“Towards Equitable Futures” was a 2020 project by Watershed, a values-led cultural venue in Bristol, UK.
Summary of Use:
At the outset of the project, Watershed said:
Our community is one where difference has been curated and change is common currency but which is still not fully representative. Change has happened within the interdependent structures of white privilege, patriarchy, disablism and extractive capitalism, therefore full participation has not always been possible. Watershed’s commitment to social justice, climate breakdown, the current pandemic and subsequent economic crisis challenge us to do things differently. Watershed wants to invert the power dynamics of traditional futuring processes to ensure a fairer, more equitable future.
The project brought together the Watershed team with Zahra Ash-Harper, Bill Sharpe, Grace Quantock, Adibah Iqbal, Rife and members of the Pervasive Media Studio community to imagine, together, what is possible in the future. The project asked:
♦What does progress look like when we challenge the notion of (exploitative) growth and value the creation of (regenerative) depth?
♦What are the community behaviours that welcome difference while bonding us together?
♦How can we act as stewards of our assets (economic, social and cultural capital) while we repurpose them in service to community?
The project was funded by the Emerging Futures Fund of the UK National Lottery Community Fund.
Use Experience:
We – the two lead facilitators Zahra Ash-Harper and Bill Sharpe – started the project without any model of how we might bring together the practices of inclusion and Three Horizons, and each workshop was a fresh experiment as we moved from alternating our leadership of sessions to a more fully integrated approach. It was only through our reflective dialogue for the writing of the case study (link below) that we were able to reach the two questions:
♦How does producing inclusion make organisational futuring using Three Horizons legitimate?
♦How can futuring in Three Horizons make inclusion transformative for the organisation?
From the perspective of Three Horizons practice, producing inclusion generates legitimacy for the organisational futuring work by the way it brings those people who have been excluded fully into the process of change – enabling participation by the whole person, standing in their own truth. Without this, any futures work done by the organisation is in danger of perpetuating the unexamined processes of exclusion as experienced by those excluded.
From the perspective of inclusion practice there needs to be a way of helping the people involved see how the current pattern limits inclusion, and how to bring about a repatterning to an inclusive future. We have reflected that some people have no background in organisational change and the presentation needs to be sensitive to this. Recognising this need, Three Horizons offers a very simple and accessible framework in which the pattern in question can be brought into view and made malleable by those who are involved in maintaining and changing it, those currently included, and those excluded. We characterise this as Three Horizons contributing authenticity to the work of inclusion by connecting it to the organisational challenge of transformative change.
Thus, there is a positive reinforcement between the two practices of producing inclusion and Three Horizons in a dynamic process of inclusive futuring, as represented below
See the full case study in the chapter link below which includes participant feedback, both positive and negative.
Impact:
Watershed first started working with the International Futures Forum in around 2006, as part of a process to understand our role and impact in what we now understand as the creative ecology. We undertook a huge amount of shared thinking around art and ecology – and Watershed evolved alongside Three Horizons – acting as both a test case and a contributor to its development for the culture sector – at the beginning of the work that became the Pervasive Media Studio. We were one of very few venues working across art forms, and one of fewer cultural organisations interested in the potential of technology. We were (are) driven by curiosity, collaboration and an energy for supporting talented people. As a practice-led organisation, methodology was one of our main outputs, but we did not know how to articulate the necessity or impact of our role.
Three Horizons provided us with some intellectual scaffolding. By understanding our distinctive role, we gained empathy for both our funders’ context and ourselves, and it made a huge difference to our confidence and our ability to act. We learned that our mixed model is part of our resilience – and that the pull between money and meaning contributed to a healthy creative tension.
By revisiting Three Horizons with a new set of people, an evolved understanding of how our organisational culture comes with baggage that can limit the imagination as well as enable it, and with the deep professional expertise of Zahra (and others) – Towards Equitable Futures shifted our mindset in really significant ways. We began to understand that the future we believe in is not a destination that can be designed, a set of specific technologies, or a building blueprint but a way of being together. That togetherness requires slowing down, being comfortable with confrontation, ensuring our work is really available, working locally and globally and making space for what people bring to us.
This formed the foundation for a new articulation of Watershed, for new programmes, producing methods and recruitment practices. It is also being built into a major place-led redevelopment project of Watershed in which we are taking a regenerative design approach, striving to be non-extractive so that humans and nature can survive, thrive and co-evolve. By centering stewardship and equity in our approach we will be able to create a multi-phase project which will ensure our building is fit for purpose for the next 100 years.
Find out more:
Towards Equitable Futures project page: https://www.watershed.co.uk/studio/projects/towards-equitable-futures-2020
Book chapter case study: Producing inclusion with Three Horizons: : https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/60338 pp 41-64
The evolution of Watershed’s understanding of its role in the cultural ecology, and our use of Three Horizons, is documented fully in Producing the Future:
