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Playing with the Future

Infuse your strategy with futures - the February Book of the Month is here!

Published 10 months ago • 2 min read

Foresight Infused Strategy is the Futures Book Club featured read for January!

“Conventional strategic planning processes have become tired, formulaic, and rarely produce truly innovative and futures ready strategy. This book takes you into the world of foresight infused strategy, with people at it's core and collaboration as its primary process.
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Using foresight approaches in your strategy development is a way to develop a shared view of your organisation's preferred future to inform strategic decision-making today. It asks you to think in new ways about the future and to challenge those deeply held assumptions about how you work today and how work will happen in the future. This is a practical book, designed to help people in organisations understand how to begin to use foresight in their strategy development processes.”

This was one of the first really accessible and easy to read books I picked up when starting my study in strategic foresight. Maree has a real knack for explaining complex ideas with easy to follow language - my post it flag forest is a testament to how rich this read is.

New reads stick around a while. This book will be discussed in March (AU & Americas friendly), April (AU & Europe friendly) and May (AU & Americas friendly).

There's still time to get involved with recently featured books

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Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

We live in an age of impossible demands, infinite choice, relentless distraction and spiralling global crises. Yet most productivity advice, like other modern messages about time, makes things worse. It encourages the fantasy that we might one day “get everything done”, becoming the fully optimized, emotionally invincible masters of our time. The pursuit of this limit-denying delusion systematically leaves us more busy, distracted, and isolated from each other – while postponing the truly important parts of life to some point in the future that never quite seems to arrive.

Upcoming discussions: March (AU & Americas friendly) and April (AU & Europe friendly)

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Imaginable by Jane McGonigal

With a gamer’s affinity for imagined worlds and the futurist’s gusto for embracing what comes next, Jane McGonigal urges us to place ourselves ten years hence, look around, imagine what might be, ask questions, run into walls, start anew. Imaginable is both argument for action and blueprint, an irresistible thought-experiment with practical, urgent application, a playful, provocative, and wildly inspiring read. Make the unimaginable imaginable and see the possibilities unfolding.

Upcoming discussions: February (AU & EU friendly) and March (AU & Americas friendly)

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Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

Doughnut Economics proposes an economic mindset that's fit for our times. It's not a set of policies and institutions, but rather a way of thinking to bring about the regenerative and distributive dynamics that this century calls for. Drawing on insights from diverse schools of economic thought - including ecological, feminist, institutional, behavioural and complexity economics - it sets out seven ways to think like a 21st century economist in order to transform economies, local to global.

Upcoming discussions: Final session coming up in February (AU & EU friendly)

Of course you're welcome to read along on your own, but if you'd like to:

  • Be part of the discussions
  • Swap notes with other readers
  • Access our full recommended reads list
  • Meet other futures-curious folk

then you might like to join us!

I hope to see you in the Reading Room!

Amanda

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Playing with the Future

from Amanda Reeves

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