What We Do

Futures Literacy is a mindset. Like Social Media Literacy or Financial Literacy, Futures Literacy sets up you and your organization to a new capacity. The idea is to expand thinking and imagination to embrace longer-term implications that bolster sustainability and resilience. In our Futures Literacy sessions, your organization learns how to apply futuring methods and practices to what you know. We introduce ways to address niggling questions about where your purposeful efforts might lead in a changing world. We start with a previously researched framework of an intriguing hypothetical future situation. Then we collaboratively process that knowledge to arrive at potential scenarios. Having selected a few interesting ones, we get to the “playing” part – designing and making things that help you feel what that world might be like. We conduct programs that immerse up to six participants in episodic thinking and artifact design from a half day up to 3 days.

It’s time to turn to your organization’s concerns. Effective futuring is not a one-off project – time doesn't end. So here's where things get better. We team with you. Our consulting engagements offer continued scouting for signals of change over time. We also periodically huddle with you and your team(s) to stay aligned on organizational priorities and new thinking. This results in futures reassessments like the probabilities and preferences of your proprietary scenarios. We stick around to ascertain whether developments in real life conditions suggest that one scenario or another is really happening. We produce things together that immerse your organization in these adjusted scenarios. What our work together looks like We start engagements by exploring where your organization currently is through internal interviews combined with your own prior research. What do you know and how do you know it? What do you think is and will be true but it’s just a hunch (so far)? Some of your people will also collect signals in your domain and about the Big Wide World. Next, we put your thinking and knowledge through the same processing that we did with the hypothetical situation in the Literacy session. Again, we arrive at potential scenarios. With a few interesting ones we get to the “playing” part – designing and making things that immerse your organization in that world, help them feel what it might be like to inhabit. During our engagement we may consider collaborating on published papers or presentations that highlight how your organization views industry and world trends and drivers. It’s excellent PR for how enlightened your organization is! When it’s time to wrap up, your organization keeps all the proprietary materials.

We craft presentations that suit your audience and event needs. We’re also very comfortable with guesting on podcasts. We also publish! Ask us to comment on futuring in various contexts, the state of futuring as a field, and possible futures in various domains. "That [presentation] changed how I think about strategy." unprompted comment from a design studio consumer strategist at UN-17, 2024

We at Shimoshi NM are infinitely curious about how real futures unfold and we have our own instincts. We’re like the scout scanning the horizon in the crow’s nest. The explorer on the expedition. We’re translators and alchemists. We enjoy playing in our own sandbox. It sharpens our sense of what kinds of data count and how it counts. We expand our ways of knowing. We hone methodologies and practices, all of which expand our capacities to adapt what works well to our client work. This messing around incubates our vision and sensemaking, builds our own knowledge, and it’s fun. Donations to this independent research will soon be tax-deductible.