and Industry EcoRevolution.
Four worlds. Using Dator's generic images of the future, we built four scenarios (Grow, Collapse, Transform, Discipline) each internally consistent and provocatively plausible. I led Transform.
Depth methods. Causal Layered Analysis for each world, moving from litany through systems and worldview to underlying myth. Backcast timelines from 2024 to 2044, with real 2024 signals threaded into the path. Day-in-a-life narratives anchoring each world in something that feels lived.
Futures artifacts. One per scenario, all children's books. We chose the format because it demands simplicity and storytelling, which forces clarity about what a world actually believes.
The Pairings
The Pairings
Each tool is chosen for what a particular book makes visible.
Monk & Robot — Futures Wheel Becky Chambers writes a world that has already made its transition, which makes it ideal for tracing consequence outward. The Futures Wheel asks what follows from a change, then what follows from that.
1984 — Causal Layered Analysis A world with a very loud surface and a very deep foundation. CLA moves from the visible litany down through systems and worldview to the myth underneath, which is where this particular novel keeps its engine.
The Free People's Village — Futures Triangle A book about competing pressures: what pulls toward a different future, what pushes from the present, what weight of history holds things in place. The Futures Triangle names those three forces directly.
Parable of the Sower — Causal Layered Analysis Our first repeat, on a book whose worldview and myth layers are doing almost all of the work.
This Is How You Lose the Time War — next session
Horizon scanning & Trend Analysis. Each team member ran an independent scan, surfacing signals across social, technological, environmental, values, and political domains. These consolidated into six trends, each documented with signals of change, related trends, implications, and full source references: Reimagine Food, Waste Has Value Too, Grassland Restoration, Redesigning Food, Climate Change and Food Security, and Industry EcoRevolution.
Four worlds. Using Dator's generic images of the future, we built four scenarios (Grow, Collapse, Transform, Discipline) each internally consistent and provocatively plausible. I led Transform.
Depth methods. Causal Layered Analysis for each world, moving from litany through systems and worldview to underlying myth. Backcast timelines from 2024 to 2044, with real 2024 signals threaded into the path. Day-in-a-life narratives anchoring each world in something that feels lived.
Futures artifacts. One per scenario, all children's books. We chose the format because it demands simplicity and storytelling, which forces clarity about what a world actually believes.
What we Have Learned So Far
What we Have Learned So Far
Distance opens people up, and then they come home anyway. Participants tell us it is easier to go deep inside a speculative world, because the stakes are borrowed and the world is not theirs. That is true. It is also never where a session ends. Every single one has come back to the present, to what is happening now and what people are living through. The fiction lowers the barrier to entry, and the group brings itself home without being asked. That return trip has quietly become the real work: play with a tool at a safe distance, then bridge it to the world you are actually standing in.
The CLA as a U. It is a way down through litany, systems, and worldview to the myth, a reframe at the bottom, and then a climb back up the other side carrying the new myth through each layer again. Groups find that shape on their own. Seeing it happen twice, with different books and different people, is the clearest argument I have for why we repeat each tool.
The tool is a scaffold, not a script. At the Parable of the Sower session the conversation ran long enough that we never reflected on the CLA board together as a group. In a workshop that would be a failure. Here it was not. People had gone somewhere real, and interrupting them to complete an exercise would have served the method rather than the room. Knowing when a tool has already done its job is part of using it well.
Some books bring their own audience. Nobody read Parable of the Sower for that session. Every person there had read it before, one of them when it was first published, and came because the book had stayed with them. That changed what the session was: not an introduction to a text, but a room of people who had each been carrying something for years, finally with a structure for talking about it together. The closing passage from Earthseed on change landed for everyone, and it landed because they had all arrived already holding it.
Virtual facilitation is its own craft. Holding an online room that is genuinely engaged rather than merely attended is a different skill from holding a physical one, and most of what I know about it I learned here.
Horizon scanning & Trend Analysis. Each team member ran an independent scan, surfacing signals across social, technological, environmental, values, and political domains. These consolidated into six trends, each documented with signals of change, related trends, implications, and full source references: Reimagine Food, Waste Has Value Too, Grassland Restoration, Redesigning Food, Climate Change and Food Security, and Industry EcoRevolution.
Four worlds. Using Dator's generic images of the future, we built four scenarios (Grow, Collapse, Transform, Discipline) each internally consistent and provocatively plausible. I led Transform.
Depth methods. Causal Layered Analysis for each world, moving from litany through systems and worldview to underlying myth. Backcast timelines from 2024 to 2044, with real 2024 signals threaded into the path. Day-in-a-life narratives anchoring each world in something that feels lived.
Futures artifacts. One per scenario, all children's books. We chose the format because it demands simplicity and storytelling, which forces clarity about what a world actually believes.
Writing
Writing
Each session I produce a reflection: a longer piece on the DIA website, and a shorter post on LinkedIn that links through to it and to the next session.
Horizon scanning & Trend Analysis. Each team member ran an independent scan, surfacing signals across social, technological, environmental, values, and political domains. These consolidated into six trends, each documented with signals of change, related trends, implications, and full source references: Reimagine Food, Waste Has Value Too, Grassland Restoration, Redesigning Food, Climate Change and Food Security, and Industry EcoRevolution.
Four worlds. Using Dator's generic images of the future, we built four scenarios (Grow, Collapse, Transform, Discipline) each internally consistent and provocatively plausible. I led Transform.
Depth methods. Causal Layered Analysis for each world, moving from litany through systems and worldview to underlying myth. Backcast timelines from 2024 to 2044, with real 2024 signals threaded into the path. Day-in-a-life narratives anchoring each world in something that feels lived.
Futures artifacts. One per scenario, all children's books. We chose the format because it demands simplicity and storytelling, which forces clarity about what a world actually believes.