About

Why futuring?
Consider how you could set yourself up to thrive if you were aware of an array of futures your organization might experience.

Shimoshi NM is a futures basecamp with research DNA in the social science mode.

What possible future contexts are most probable?
What is the world like with your idea in it?
Who are the people in that world?
Can your team adapt to potential futures?

Firm plans and goals seem reliable and smart. But you need leading indicators of future values and actions in a complex world of morphing conditions. Then you may chart adaptive courses that play out in preferred futures.

Shimoshi NM applies signals of futures currently in progress to generate commissioned and original research, scenarios, and artifacts that illuminate future possibilities. We practice an enhanced visionary product, service, and policy development process that produces informed mindsets.

Bio

Susan Wilhite is the Managing Director and Principal Researcher of Shimoshi NM. For over 20 years her in-depth user experience research described evolving human lives and landscapes. Her recommendations guided a closer mapping of products and services to the worlds they were intended for and implications for the worlds they were not.

Susan is a 2024 Fellow of Livable Santa Fe.

FAQs

Where does Shimoshi NM stand on futures agendas?

Shimoshi NM does not take a techno-solutionist stance. With AI and biotech verging on forever altering the project of human existence, we take a pluriversal position on evolutions with a long-term lens, for new products, organizations, and policies, the infrastructures behind them, and in the laws and regulations that call for extraordinary collaboration.

What kinds of organizations benefit from working with Shimoshi?

We work with teams and organizations that need to look out 2-7 years in the future to posture themselves to meet emergent factors and conditions and their implications.

Creators of the Not Yet Thinkers who need time in speculative rabbit holes.
Inflection Point Strategists Those who must consider multitudes of decision variables to know when to flex while navigating new conditions.
Stuck Founders Entrepreneurs who intend to build sustaining and sustainable enterprises. In the process, to be able to talk to partners, vendors, funders, and employees about vision and mission. Those who need stories that persuade others of a vision.
Stabilizers Those who wish to establish manageable directions by participating in the generation of regulations and processes likely to promote more adaptable futures.

Is Shimoshi NM conducting strategic foresight?

As a rigorous futures basecamp we may inform strategic foresight efforts. We interrogate the front part: investigations of client's research, desk research, and primary research, with varied ways of knowing. We then develop 'what if' scenarios leading to 'what then' scenarios and on to speculative designs and design fictions.

Does Shimoshi NM endorse Design Thinking?

We do very much endorse iterative learning and doing. However, we consider Design Thinking a flawed creative process framework. This MIT Technology Review piece sums up many of its issues. And besides, Design Thinking outcomes are irrelevant to the purposes of futuring.

Why Anthropology?

Anthropologists investigate patterns of human life - how humans work or don't work in small and large, simple and complex, ecologies - by applying relevant and unique qualitative and quantitative data. Shimoshi NM teams with social scientists plus those in the humanities and arts.

Is it possible to be too late to anticipate futures?

Let's find out!

"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, LOTR

"Chance favors the prepared mind."

Louis Pasteur

Karthick Ramakrishnan | CA100’s Executive Director

California 100 is a statewide initiative designed to build “a vision and strategy for California’s next century.

"Forecasting skill requires taking insight to action. ‘DNA’: Data, Narrative, Action"