FAQ

IFF addresses complex, messy, seemingly intractable looming issues. We respond to the conceptual emergency, wherever it shows up.

Some issues are local, some global – and at all levels in between.

We work with governments, communities, businesses, foundations and others. We work with people experiencing a combination of aspiration for something better and frustration that nothing they do seems to get them anywhere nearer to their goal. In these circumstances we support people to generate practical hope and wise initiative and to aim for transformative innovation rather than simply propping up the old system.  

A ‘concept’ is, literally, something we use to grasp the world and make sense of it. We can experience a conceptual emergency when the ways in which we have made sense of our world in the past are no longer up to the job and as a result our actions go awry. We are confused. We don’t know what to believe any more. The things we have relied on in the past are no longer effective, or even counter-productive. Our problems are showing up as paradoxes or intractable conundrums. We don’t know what to do, we have no faith in any of the ‘solutions’ on offer, but still we must do something. That is a conceptual emergency.

We have a diagnostic questionnaire. See if you answer ‘yes’ to any of the following:

Are you in a conceptual emergency?

• Do you find it increasingly difficult to run a long term operation in a short term culture?
• Do you ever feel like you are riding two paradigms at the same time, bringing the future system into being whilst accounting for yourself in the past?
• Do you find that the harder you try to get things back under control the worse they seem to get?
• Do you ever feel your job description is a work of fiction compared with what you are actually required to cope with from day to day?
• Do you find discussions about important strategic decisions going round and round in circles until the next re-organisation?
• Are you finding it difficult to marry your higher aspirations for the world with the need to generate commercial results?
• Are you struggling in the public sector to provide care and compassion within a framework of scarcity and political competition?
• Is your community feeling powerless in the face of globalisation and the forces of ‘creative destruction’?
• Do you find our response to global challenges characterised by no shortage of textbook solutions but little practical implementation?

 

Innovation is simply introducing something new. We can distinguish three types.

Sustaining innovation improves the existing system – helps it run faster, cheaper, more efficiently.

Disruptive innovation puts a spanner in the works of the existing system, introduces something from left field, shakes the system up with something unexpected. Much of this kind of innovation fails. If it gets taken up it is usually because it fulfils a need already met by the existing system – but in new ways. So, free online lectures disrupt the system of college education. But they still supply the same content.

Transformative innovation is not an innovation within the system, it is an innovation of the system. Rather than propping up the old system and making it work better, transformative innovation points to a very different system, a new vision. It is difficult to reach such a vision through incremental improvement in what already exists. You cannot invent the microwave by improving a toaster. You need transformative innovation. 

IFF deals with complex, seemingly intractable issues. Some people call these ‘messes’ or ‘wicked issues’. They might look like this:

• unprecedented interdependence of factors
• high complexity
• everything impacts everything else, but knowledge is locked in silos
• the stakes are high
• even the ‘facts’ are uncertain or disputed
• there are elephants in the room that are not spoken of
• values are in dispute
• decisions are urgent
• unintended consequences are likely
• no one organisation or department ‘owns’ the whole problem

Peter Senge talks about such issues being complex in three ways:

• dynamically complex: cause and effect are interdependent and far apart in space and time
• socially complex: actors involved have different perspectives and interests
• generatively complex: the future state of the complex of issues is fundamentally unfamiliar and undetermined

But we are careful to call these ‘seemingly intractable’ – because they become tractable with the right support. And we talk about ‘issues’ rather than problems – many of the people we work with are seeking to realise ‘wicked opportunities’ in a complex environment, real tangible and inspiring goals that are nevertheless difficult to achieve in practice.  

We have learned over the years that this work is about people first, then issues. It is people who have aspirations, and people who get insights – so we always need to have at least one committed individual at the heart of any engagement, somebody who really wants to get something great done and who is ready to help us engage with colleagues and stakeholders to enlarge the human system, the integrity, at the heart of the work.

We also know that this work is not about the tools. There are plenty out there, and we have invented some more. But the fact is that tools and theories and models only come to life in the hands of the user. We can use a hammer to bang in a nail, prop open a door, or chip another sliver of marble from the block that contains David. Effectiveness lies not in the tools themselves but in the worldview and the intentions of the user. We have therefore learned to be sceptical when invited in to use a tool (‘do some systems thinking’, ‘create a set of scenarios’) rather than to address or engage with an issue.

In effect we ask ourselves five questions around any potential working relationship:

• is there a person at the heart of the potential project who really wants to get something done?
• is what that person wants to do more likely to feed the future than prop up the failed systems of the past?
• is this an issue where we think the IFF methodology might have something to offer?
• will IFF learn anything from the engagement?

And finally:

• if the answer to any of these questions is unclear, is there a fast and frugal way in which we can get to know our potential partner and their issue better, preferably through face-to-face experience and exploratory conversation?

 

No. We work with people: anyone who is seeking to realise a virtuous aspiration in a challenging world. Our motto is ‘think global, act anywhere’.

It is true a lot of our work is with government and philanthropic foundations – the agencies that are left to deal with the consequences of society’s struggles to act effectively in the face of conceptual emergency. Most of our partners are middle managers: those with enough authority to try something different, but not so much that they are afraid to do so.

We also work with business, but usually on issues relating to being a power for good in the world, or where pure business interests are intertwined with the complexities of society, community or politics.

And we work with communities and all kinds of community groups on challenges that confront them – usually on a pro bono basis. Any problem at this level sufficiently articulated to have a budget is usually not the kind of problem IFF was set up to address. 

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IFF’s international clan is a diverse group of individuals with different perspectives, disciplines, expertise, life experience and so on. The group meets as a learning community as often as possible, including in plenary session, and otherwise stays in touch online and in smaller local gatherings. We draw on this group for expertise both in reading the way the world is going and for specific engagements.

We call it a Clan because we are based in Scotland where the founding meetings of IFF took place in 2001/02. But also because it represents a specific type of organisational form more at home than eg business organisations or even networks in the domain of personal relationship and the type of knowledge that is embodied or difficult to articulate. It is a term we adopt from the work of one of our founding, much loved and much missed members, the late Max Boisot: you can find more information about his work on culture and organisation here.

Membership of the IFF Clan is by invitation – which is extended to people we believe are making a significant contribution to our work and to advancing the IFF philosophy and mission. 

By doing the following:

• sign up for our newsletter
• follow some of our IFF Clan on Twitter and retweet or comment on things you like
• support us with a donation
• come to our events
• comment on our blogs
• contact us with a conceptual emergency to work on together

 

International Futures Forum is registered as a charity in Scotland. Its charitable purposes are broadly education. To be exact:

• To promote and advance the education of people in the United Kingdom and internationally to enable them to meet their social and economic aspirations in the face of a complex present and an uncertain future;
• To encourage and facilitate research and practical collaboration in particular in the fields of health, learning, responsible enterprise and governance through meetings, publications and otherwise;
• To promote education in and development of the capacities required to restore effectiveness in action in the face of contemporary challenges at all levels locally and internationally for the benefit of the public.

 

A Praxis Centre is a local hub for IFF activity, supported by our central infrastructure. We are developing our Praxis Centres beyond home base in the UK cautiously and strategically and have a plan for rolling them out in the next five years. If you think you could seed a centre of activity where you are, please be in touch with our Producer: roanne@internationalfuturesforum.com 

We set out in 2001 to find how to become more effective and responsible in action in a world we don’t understand and can’t control. We brought together some of the smartest people we could find – and then asked them to keep their knowledge in the background and engage at the level of their ignorance, so that we could find in our collective intelligence something genuinely new and useful.

This meant that we set ourselves apart from the mainstream – we had more questions than answers, we reveled in taking time to reflect on things, we avoided jumping to conclusions, we sat in the messiness for a while and invited others to do likewise, we spoke of deep emotions – love and fear – and encouraged people to confront the awkward fact that we are all human beings, working in human systems, artists of our own lives.

This has been hugely inspiring to us, and to those we work with. But we are acutely aware that it is not everybody’s cup of tea – and still chafes against the grain of the dominant culture (all the more so as that culture strains under pressure). Nevertheless we have made a virtue of it. We know that who we are being is as important as what we are doing (more so). ‘Be fun to be around’ – reads one of our prompts. ‘Use playful means to generate serious results’ – says another. ‘Always have more than one rationality’ – says a third. There are many more. At our best these approaches should be invisible. But we may occasionally labour them too hard, or revel in them too obviously, protesting too much perhaps at the contrasting style around us. That is regrettable. It is then that these behaviours may show up as ‘iff-y’.