Toward a Preemptive Social Enterprise

Verynice is a social enterprise design firm based in Los Angeles, with the groundbreaking business model of giving away half their work for free. To date they have gifted over USD 5 million in design services to worthy causes.

Having worked at the cutting edge of social enterprise for almost a decade, the Founder and Managing Director of verynice, Matthew Manos, is releasing a book about what he believes the next generation of this work calls for from entrepreneurs.

I'm honoured to provide the Foreword for Toward a Preemptive Social Enterprise, which features a cast of contributors including futurist Jake Dunagan, designer Nathan Shedroff, and science fiction author Bruce Sterling.

The book's worldwide digital release is tomorrow, 1 August 02016, with hard copies available in mid-September.

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FOREWORD to Toward a Preemptive Social Enterprise.


Business as a category of human activity has traditionally aimed to maximise certain outcomes at the expense of others. Other communities, other species, other places, and future generations.

Take the oil industry for example. Like the endlessly ingenious tools of the extractive trade themselves, profit-first business morphs to fit the contours of the lucrative niche. I locate a rich deposit, I work out access to it by hook or by crook, and voilà: I drink your milkshake. Other impacts are someone else’s problem.

Traditional business is a badly broken finite game.

Yet it is possible to flip the premise. Here is the quietly revolutionary but increasingly obvious alternative: morph the enterprise to generate desired impacts, and reverse engineer a business model to make it economically viable.

This change-making path is often called social enterprise, and the figure animating that change and beating that path is the social entrepreneur.

Social entrepreneurship comes from the overdue recognition that business is an engine of change –– nay, a powerhouse. More and more of us see that to harness its institutional potential to worthwhile ends could be hugely influential, generating outcomes as deliberate and positive as the outcomes generated by legacy means have been accidental and destructive.

As Matt Manos explains in these pages, "A social entrepreneur is a designer of business whose intentions are not in capital gain, but instead in the advancement of the greater good of society." The central formula is, then, approximately: business + design + ethics (greater good) = social enterprise.

When one surveys today's fast-changing "ecology of commerce", in Paul Hawken's resonant phrase, we find a wide range of creatures from different evolutionary eras living side by side. There seem to be many recent, small initiatives nobly attuned to the full spectrum of their impacts. Generally these are nimble little Darwinian upstarts, yet to prove their fitness over generations. Such hopeful mutants co-exist alongside others, bigger and older, but catching on to the emerging rules of the infinite game, and if nothing else keen to be thought of as doing the right thing. Alongside these in turn can be found still others – some of the biggest, most formidable, and lumbering beasts in the landscape –– that show zero indication of giving any shits at all about the greater good.

Thus we find ourselves in a strange transitional era for business.

Consider entrepreneur Tony Hsieh's recent memoir Delivering Happiness, which documents the heroic efforts at his company Zappos to establish a viable niche as a service-oriented online shoe retailer. This story elicits a paradoxical kind of wonder. On the one hand, we can admire the way the organisation has promoted passion, purpose, and positive experiences for those in its immediate orbit. On the other hand, we may be simultaneously baffled by a lack of attention to the happiness of the invisible yet essential legions of workers further up the supply chain; those who actually stitch and glue together the shoes at the heart of each all-smiling transaction.

This integration of ethics into business, then, the "sociality" of social enterprise, is patchy, with even some of the good guys having serious blindspots, To misquote William Gibson, social enterprise may already be here, but it's by no means evenly distributed.

Still, there is no mistaking the direction in which the global connectivity, transparency, and systemic awareness are pushing. Some people, reporting right from the cutting edge, are perfectly positioned to help the rest of us understand where social enterprise, and ultimately business in general, need to go. Matthew Manos is such a person.

"The entire premise of social enterprise relies on reaction," he writes. The default setup is "post-traumatic innovation", but waiting until something has gone wrong––treating disaster as the trigger for action––is irresponsible.

It turns out that thoughtfully engaged and ethically motivated business can still be stuck in the past, solving one set of problems while leaving others untouched, or even making them worse.

It is therefore the aim of the book you are reading to show that a crucial ingredient is missing from the social enterprise formula: foresight.

The next generation of social entrepreneur must be "preemptive", less problem-ameliorating and more visionary, attending not only to traumas in need of remedy, but also to opportunities of shaping positive change, based in coherent, plural perspectives on how the whole system could evolve.

Social entrepreneurs should also be futurists.

Now, this is a big idea, and dealing with big ideas is hazardous, especially when it comes to value shifts. The more basic, load-bearing, and "self-evident" the assumptions at issue, the more readily attempts to address them risk being dismissed as irrelevant (incompatible with current settings) or redundant (since, once absorbed, previously unfamiliar settings become normal again).

However, someone has to take on the big ideas, and in business, “normal” needs major renovations. So regardless of whether you already share its view, or disagree vehemently, you should read this book.

To be slightly pre-emptive myself for a moment, it may be that some readers find this argument for foresight to make a poor accompaniment to a fond belief that the market already and automatically incorporates whatever information about the future it needs to.

You are invited to consider that the invisible hand mediating market participants works only with information in the system, and since there are no future facts, the hand can contribute no more foresight than the parties themselves bring to the situation. If we want markets to take the future into account, the people in them need to do it.

Then again, there may be some entrepreneurs sceptical about the value of designated “foresight” tools, since they already are creating the future, thank you very much. This resembles claims I have heard from some designers I’ve met over the last ten years.

They are partly right, of course. But it is a truism to claim that business, or design, is creating the future. As Kenneth Boulding has pointed out, all decisions are about the future. Merely existing helps to create the future, and inactions can have an effect just as surely as actions do. Neither the claim nor the fact that one is already "shaping the future" puts that activity beyond the possibility of improvement.

The good news is that designers and entrepreneurs alike are perfectly positioned to use strategic foresight approaches, such as horizon scanning, scenario generation, and experiential futures; the inherent future-shaping properties of design and business make these valuable places to integrate such a futures literacy.

Part of what Manos and his collaborators seek to do in this book, very successfully I think, is show that entrepreneurs and designers must take it upon themselves to be more systematic, deliberate and detailed in articulating which futures are at issue; which scenarios their efforts mean to help avoid and, more importantly, which ones they intend to help realise.

Preemptive social enterprise, therefore, ties our initial recognition of institutional capacity ("business is a powerful category of actor") to the capacity for individual action ("what can I do?"), and turns a personal ethical problem ("how can I as an individual exert meaningful influence?") into a collective design invitation ("what can I start, or help to grow, that may have the outcomes I wish to see?").

But let’s be clear about the depth and reach of what is being suggested here. We are not talking about a one-time goal shift, but about the development and integration of a permanent and self-renewing orientation. Not merely a new direction, but a new way to navigate.

One way to appreciate the significance of the argument is to call to mind the generic taxonomy of "places to intervene in a system" offered by Limits to Growth lead author and pioneering systems thinker Donella Meadows. What Manos is inviting social entrepreneurs to do, in effect, is move some of their effort and attention upstream where greater influence can be had. He would not merely have us put business in service of different, even if more worthwhile, "goals of the system" (number two on Meadows's list). The case for preemptive social enterprise is directly affects "the mindset or paradigm" out of which the goals themselves arise. This is leverage point number one, which implicitly impacts goals, and everything else.

Why does this matter? The cultivation of a capacity for strategic foresight entails a rigorous, informed, creative, generative, and always updating view of the world's and of one's own possibilities. Integrating it represents a change with ongoing and ever-evolving implications for organisational and individual activity.

In earlier work, echoed and amplified here, Manos has set about addressing how entrepreneurship is done, carefully documenting all existing business models in order to work out where underexplored potential lies. So the perspective of this book is –– bear with me now –– meta-entrepreneurial. It is being entrepreneurial with regard to entrepreneurship itself; not only using existing tools to put the changemaking powerhouse of enterprise in service of "better goals", but seeking to make it self-improving. Retooling the toolkit.

As Stewart Brand, another important social innovator, and a futurist too, has pointed out: “Nobody can save the world, but any of us can help set in motion a self-saving world." Foresightful, anticipatory, or to use Manos's chosen word, preemptive social enterprise may well be a critical, organic ingredient of a self-saving world; more flexible and resilient, more apt to adjust and to learn.

Preemptive social enterprise is a bid for business to embrace an iterative, anticipatory learning function, and for this to face outwardly and inwardly at the same time: "The design of scenarios, and, most importantly, the design of ourselves within those scenarios allows for a deep understanding of our potential, preferred, probable, or plausible futures."

“The design of ourselves” seems an important phrase. What might this entail?

I suspect that the answer may rest in a central, and highly valuable idea explored in this book. If you wish to realise a changed world, it is important to invest in imagination.

Now, one reason why I think Matt Manos is so effective as a designer, as an entrepreneur, and as a person is that he doesn't take conventional dichotomies at face value. He does not, for example, seem to see invention as being somehow elevated over or opposed to the legwork of researching that which already exists. This attitude lets him do the due diligence of assembling a near-exhaustive catalogue of business models, as well as adding his own––not only in theory but in ever-iterating, ever-improving practice. Nor does he snap-to-grid with an assumption that many others seem to live by, that imagining and implementing are somehow opposites. Instead, he treats the two, rightly I think, as equal, necessary and complementary facets of the same changemaking work. This lets him try out more ideas in a single project than a lot of people could be proud to have initiated over a span of years.

Even the seemingly foundational opposites of fact and fiction, when it comes to navigating change towards preferred futures, are unhelpful signposts. For what is a dream that one means to manifest if not both fiction and fact at once? Or rather, fiction that aspires to fact, and thereby creates it?

So one of the conventional dichotomies that this work refuses, critically, is the putative "realism" of business vs the "indulgence" of imagination.

Again: Imagination is an investment.

Over the past decade, designers have turned to futures practice, and futurists to design, out of a mutual need to integrate speculative and material registers. A flowering of hybrid practices – experiential futures, design fiction, speculative design – has been the result. All sorts of tangible artifacts and immersive experiences that make futures more easily shareable, thinkable and feelable. A few years ago, fellow traveller Bruce Sterling proposed this definition of design fiction, “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change”. However, as digital media professor Janet Murray has observed, "When we enter a fictional world, we do not merely 'suspend' a critical faculty; we also exercise a creative faculty. We do not suspend disbelief so much as we actively create belief." Similarly, interactive performance specialist Jeff Wirth points out that his artform "does not rely on the 'suspension of disbelief'", but rather "calls for an 'investment of belief.'"

After a decade of working at this intersection of design and futures, I think it may be time to retire our long-term loan of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s wonderful but too-limited notion of "suspension of disbelief", in favour of this idea that we really invest belief in our imaginings, in order to see where they may take us. Suspension implies an interim state, with nothing much changing once the thing suspended is reinstated. But one invests with a view to a return.

Peter Lunenfeld's "return on vision" cited by Manos is right on point: we should invest in imagination, and seek our return in the new options and pathways that thereby become available.

Why so? People are extraordinarily plastic, and versatile, as testified by the massive (if lately endangered) diversity of human cultures built atop a more or less identical biological substrate. I've suggested this before, mashing up media ecologist Marshall McLuhan and sociologist-futurist Fred Polak: we shape our images of the future, and meanwhile they shape us.

Therefore, if design has given to business some tools with which to be more creative and intentional, and futures has offered business a vocabulary of long-range outcomes, then perhaps here we have a hint as to how business can return the favour to both. The framing and language of investment, unshackled from its bloodless, numerical bottom-line connotations, but retaining the impulse to clear-eyed evaluation of what one really values, and how much difference one’s actions are really making, could prove an important loan for designers and futurists alike.

This book calls for bringing futures and foresight work into the repertoire of the social innovator or entrepreneur. We have touched on why, and also also, broadly, how, by investing time and effort in experimental belief structures, the imagination of alternative worlds. If you're as pragmatic and results oriented as I hope you might be, then at this point you'll be itching for more concrete details. But WHAT does this mean, specifically, on Monday morning?

Good, good. Read on!

The ultimate test of these ideas does not consist in what they do for you on the page, but in your search for ways to take them on in your life. The truest and fullest response is one for you –– for all of us, a community –– to find in the doing, and share.

I know, and suspect you know too, that business is changing, and that it needs to change, dramatically so, in order at last to fit the contours of the infinite game that makes all of this possible.

I believe that if you follow along a little ways in the direction this book is pointing, towards the preemptive social enterprise, your practice may become more imaginative, your convictions more grounded, your perceptions more trenchant, your action more effective, and the world incrementally more just.

And I hope you will agree that it is well worth a try.


Stuart Candy
Museu do Amanhã, Rio de Janeiro, July 02016

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Toward a Preemptive Social Enterprise is available in full on a Pay-What-You-Want basis via futureimpact.co.

The Foreword above can be found in pdf here.

Related:
> The act of imagination
> LEAP Dialogues: Impacting the Social
> Foresight is a right
> Design is a team sport
> Strategic Foresight and the Design MBA

Impacting the Social

Images: Candy Chang, Before I Die, New Orleans, 02011.

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Last month a remarkable book was published by Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design –– LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation.

In the preface, editor Mariana Amatullo states that the work is "a first-of-its kind resource" directly addressing "change[s] in how design is taught, practiced and integrated into organizations, why these changes are happening, what is needed to support these new practices, and how designers can pursue these new career pathways". With 84 contributors across many themes, it's an impressively wide-ranging, substantial, and I might add, beautifully designed volume.

I'm thrilled to have a piece in LEAP Dialogues in the form of a conversation with artist Candy Chang, moderated by designer Bryan Boyer, who is also one of the collection's co-editors.

Bryan Boyer's wonderful stuff has appeared here at The Sceptical Futuryst before; he has since spent years working on pathbreaking projects and approaches in strategic design (e.g., In Studio: Recipes for Systemic Change, 02011, pdf).

Candy Chang's work includes marvellous participatory public projects such as Before I Die and I Wish This Was, as well as contributions to the Hypothetical Development Organization, a collaboration with Rob Walker and others which I delightedly backed on Kickstarter years ago, and regularly feature in talks about guerrilla futures practice.

Our dialogue appears in the book under the title "Impacting the Social".

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Bryan Boyer: You both do projects that are performed in the real world, in the city. Why is this important to you?

Stuart Candy: I work across settings and formats—museums, galleries, boardrooms, conferences, universities, city streets. Operating in diverse sites from project to project is more important to me than any one project by itself. To my mind, all contexts of deployment are “real world,” although each has its own affordances, limitations and publics. The same goes for different media—online game, workshop, installation, mailout, design jam, short film and so on. To riff off Marshall McLuhan, each medium is a different massage. These different contexts of encounter, and alternative ways of massaging those contexts, are not merely interchangeable aesthetic options but design parameters: how would you like to massage those you wish to engage?

Experiential futures practice is location and medium agnostic because it is more about enabling futures than using or advancing a particular mode of expression. Anything that you can cause to happen to, with and for someone is, in principle, fair game; the entirety of experience, the whole of the sensorium, is the canvas or design space. The term “experiential futures“ tries to convey this encompassing, transmedia idea of the range of options at our disposal. The corollary is that each intervention within the practice must be highly specific to topic, site, time, audience, etc.

What‘s interesting to me about urban settings is that they are less scripted. I find it important to be prepared to use unscripted places because most people, thoughts, decisions aren‘t necessarily happening where one has an invitation. When there is something that people should perhaps be considering, and they aren‘t aware of or able to enter the museum or workshop or boardroom or town hall where the conversation is officially convened, it can be useful to instead bring the conversation to them.

This is how our “guerrilla futures“ practice emerged. Formal, solicited projects often encounter roadblocks, and since you have to adapt to constraints in any project, it can be interesting to work with “found” challenges and opportunities instead.

Candy Chang: I’m interested in how places shape us. I studied urban planning and at the same time I made street art, which led me to think more deeply about public spaces. In a built environment where citizen’s flyers are illegal yet businesses can shout about their latest products on an increasing number of surfaces, we need to consider how public spaces can be better designed so that they’re not necessarily allocated to the highest bidder, but also reflect our needs as a community and as individuals. The places we share have a lot of potential to help us connect, reflect and make sense of our communities and our lives together. William Whyte’s The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces encouraged me to trust my real world experiences, and making street art gave me the moxie to just try things out and see what happens.

I’m an introvert, and the participatory public art projects start- ed out as a way to ask my neighbors things I was too shy to ask in person—or as a way for the quieter people to share just as much as the loud ones. Over time I realized these installa- tions had other benefits. They’re anonymous, so you can open up in ways you might not have otherwise. They allow people to easily participate on their own time. And they’re places where we can collectively reflect together. I think Stuart’s work does that well in his own way, and I admire his democratic approach to foresight work. I’ve been interested in creating safe spaces for honesty and vulnerability, and I like how Stuart is interested in making “safe spaces for dangerous conversations.”

SC: One doesn’t really get anywhere very interesting with futures until one starts to entertain possibilities that deeply challenge current ways of thinking. I’m invoking the spirit of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead here (“It is the business of the future to be dangerous”) as well as my mentor, Jim Dator (“Any useful statement about the future should at first appear to be ridiculous”). A company may be facing some change in the market that no one in it recognizes; a government may need help even to see, let alone respond to, unexpected shifts in the political landscape. In any case, the “dangerous conversation” confronts that which is uncomfortable and vulnerable, and therefore marginalized, but potentially transformative. Likewise for other kinds of community, and for individuals. Creating a safe space for that means first of all finding ways to suspend the very powerful reflex of avoiding such sensitive topics.

One of our earliest experiential futures projects was for the State of Hawaii, almost a decade ago, to kick off a sustainability planning process across the islands. Together with Jake Dunagan, and with the help of others at the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, we immersed 550 people, ordinary citizens and elected representatives alike, in four alternative versions of the islands in the year 2050. One of the four was set in the wake of a global economic implosion in the 2040s, followed by an interval of chaos before the United States military intervened to maintain law and order. With the old economic and political regime discredited, they reinstated the monarchy that the U.S. had overthrown in 1893.

As an experiential scenario, then, participants entering the room found themselves cast as climate change refugees being naturalized as citizens of the so-called “Democratic Kingdom of Hawaii,” a military governance regime with a veneer of local culture. Here the experience provided a container in which some potentially discomfiting prospects could be engaged: you’re already in the scenario by the time the rational mind starts to mount intellectual or political objections. As we say, it’s better to be surprised by a simulation than blindsided by reality. Such a conversation may be difficult, but it can’t hurt you nearly as much as not having it can.At other times, offering hospitality to dangerous ideas can take the form of adopting processes designed to include people and elicit views that might otherwise (if often unintentionally) be left out. For many years I’ve used Open Space Technology, a participant-centered way of running meetings of almost any size, and organizations like the engineering firm Arup, as well as the Singaporean government, the leadership of Oxford University, and the team behind the regional Burning Man event in Australia were all able to overcome initial discomfort with the emergent character of the process to explore their potential contexts and choices more freely and more effectively than usual.

BB: Who are your projects for?

CC: They’re for everyone—or at the very least for me! They’re a way to satisfy my curiosity. My projects are more psychological now, but they started out very civic-minded. When I lived in New York City, I learned about Jane Jacobs and how she rallied her community to prevent the Lower Manhattan Expressway from being built in 1962. It still shocks me to think how different New York would be today if the Lower Manhattan Expressway happened, because the “slums” Robert Moses tried to clear out are now some of the greatest neighborhoods in the city. It made me think about all the cities that could have been, and how all the cities that we have today depend on who gets involved. When we make democracy more accessible, we make places that are more loved, more cared for and more meaningful to us for the rest of our lives. If we believe in greater democracy, our unbridled creativity is now required to design the situations in which this can happen.

That’s what I like about Stuart’s immersive, thought-provoking scenarios for residents to contemplate and kick around and challenge. It’s fun and engaging. There was a lot of talk in my urban planning classes about participatory planning as if we were holding the doors back to an excited, well-informed mob. In reality, there is no crowd on the other side of the door. Many people have an ambiguous understanding of civic processes, and many others are simply turned off by them. I’ve been to many community meetings that are so dreary, only the angry neighbors are excited enough to show up. There are a lot of opportunities to re-imagine civic engagement so that people are inspired to get involved in shaping the future of their community.

SC: A colleague asked recently whether thinking about the future is a privilege or a right. Unfortunately, it’s actually a luxury. Many may have the motive, but few have the means or the opportunity. But this is not how things ought to work. Normatively, thinking about futures is everyone’s right. My work is interested in making futures more available, accessible, habitual. It’s about urging people to claim their license to spend time and creative effort there. With this broad mission in mind, participation can look very different from one engagement to another.

I think this work is for people willing to ask questions and entertain new ideas about the future. That’s less a demographic than a psychographic—or better, a mindset—that you try to bring out among whoever comes along, by providing opportunities to think differently.

Another aspect of “who is this for,” is that currently I do a good deal of work in an education setting. OCAD U has the world’s first academic program in design and foresight, that’s what drew me there. It’s exciting to help spread this practiceto where practitioners are trained. This lets us access a higher leverage point in the system—how emerging designers are acculturated. You try things out by setting briefs and developing methods, then see how a range of different minds adapt and work the process through. The classroom becomes a lab, and students—bringing their own backgrounds and concerns, intentions and publics—extend experimentation into places one might not think or choose to go oneself. I find this a more generative way to work than just doing my own stuff all the time, and it also ultimately makes the work “for” a wider and more flexible constituency.

BB: Are your projects provocations, or something else?

CC: Each project is an experiment that challenges what our public spaces are fundamentally made of and how they might better reflect what we value as human beings. After I lost someone I loved, I went through a long period of depression.I made the Before I Die project as a way to make sense of my grief and find consolation with my neighbors. Their responses helped me more than they will ever know, and I’ve learned just how universal our struggles and desires are after reading responses from Before I Die walls in over 70 countries. I saw even more struggles in the Confessions project. From my experiences, people are yearning for safe spaces to be honest and vulnerable with the people around them. It’s cathartic and consoling. You’re not alone as you’re trying to make sense of your life. You’re not the only one who feels like they’re barely keeping it together.

During one of my gloomiest periods of existential confusion,I found a lot of comfort in a book called The Middle Passage by Jungian analyst James Hollis. He said, “In the end, we are only tiny frightened animals, doing our best to survive amid other tiny frightened animals.” This always consoles me. I returnto this sentence when I lose perspective, and it’s somethingI remember when I consider our communities. Our personal anxieties extend into our public life and many of the conflicts in our communities come from a lack of trust and understanding. There are a lot of barriers to opening up and while the barriers remain, it’s easy to forget the humanity in the people around us and become impersonal, and even adversarial. These personal, anonymous prompts offer a gentle first step towards honesty and vulnerability in public, which can lead to trust and under- standing. These are essential elements for a more compassionate society. They’re essential elements for social cohesion.

SC: A provocation can spur thought when it succeeds, but sometimes it generates rejection. There’s probably a need to invite or seduce as often as to provoke. I’m interested more and more in projects—and Candy has done many of these wonderfully—that enable people to generate their own ideas, as opposed to responding to ours.

The Thing From The Future, for instance, is a card game that my Situation Lab co-director Jeff Watson and I designed. People have used it as a tool for warming up to strategic conversation, for design ideation and prototyping, and as a party game played for fun. This combinatorial prompt generator, as you understand how it scaffolds imagination, becomes very adaptable and useful. We recently released the game under a Creative Commons license so players can customize it more easily to their local contexts and needs. I like projects that offer frameworks for participation and produce surprises. Instead of specifying an experience in every detail, they offer conditions that invite others to grow their own.

BB: What does the future mean to you? Is it a worry, an invitation, something else entirely?

SC: Ashis Nandy calls futures a “game of dissenting visions.” It’s a gift of sorts, a psychedelic playground where we can make new perceptions and actions possible, and incubate real and far-reaching change.

Another brilliant cultural commentator from India, Shiv Visvanathan, invites us to see the future as a commons. I love this idea. Public imagination is the ultimate renewable resource; we are still learning how to use it wisely.

CC: The future is something I’m excited to shape with others. I’m interested in the relationship between public space and mental health. The urban historian Lewis Mumford once wrote that the origin of society, the reason we came together in the first place, was not just for pure physical survival but also for “a more valuable and meaningful kind of life.” Some of the first gathering places were graves and sacred groves. We gathered to grieve together, worship together, console one another and wonder together. I think one of the greatest missions of modern cities is emotional communion. Not only does this serve fundamental needs of the human spirit, it cultivates compassion and trust, which are vital for civic respect and collaboration. I’d like to expose more of our interior world in public so attention to mental health becomes less stigmatized. I’m currently creating a public device for philosophical reflection that is inspired by the I Ching.

I’m also intrigued by how we deal and don’t deal with death. After anthropologist Ernest Becker wrote the book The Denial of Death in 1973, a theory emerged called terror management. In a nutshell, it argues that legitimate anxiety about our impending deaths was solved by creating cultures that provide comforting arrangements, including the hope for immortality. Immortality can be literal, as in heaven or reincarnation,or symbolic, as in publishing a book or having children. Our current cultures try to give us meaning and value, but they can also distract us and take us away from the deep encounter with ourselves. This helps to remind me that culture is man-made and we can change it.

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LEAP Dialogues –– all 360 glorious pages of it –– is available to order here.

(Update 14jul16: pdf of the above interview can be found here.)

Related:
> Designing futures
> Architectural time travel
> Strategic foresight meets tactical media
> Dreaming together