Archivists and Futurists

WHAT IT IS

A one-day workshop built around a fictional regional ecosystem set a decade ahead. Participants arrive as independent panel members tasked with reviewing six organisations that tried — and mostly failed — to build lasting futures capacity. The problem we were solving: most people in a futures workshop have never actually built a future culture, and asking them to imagine forward from that position doesn't produce much. So we gave them a failure that had already happened and asked them to take it apart. The fictional frame did a second thing we needed — it made it safe to be precise. When the organisation failing isn't yours, you can say clearly what went wrong.

DESIGN DECISION

The six fictional organisations were doppelgängers of real institutions in the host region — close enough that participants recognised the culture, the pressures, the failure modes. Each was designed to fail through a different dimension of the framework, so the same structural problem showed up differently across six sectors. The framework itself was never named until participants had already used it. By the time we introduced it, they were confirming something, not learning it.

ONE OBSERVATION

We expected participants to engage seriously with the documents. We didn't expect them to go forensic. Tables reconstructed timelines unprompted, tracked decisions across artifacts, caught contradictions between what organisations said publicly and what the internal records showed years later. One table noticed a family surname recurring across several documents in different roles and said: "It's power converging." That observation only lands if you already know how institutional networks move in a place like this. They weren't reading a scenario. They were reading a region through one. The artifacts gave them permission to say something true. We're still thinking about what that means for how much local texture you put in — and for whom.

Built: March 2026