a Futures Research Institute
About
Shimoshi NM
​Shimoshi NM is a futures basecamp with an anthropology core. We are investigators, theorists, and alchemists. We fuel long-term thinking, imagination, and action.
What possible futures are most probable?
Which of those futures is preferable?
How might new conditions change your course?
What are people doing in various futures?
Our mission is to envision more possible futures among more open-minded and conscientious people. In a world of delusion and misinformation, we seek and generate clarity in reality.
We apply factual data and critical evaluation to building realistic scenarios. The goal is adaptive planning and resilient organizations, societies, and environments.
Shimoshi NM compiles signals of futures already in progress to generate insights, scenarios, and artifacts that illuminate future possibilities. We practice an enhanced product and policy methodology that results in informed visionary minds.
We have probed the futures of productivity, Belonging in historical + transitory communities, healthcare delivery, mobility, urban and rural relationality, built environments, and creative industries.
Our special expertise is in the socio-cultural implications of emerging tech. More importantly, we have delved into socio-cultural forces that drive technology development and innovative adoption practices.
Founder Bio
Susan Wilhite is the Managing Member and Principal Researcher of Shimoshi NM. For over 20 years her generative Design Anthropology research described evolving human conditions amidst emerging and repurposed technologies.
User research at Microsoft's Innovation Lab and Google ATAP guided closer mappings of prototypes to intended use scenarios and the implications of unintended scenarios. "Here's what daily life might be like with this thing in the world."
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Susan holds a Socio-cultural Anthropology BA (University of New Mexico) and an MA (University of California, Los Angeles). She is certified in Scenario Building by Institute for the Future and The Cynefin Company and in built environment design research for healthcare facilities (Center for Health Design).
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Environmental Design Research Association
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2024 Sustainable Urban Growth Fellow with Homewise in Santa Fe, New Mexico
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Shimoshi NM in Action
Provocation
International refugee organizations seek to reduce the disruption of community and culture among crisis migrants and refugees.
Exploration
We investigate the psycho-social needs of communities to stay intact on the move. Various factors are considered that seem to inhibit or support unsettled communities. We generate potential benefits of innovative policies, products, and services that might reduce friction among distanced members.
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Actions
The organizations craft ethically sensitive trial policies and invest in partnerships to develop and test products and services. For long-term effectiveness of refugee community resiliency, we watch for conditions that present strategic and tactical levers to mediate or deflect risks and direct actions toward preferred futures.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where does Shimoshi NM stand on futures agendas?
Shimoshi NM rejects techno-solutionism. With AI and biotech forever altering the project of human existence, we take a pluriversal position on futures. We view products, services, organizations, policies, and the infrastructures behind them all through a long-term and systemic lens, and on to laws and regulations that call for extraordinary collaboration.
Aren't some people working on undesirable futures?
Undesirable to whom? Undesirable why? That's dialog in action. Let's all hone our critical thinking skills and haggle it out as conditions morph. With greater shared understanding comes stronger political, social, cultural, and legal will to invest in and sustain efforts.
Speaking of sustaining, how does Futuring work with Sustainability efforts?
Sustainability is informed by constant futuring. Scanning the horizon for changing conditions in our complex world prepares organizations and individuals to pre-think and pre-imagine possible scenarios, and craft strong actions directed toward preferred futures.
Who benefits from working with Shimoshi NM?
We work with teams and organizations that wish to foresee 2-7 years in the future to position themselves to address emergent factors and conditions, and their implications.
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Inflection Point Strategists Anyone who must navigate emerging conditions. We boost capacity to widen possible courses of action containing many decision variables.
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Adaptive Leaders Those who need to form agile organizations; empower everyone with a problem-solving generalist lens.
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Stabilizers Those who wish to establish manageable directions by participating in the generation of regulations and processes likely to promote more adaptable futures.
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Creators of the Not Yet Thinkers and creators who need time in speculative rabbit holes.
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Stuck Founders Entrepreneurs who intend to build sustaining and sustainable enterprises. In the process, to be able to persuade partners, vendors, funders, and employees about a grounded vision and mission with well-informed and richly imagined stories.
Our most effective engagements
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Established organizations that already know they need to adapt to or pivot amidst morphing conditions
- Willing to take empirical evidence seriously
- Willing to engage the imaginations and insights of a range of roles within their organizations, irrespective of job status influence
- Willing and able to take action - iterate strategies based on how preferred scenarios play out over time
What if we act on a scenario that makes things worse?
Not every action need be a dramatic Big Bet. We can learn from iterative experiments to arrive at actions most worthy of investment in effort, proper regulations, partnerships, and resources.
Don't panic! Futures Thinking is a skill. We'll get better at this.
Does Shimoshi NM endorse Design Thinking?
We very much favor iterative learning and doing. However, we consider Design Thinking a flawed creative process framework. This MIT Technology Review piece sums up many of its problems. (Here's a link to the audio version.) Here's how Harvard Business Review criticized Design Thinking in 2018. Besides, Design Thinking outcomes are intended for direct marketable results, irrelevant to the purposes of pure futuring.
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The point of Futures is to feel, and be, better prepared to shift strategies as a result of changing conditions. Agility (adapting or disrupting) is the core of resilliency.
Design Thinking prototypes but stops before the Act stage. Futurists follow through.
Does shimoshi mean something?
Yes, it does! It means "useful" or "functional" in a certain language. Not Japanese.
Is it possible to be too late to anticipate futures?
Never. Futures are already in progress! Just imagine the possibilities.
Horst Hortner
Ars Electronica FutureLab
“Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.”
Gloria Steinem
"In times of change the Learners will inherit the world, while the Knowers will be beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists."
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​Eric Hoffer, 20th Century American philosopher​
„Zukünft ist ein Teamsport“​
Florence Gaub, Director
NATO Defense College
"Chance favors the prepared mind."
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Louis Pasteur
"There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after."
J.R.R.Tolkien, Lord Of The Rings
​"One who has imagination without learning has wings but no feet."
Joseph Joubert
Essayist