a Futures Basecamp
About
What is Futuring?
Imagine how you could thrive if you were more aware of an array of futures you or your organization might experience.
Shimoshi NM is a futures basecamp with an anthropological investigation and process mode. We are observers and translators, producers and alchemists.
What possible futures are most probable?
Which of those futures is preferable?
What is the world like with your idea in it?
What are the people doing in that world?
Firm plans and goals seem reliable and smart. But as we know, our world is a complex system, and the future of that system hasn't happened yet. So it cannot be accurately predicted.
Still, awareness of leading indicators of future conditions catalyzes resilience in a complex world. Such awareness supports inherent ability to chart adaptive courses in preferred futures.
Shimoshi NM applies signals of futures already in progress to generate insights, scenarios, and artifacts that illuminate future possibilities. We practice an enhanced product, service, and policy methodology that results in informed visionary minds.
Futures of work and productivity, near Earth orbit expansion, healthcare delivery, mobility, urban/ rural relationality, domestic built environments, emerging tech, intersectionality of digital/IRL communities.
Founder Bio
Susan Wilhite is the Managing Member and Principal Researcher of Shimoshi NM. For over 20 years her generative user experience research has described evolving human conditions amidst emerging and repurposed technologies.
Product recommendations guided a closer mapping of products and services to intended scenarios, and implications of unintended scenarios. Covert anticipatory anthropology. "Here's what daily life might be like with your thing in the world."
Susan earned a BA (UNM) and MA (ABD - UCLA) in Socio-Cultural Anthropology and is certified in built environment design for healthcare facilities.
Aside from reading books, hiking, and playing basketball, Susan can be found in the front row of the balcony of a local Temple of the Silver Screen.
Susan is a 2024 Sustainable Urban Growth Fellow in the Livable Santa Fe program.
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.
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 verging on forever altering the project of human existence, we take a pluriversal position on progressions. 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 consensus 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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Creators of the Not Yet Thinkers who need time in speculative rabbit holes.
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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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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.
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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.
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 the link to the audio version.) Besides, Design Thinking outcomes are intended for marketable results, irrelevant to the purposes of pure futuring.
The point of Futures is to feel, and be, prepared to shift strategies as a result of changing conditions. Shifting (adapting or disprupting) effectively is the core of resilliency.
Design Thinking stops before the Act stage. Futurists follow through.
We monitor the morphing conditions that comprise a set of scenarios - the processed basis of strategic plans. Changed conditions inevitably lead to a re-evaluation of priorities and preferred futures. That re-evaluation calls for marshalling or realignment of resources if a contingency plan becomes desireable, Or a different push to make a preferred future a reality.
Is it possible to be too late to anticipate futures?
Futures are already in progress as you read this! Just imagine the possibilities.
"The only thing you can create is the future."
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
„Zukünft ist ein Teamsport“
Florence Gaub, Director
NATO Defense College
"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
"Chance favors the prepared mind."
Louis Pasteur