5.4 Islands in the Sky – the methodology

Islands in the Sky can help surface insights about future challenges and opportunities. It creates a space for creative discussion and fresh ideas regarding different possible futures, in order to develop future strategies.

The approach for this is normally through workshops with a diverse group of participants, to ensure a range of voices in the room. The methodology has six stages:

1. Confirm the purpose (normally you will know what you want to explore in advance of a workshop, but remind participants of the purpose).
2. Map the transactional environment – internal and external relationships involved in the mission.
3. Label the relationships with ‘social’ and ‘functional’ value generated for both parties.
4. Identify the uncertainties that shape decisions on the island, and how these might play out to redraw the future.
5. Review the opportunities and challenges:
   • select those that require more investigation or could be progressed
   • apply the learnings.
6. Feedback and follow up.

In the video Dr Matt Finch provides insights as to how you can use and adapt Islands in the Sky for your purposes and better conversations. As you read through the stages of the methodology reflect on the insights that he shares.

Download this video clip.Video player: Video 16

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Transcript: Video 16 Adapting Islands in the Sky for better conversations

MATT FINCH

Once you've used Islands in the Sky to visit these plausible, challenging, imagined futures, the question is, how do we bring that back to bear on the present? And there are various ways in which this can happen. But perhaps the most straightforward is just to use that future vantage point and say, what if that was definitely the future that was ahead of us? If we knew we were going towards that island, what should we stop, start, or continue doing? What new conversations should we start having today if we knew that new actors were going to be on the island with us in times to come?

And particularly with that question of the stop, there's always this urge to do more, to take on more, to expand, to stretch our scope. And when we think of what we ought to stop strategically, we almost always think of something that is obviously negative or burdensome. But the real question with strategy is always that trade-off. I am going to do x and not y, and this is the reason that I'm making that choice.

So, when you look at the stop, you might look at the islands that you've generated, think about the discussions you've had, and then say, if that was the future that was definitely ahead of us, what otherwise good and worthwhile thing would I surrender, sacrifice, ease off, or give up on because I decided that something else was more important? And by having a collection of imagined futures, different islands, each of which differ from the one that you currently live on or the one that you expect to live on, it lets you generate a kind of playbook of options.

You can think of yourself almost like a rock climber trying to make their way up a mountain. There are different routes to the summit. Some of them might be marked. Some of them you might try and explore and go your own way. But what you've done through having this conversation is rehearsed. And the aim of that rehearsal is to help you to make a wiser decision in the present based on having thought differently about what might lie ahead.

And one of the things the Islands in the Sky methodology can do is it gives you future islands which you can then say, what would people in this island think? What would their judgments be? In a world that had been transformed by climate catastrophe, what would they think of the way that we're using fossil fuels, the way that we're consuming materials? Will they judge us in the same way that we perhaps judge some generations of the past for things that maybe they didn't have the benefit of hindsight for?

So, I think, in a sense, we're all ancestors of a future that hasn't arrived yet. And that includes thinking about what we are going to consider to be right and wrong, what we are going to value, who is going to have power and privilege, who is going to have rights and responsibilities, who is going to be allowed to say that we belong to the land or that the land belongs to us. So, I think really it's not my place to pass judgment on these things, but rather to try and find ways to convene that conversation, which might have to be a really courageous conversation.

End transcript: Video 16 Adapting Islands in the Sky for better conversations

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Video 16 Adapting Islands in the Sky for better conversations