Wayfinding, part seven
/In which we offer a process for the play and practice of wayfinding
“Thought is generally considered to be a sober and weighty business. But here it is being suggested that creative play is an essential element in forming new hypotheses and ideas. Indeed, thought which tries to avoid play is in fact playing false with itself. Play, it appears, is the very essence of thought.” –David Bohm, Unfolding Meaning
The practice of wayfinding is not new. Many people practice it without naming it. They intuitively sense how to bring ideas together in new and critical ways. By making the practice of wayfinding known, by giving it a name, and working it together we believe there is likelihood of dramatically increasing the number of individuals who are attracted to it and who will use it to engage with the future, step into the unknown, and appreciate the opportunity to shape the future towards a better, more fit world.
Below is a way of getting started with wayfinding. If one of your roles is facilitating large groups, we encourage you to incorporate wayfinding exercises such as this. While one can certainly do wayfinding as an individual or in a small group, the excitement comes as people work together, watching divergent and individual ideas connect, collide and meld into each other and entirely new possibilities emerge from obscurity. In practicing wayfinding, people come to see how one idea can go in different directions depending on connections made.
In this offering, we are creating a hypothetical three-hour convening with around 30 participants.
Prepare by immersing yourself in websites such as
• Edge - http://www.edge.org
• The Reality Club - http://www.edge.org/discourse/about.html
• Long Now seminars - http://www.longnow.org/seminars
• Raymond Kurzweil’s site - http://www.kurzweilai.net
• TEDTalks - http://www.ted.com
• Kevin Kelly's site - http://www.kk.org
Here and any number of other places, you will find thinkers and doers whose passion and avocation is to expand the notion of who and what we are as humans, and to amplify ideas, processes and accomplishments throughout the world. It is through wayfinding that these individual ideas can be contextualized, connected and cohered, and a greater understanding of our world’s situations, challenges and possibilities can be gained.
Several days ahead of your convening, invite participants to do the same thing. Know that some will and others won’t. This is OK.
To begin your wayfinding, you will need the ability to work big – such as a large white board or a roll of butcher paper. We typically work with a surface of 12 - 20 linear feet and 6ft top to bottom. Across the top of your work surface mark years, going back and forward in time at least 25 years. (We’ve done this practice for as large a span of time as seven generations, but that requires a lot of wall space!) Have an abundant supply of sticky notes in many colors. Use these to signify subject areas such as economy, technology, culture, politics, learning & education, science, etc.
Step 1: (Before the group arrives) Choose a few ideas sparked from your exploration and place them on your Working Big wall using the color coding system you developed.
Some examples could be:
• TIME Magazine “Person of the Year” is “You” thanks to YouTube, 2005.
• On-line games and simulations a major part of elementary curriculum in many countries by 2015.
• MTV, 1980
• Apple Macintosh, “a computer for the rest of us,” 1984.
• Maldives fall below sea level, 2029.
• Tiananmen Square, 1989.
• US defense budget cut by 25% in 2020.
• “Edible landscapes” outnumber grass lawns in US, 2022.
• 100 billionth song downloaded from iTunes 2030
Step 2: (30 minutes) Welcome participants and Introduce the exercise to them. Explain the categories and color coding system and then give them 20 minutes to blitz the walls. Remind them to write so others can read the ideas. They can add as many ideas as they want ... work back and forth across the entire time line. Let one idea spark another. Don’t worry about the contradictions. Add wild card ideas. Think world wide, even if group is very local.
Step 3: (10 minutes) have the group stand back and view the wall. Participants can ask others for clarification of words, but this is not a time to debate.
Step 4: (30 minutes) Take some time to see together what is on the wall. Ask a participant to name something that s/he put on the wall and name something(s) else that they did not put up that seems to connect to their item. These occurrences can be years apart or very close. Repeat with at least five more participants, as time allows. The purpose of this step is to begin to see the the ideas not as single linear events but as connected stories each intertwining with the others.
Step 4 (5 minutes) Ask each participant to write down four or five items from the wall that fall into one of the following categories:
something they really want to happen ... something they believe will help shape a better world;
something they are afraid of and feel it will lead towards a worst case scenario;
something where they see the most possibility to influence an outcome.
Step 5: (40 minutes) Group participants in teams of four or five and have them share what they selected from the group timeline. If possible, work in breakouts and have wall space available for the teams to create a timeline using what they individually selected from the group wall. After all the the individual items have been posted or shared, have the team select two “big” ideas/events from the future that they all could invest in and identify things that need to happen before hand if these big ideas are to happen. How can the individual ideas and events that need to happen tie together to make the big ideas more likely? If you’ve chosen “negative” events that put us on course for worst-case situations, what are the ideas and events that if connected could redirect our course?
Provide some means for the teams to create a document or artifact of their work that can be shared with the other teams.
Step 6: Bring the group back together and have each team take about 10 minutes to share the timelines and ideas they developed.
Step 7+: From here the process takes on a life of its own and you can go in several directions as the group begins to dialog. We have seen this exercise go on for hours, even when participants had set limits for themselves. As you flesh out these histories, look for and speculate on where they intersect or influence one another.
This is not a right/wrong debate; rather think of it as a a process to create a scaffolding – a way to get a foothold into the future. It begins a conversation from within a potential future. It is the dialog about the relationships between ideas that matter. It may take a while to get started, to get your brains and intuitions working together. With these thought experiments, you can begin to see how one paradigm shapes ideas and creates a pattern in which other ideas must follow. Disruptive ideas, once they take hold, create whole new ecosystems of simple ideas and products. Many of the products might have been on the drawing table for a decade or more, yet unable to mature because they lacked a seminal idea to provide a foundation.
When President Kennedy challenged his country to send a man to the moon and return him safely to earth, the NASA team thought almost every key component would need to be invented and many were frightened by the challenge. Yet, once project leaders put forth a request for proposals to the rest of the world, they learned that most of the parts were either in circulation or simply waiting for a bigger idea to come along that would transform their context, purpose or marketplace. The moon project was long before the Panarchy paradigm had power to grow. The tools and technologies were simply not available for widespread participation. Had they been, would the moon project have continued to evolve and give guidance to a more sustainable world? Certainly the one shot of earth from space was a game changer. The NASA story provides a way to explore alternative scenarios. Change one or two key happenings and the entire world changes.
As you work your ideas, include possibilities that scare you, that go against your values, or could just as likely lead to a dark outcome. Make your scenario a map of best case/worst case and explore the moments where these possibilities bifurcate. Although you can’t control the future, through taking part early in the design cycle you can, add influence. Take part in creating the future by design, not default. The more lay people engage with these ideas, the more transparent we make the future, the more likely we can steer toward best case.
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