Stage 6: Feedback and follow up

At the end of the workshop, provide an opportunity for participants to share their experience of doing the workshop and how they now feel about futures planning.

Questions that may be useful to consider:

• How do participants feel?
• What has been the impact on them?
• What else do they want to know?
• What else do they want to share?
• Is this what they expected?
• What would they change?

It is then important to follow up with participants to seek any clarification from their input into the workshop. Having had time to reflect, is there anything else they wish to contribute towards a summary of the outcomes?

Futures planning should be an ongoing process within organisations, so consider your approach to planning cycles.

Islands in the Sky can be an effective approach to help you think about future scenarios and quickly explore problems. It has been designed to focus on understanding your environment and the value you can generate within your transactional relationships in order to gain a fresh perspective.

In the video Dr Matt Finch shares tips for effective use of the Islands in the Sky approach.

Download this video clip.Video player: Video 17

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Transcript: Video 17 Tips for using Islands in the Sky

MATT FINCH:

The tips I would give for people using the Islands tool are really very simple. The first is to really think very hard when you map that island of relationships. It's very easy to overlook an actor or to take them for granted. But when you really take the time to think about every single entity that your institution, or your team, or your community interact with in the part of going about their business, you'll find that there's this rich and complex ecosystem. So really taking the time, iterating, ensuring that there are multiple people involved, each of whom will have different perspectives, who will spot relationships that you've overlooked, all of that will be of benefit.

And then, again, when it comes to those uncertainties, to the extent that those contextual uncertainties are driving forces which shape the decisions of other actors, it's worth taking the time to almost go and inhabit the shoes of each different actor on that island with you and think, what does drive their decisions? And this is where you can pull in insights from, for example, user experience and the use of personas. You can really try and imagine, what is it like for each one of those actors to live on that island in the here and now? What drives their decisions?

And then, as you manufacture future islands, like scenarios, which show us how things could be different in times to come, once again, you can sit in the position of different actors on the island. And say, what would it be like for them to live, work, and inhabit that future context? So, it's really an opportunity for empathy, for imagination, and play, always anchored in the business of making a real decision in the here and now, but a chance to go beyond the things that we maybe don't even take time to question from day to day.

The name of Islands in the Sky itself is an invitation. It lets people know that when they take part in this process, there is an element of play. There is an element of make believe. And that actually, the foundations of these imagined future contexts precisely because they won't be like yesterday, they're not purely founded in the expectations and assumptions of the past, they can also be built based on what if. The questions of what might be. The things which go beyond our usual expectations. The ways that we think that trends are going to play out.

They're a way of thinking about what happens if a trend bends or even breaks. And that means that they are, in a way, more like looking up at the sky and seeing pictures in the clouds, seeing faces drifting past us. But that doesn't mean that they don't anchor something very real and very serious when it comes to the decisions we face in turbulent times.

Participants in the process get access to this space that's almost like a sandbox or a playpen, where they can consider how issues might play out in ways that are challenging or opportune. They can look at things which might not be considered in the run-of-the-mill business of conducting their operations, that might not even be considered in traditional ways of thinking about strategy, like SWOT analyses. The aim of Islands in the Sky is to go beyond current expectations. And that means that participants can bring their own concerns and their own questions, but it also means they can expect to be surprised.

And there might be an element of discomfort too. And that's not because these are intended to be dystopian. This isn't about the futures we want or fear. It's not about expectation and prediction. It's not about norms. It's actually about seeing something that surprises us.

But that means that we can expect that slightly unsettling moment, which can feel like a real exciting thing. It can feel like an aha or a wow moment. I never thought the world could be that way, but now that I've looked at these islands, I can see how the world might change. And that means I'm going to think differently about the decisions I have to make today.

End transcript: Video 17 Tips for using Islands in the Sky

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Video 17 Tips for using Islands in the Sky

In the next section you have the opportunity to explore a case study on the use of Islands in the Sky within The Open University.