The Design Thinking focuses on creating for today’s world and the immediate future. Consequently, the inspiration phase is usually focused on investigating the present and the immediate past. The Futures Thinking, on the other hand, aims to illuminate the possibilities 10-15 years into the future. It explores the world with a different gaze because it tries to focus on different ideas.
“I recently entered this second perspective: I started studying and dealing with Futures Thinking during the pandemic.
Roberto Cobianchi could not be more direct and candid than this. The pandemic as an opportunity for study and discovery, thanks also to a series of fortuitous circumstances, as he explains at the beginning of the interview, which took place via video call between Milan and Bologna.
“Some time ago I had already become a facilitator working with the LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP – Lego Serious Play) methodology. Since some of the activities I was following had stopped because they were all in-person, I started looking for something online to follow with Design Thinking in mind because I saw that my colleagues were also combining the Lego Serious Play methodology with other methodologies and tools, such as the business model canvas. Having a lot less to do because of the lockdown, I said to myself: ‘This is the right time to study something new'”.
From Design Thinking to Futures Thinking
Only, next to Design Thinking, Cobianchi found Futures Thinking.
“And at that moment I said to myself, ‘This is something new’. There are many people in the market who are very knowledgeable about Design Thinking; instead, curiosity led me to look at what I didn’t know. I did a first online course from the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, which has been doing studies on the future since the early 1960s, and I got confirmation that it was a very fascinating world. But what really convinced me was that they, with their method and their tools, propose something that is open to everyone.
Roberto Cobianchi writes the newest thing first in his LinkedIn profile: he calls himself a Foresight Practitioner, and only later also a contract lecturer at the University of Bologna, a facilitator of the Lego Serious Play method and active in digital media consulting and training. The newest thing first, which is also the direction of the future: new things must come first.
“The openness for all of Futures Thinking is a kind of democratisation of futures studies: they focus on personal reflection, on imagination, on the work one can do to create images of the future. Futures Thinking is a practice and as a practice, a tool and a mindset it is really open to everyone because we all have imaginative, creative and imaginative capacities”.
The connection that Roberto Cobianchi saw, or rather intuited, at the beginning of his approach to the field of futures studies is intrinsically linked to the discipline: Futures Thinking paves the way for a long-term quality strategy. Design Thinking paves the way for user-centred products and services. Futures Thinking insights can be used in Design Thinking. Likewise, insights from Design Thinking can be employed in Futures Thinking. The two fields are in a state of entanglement, they are intertwined like the quantum states of interacting physical systems. Even when it may appear that they are disconnected, the intuition transfers surprising (conceptual) distances.
“The world of Futures Studies is very broad and constantly changing: there are dozens of methods and many are of a more quantitative type, reserved in quotes for those who do trend analysis. Other methods, however, are more qualitative. There are practices that work on imagination, play, simulation. It is the person who is called upon to engage with a scenario: to imagine and construct a scenario, to analyse the news and signals he or she encounters on social media, in magazines, on the net. As I studied and delved deeper, this aspect definitely won me over’.
The creative and exploratory process of future thinking
Like any rapprochement based on elective affinities, both an inner propensity for the more qualitative rather than quantitative aspects of research, and its dimension of individual and group practice, played a role. But, of course, in these processes of rapprochement, there is always also a point of view, a figure with a stronger gaze that gives perspective and orders the reality of ideas.
“It was fortunate, a form of serendipity, to have found the most qualitative area of these studies. I have been working on it for three years. Then, I found the work done by Jane McGonigal, who does game research at the Institute for the future, who launched an online community: Urgent Optimists, which is an online community. He has also structured MMORPGs, an acronym that stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game – that is, ‘massively networked multiplayer role-playing games’ – which further fascinated me because I found the dimension of ‘serious play’ that comes from the Lego Serious Play methodology: not occupying time with playful activities but using those activities to deal with serious things“.
Opening to new ways is not simply a change of methodology but also involves opening up to new ways of organising ideas. Future thinking is a creative and exploratory process using divergent thinking, seeking many possible answers and recognising uncertainty. It is a different mindset from analytical thinking, which instead uses convergent thinking to seek the right answer and reduce uncertainty.
“I started doing workshops with the Lego Serious Play methodology very slowly. I imagined the possibility of integrating the two methods: the Futures Thinking method with the Lego Serious Play methodology, in essence. I wrote a small booklet for facilitators, a practical guide to integrate the two worlds. The idea is that that way of futures thinking harnesses and emphasises people’s imaginative capacity. This brings out and brings up what is part of people’s innermost sphere: how you feel about yourself, how you perceive the world, what desires, what goals for the future, what holds you back. This is the domain of ‘serious games’ and the Lego Serious Play methodology. I also wrote the booklet because I now plan to devote most of my time to delving into these techniques and skills’.
The game is serious
But what ‘comes out’ of serious play? And how? And why? What happens when a practice is established that allows the most intimate part of people to be brought out? The concept is openly intuitable but intimately private, hidden. The best-known narrative is that serious play is a method that helps participants in a process of creative thinking and problem solving. During the workshop each participant is invited to construct an answer or propose a solution to a question using, in the case of the Lego Serious Play methodology, a small set of Lego bricks (where the methodology was created in the late 1990s, first for internal use), all carefully chosen. But how does it actually work? What goes on behind the scenes, behind the veil of the conscious mind?
“On an individual level, serious games make what the person knows without knowing they know emerge. It is maieutics. One of the theories: the hand-mind connection. According to neuroscience research, our hands are the organ in our body most neural connected to our brain: nerve endings reach 70-80% of the mind. The result is that hands have the ability to fish for information in our brains that we did not know we had. To explain this, it is necessary to take a step back for a moment: one of the scientific theories for the representation of our brain is the so-called ‘Triune Brain’ created in the 1960s by Paul D. MacLean and maps our brain into three fundamental parts.
The three parts, explains Roberto Cobianchi, have very different roles and functions. The first is the rational part, i.e. the frontal cortex, which we access by reasoning, processing thought that is articulated in sentences and images. The second is the emotional part, the limbic brain, more central, where emotions are located: it is that part of the brain that makes certain memories stick in our memory because they are charged with emotions. That is, a certain moment affects us and becomes fixed and becomes memory. Finally, there is the third part, the posterior part, which is the reptilian part where there are our four fundamental instincts: fight, flight, feed and reproduce. Basically, the three parts of the brain define the rational, the emotional and the instinctive part of our mind.
“You have to consider that all the decisions we make are 10 per cent rational. Everything else is emotional and instinctive. We don’t buy that new car we have chosen because it has lower mileage than the others. There are certainly these considerations too, but in the end we choose the one we like. The rationalisation comes later, to justify an emotional choice’.
This explanation serves to show what happens when the relationship between the brain and the hands comes into play.
“The fact that the hands are 70-80% connected to the brain means that they access emotional and instinctive parts that we cannot access rationally. All this in the Lego Serious Play methodology translates into very interesting behaviours: building a Lego model in response to a challenge from the facilitator, the hands choose the bricks and assemble them together in a way that appears largely rationally random but is instead strong in the concept we were talking about earlier: the choices are random for the rational mind but deeply meaningful and “rational” for the hands, that is, for the instinctive and emotional components of the mind. This is why the Lego Serious play methodology brings out emotions and feelings that a person was not aware of: it allows us to give meaning to what we are building, even if we apparently do it randomly. Serious play brings out things that are already there but that we are not able to reach, that we are unable to give meaning to, and not substantially that we are unaware of’.
Bringing out what we don’t know
Design Thinking is a newer approach than traditional thinking and has the potential to help organisations solve complex problems more effectively. Forward thinking, however, is a mindset, not a method. It requires something more.
“In the Lego model, people transfer what they really feel or feel about a certain topic, not the rational answer. Our meetings are brain battles, because we talk and thus access the world of knowledge we have built. If we talk about immigration for example, each of us fishes out information, experiences, values that we already have but we talk about it rationally. We have no other possibilities. Our brain works this way. But by holding meetings in which we construct artefacts with our hands, we transfer in there what we really feel and think about that topic’.
It is, explains Roberto Cobianchi, the theory behind the Johari Window, named after its two creators, Joe Luft and Harry Ingham. It is a model that conceptualises people’s knowledge and self-knowledge mechanisms. The theory tries to explain how the ego relates to itself and others, through different cognitive and relational levels. There are four areas in which our mind knows that it knows, knows that it does not know, does not know that it knows and does not know that it does not know. The Lego Serious Play methodology brings out, during the activity, what the mind does not know it knows. It is a knowledge that is often emotional and instinctive.
“It is a personal emergency, but when it is put together with that of others, new ideas, new possibilities, new risks, new paths emerge. What emerges on a personal level is put together with specific techniques to bring out a new shared vision of the group on the subject. It’s all about bringing out what people know without being aware of it’.
Alongside this RMA work is the midwife figure. The term ‘midwife’ comes from the Latin ob-stetrix, meaning ‘to stand in front’ (of the birthing woman). The midwife’s task is not only to assist the woman during childbirth, but also to care for her in her gestational problems. Similarly, the role of the facilitator is not that of someone who has to administer a questionnaire, perhaps by telephone, but does much more. This is why there are various types of facilitators with various levels of technical expertise.
“I am not technically a facilitator. I facilitate yes but sessions with the Lego method. The role of the facilitator is to facilitate people to do what we said before: to discover what is behind the models they have built. One of the fundamental rules in the Lego methodology is to help people understand and see and give meaning, not to interpret what has been done. That is why questions that start with why are forbidden: “why this” or “why that” means that the facilitator has already made a judgement. Instead, there are questions that lead people to make interpretations. For example: not why is there a blank area on a board. Instead, you ask “what is here” and “what is there”; or, you ask what colour the bricks are: if one person tells me for example that a certain blue is an “ultramarine” blue and another that it is an “institutional” blue, this indicates that it totally changes how the two people see and therefore interpret. The aim is to give meaning to what has been constructed. And notice inconsistencies: if a person tells one thing but with his hands constructs a different thing, the truth lies in what he has constructed, because hands cannot lie. The hands are the Google of the brain: they pull out what is inside and our challenge is to give meaning to what the hands have pulled out. However, as far as my status as a facilitator is concerned, this is a wide world with many certifications of different levels. I do not go beyond a certain threshold because I do not have the experience and skills to handle certain situations with strong emotions. Something that, by telling people things that until then they had not understood or recognised can happen. So I don’t go beyond a certain threshold, but there are facilitators with the right methodology, who by profession are coaches or psychologists or educators and who therefore in those emotional worlds have the skills to manoeuvre the right levers’.
Roberto Cobianchi, the union of Futures Thinking and Serious Playing
What does this have to do with Futures Thinking? Why is imagination and serious play one more possibility for ‘the aspiring futurist’, as Roberto Cobianchi calls himself?
“Because it allows you to place the answers better. One of the things I am doing and have given myself as a fixed commitment since November is to produce one future scenario per month. Writing it down, following the method I have learnt, that is, gathering signals and forces of change behind what I think is relevant and building a narrative, that is, a scenario. The last one I posted on my channel is about commercial surrogacy: the scenario is that of a future world where the practice is legal and internationally managed. Another scenario, prior to this one, described the extension of the right to vote throughout Europe to six-year-olds. I want to use these scenarios not as tools to predict a future, because obviously it is impossible to say whether this or that will happen in ten years. Instead, I want to use these scenarios to stimulate people. By asking them questions like: ‘You wake up one morning, ten years from now, and you read that the international surrogacy register has collected one hundred million registrations. How do you feel? What do you think? How do you react? If you have friends who would like to but ask you for advice, what would you tell them? If it were you, how would you act?”.
“It is a person’s immersion in a future scenario, among many possible ones. I use these scenarios more and more: I use them to stimulate more and more conversations between people, making them investigate, from their immediate reaction to the scenario, what their deepest values are that come out of it. Do they feel astonishment, disgust, anger, enthusiasm? All this relies on unique, personal characteristics that ultimately define the personality as a human being of each individual, define their identity. But the purpose is another: it is not so much to predict the future as to prepare for the future‘.
Roberto Cobianchi is working with this methodology that mixes Futures Thinking and Serious Playing to activate certain functional areas in people. It is not theoretical, generalisable and exportable research. Instead, it is a way of changing people one after another, one workshop after another.
“This work serves, more than to forecast the future, to prepare for the future. It trains the mind by playing simulation games to make it better able to come up against a new possibility. To think the unthinkable. What they say: think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable. Just as the gym trains muscles by breaking down fibre and making it reform stronger, so simulation breaks down the bias that we all inevitably have. They are biases that help us so much in our daily lives: if we had to re-categorise the things that happened to us during the day every night, we would be mentally destroyed after a few years. Instead, categories help us understand the world, give value and meaning to things, make decisions, in essence live and do everything. However, these categories of thought also have another effect besides calming us down: they become great traps because we more or less consciously choose to use them as a refuge. Saying ‘the immigrant is a tendentially dangerous person’ is supported by many cases but if it becomes an absolute category it prevents us from imagining alternative future possibilities’.
That is why thinking that a six-year-old child should go and vote in political elections seems absurd: indeed it certainly is, but, says Cobianchi, exploring this possibility might bring to mind other ways of educating young people about politics or public affairs in a different way. Or find ways to get young people who no longer vote today to vote. The strength of this type of scenario-based approach, says Cobianchi, lies precisely in the fact that it allows people to enter a strange world and allows them to try to experience it, obviously in a guided way, imagining their own and others’ possible reactions. A totally different scenario than what we usually seek, because it offers the possibility of exploring it. Imagining and inventing new artefacts, positions, movements in protest or in favour. This, says Roberto Cobianchi, helps to create situations and memories of futures that do not exist.
“For the past two years I have been offering free one-and-a-half hour evening workshops doing different activities. What I have learnt on a personal level is that measuring yourself against a scenario leads you to reflect on how you are living today. I did a simulation, for example, of a world that reduces waste to zero: today people produce 50 kg of waste per person per month and that has to be reduced to 10 kg. For example, I imagined that the government removed all the rubbish bins. The simulation lasted ten days and left me with a series of memories, memories of a new point of view, for example, when I go shopping. This is an idea of change. The pandemic also left us with a series of behaviours that we would not have imagined. The futures are many, unforeseen and introduce changes of many kinds’.
Building a future-proof strategy
The future of this idea of change? This kind of thinking of futures to build the capacity to react to change?
“I want to take this type of methodology to the organisation level, to companies, to the non-profit sector. This type of activity allows people to devise scenarios, observe the signs of change and use them as information to do something forward-looking. Bringing this ability and this kind of mental training into companies serves the purpose of not stopping at the surface of the things we read. The scenario is not necessarily the future that that particular company will be in. And the things that happen in a particular sector are not necessarily what will happen to those who work in that sector: changes also come from outside. My goal is to bring these ways of building scenarios so that people in organisations are able to build future scenarios for themselves. And I must say that it is amazing to see what happens when companies learn this methodology’.
Everyone, individuals, groups, organisations, companies, think about the future. In companies, the vision, mission and other documents created serve to establish a vision of the future. But it is a single, predefined future. It is a vision that may be at odds with the many ways in which futures are realised. This method, says Cobianchi, is a way to test the vision and strategy that has been created with a stress-test based on different, unforeseen futures. Would the strategy withstand a radically different future? The goal, says Roberto Cobianchi, is to help companies build a future-proof strategy.
“I don’t see myself as a suit-and-tie consultant telling companies what their future will be like. Rather, I see myself as someone who is able to empower structures and people to do things that will enable them to break out of the cage of preconceptions of the official future. Without a judgement of merit, but with the idea of enabling them to create a future-proof strategy’.
