01 / Analysis
Analysis and Edge Papers
Original, research-grounded analysis of emerging technologies, ethical dilemmas and shifting power. Published openly as Edge Papers, or written privately on your question.
Read the first paperSpeculative Edge
AI ethics. Power.
The futures others overlook.
We specialise in AI ethics, the changing nature of power, adverse scenarios, and the emerging risks and opportunities that conventional thinking misses.
Futures consultancy for C-suites and senior officials. Analysis, executive workshops and confidential strategic advice.
At the edge of the mean.
Futures work compresses complexity into something leaders can use. That work is essential—and a core part of our skill set. But it can favour the already familiar.
We help you examine what gets left out, what it could change and what you could do.
- Already consequential. Underexplored implications.
- Consequences still hidden. Follow the idea further.
- Strange, but relevant to you. Find the particular opportunity.
The familiar is already illuminated. We help you explore what else could matter.
Move the torch, tap the graphic, or use the arrow keys while it is focused.
How we work.
Senior, discreet and specific. Simon and Antony do the work themselves.
02 / Workshops
Executive workshops
Fall in love with a future. Discover its wider world through design fiction. Or take a deep dive into a possibility you have already identified. Simon and Antony push the room—and connect it back to your decisions.
Explore the three workshops03 / Advice
Confidential strategic advice
Bespoke advice for C-suites and senior officials facing hard decisions and unfamiliar risks, from business anthropology inside your organisation to implementation and the story you tell.
A private conversationFrom business anthropology to implementation.
Hire us at any stage—or through the whole process, including the story you tell.
Five stages. We can join you at any one of them.
Simon has led innovation programmes at Cisco and Mastercard and advised heads of state. Antony has investigated multinationals from the inside, designed futures and wargames at Dstl, and taught futures to NATO.
01Business anthropology
Find the tribes. Question the assumptions.
What does your organisation believe about the future—and its place in it? We listen across the business, follow conflicting accounts and find the tribes inside it. See where you are getting things right, where you are going wrong and what the official picture leaves out.
Explore business anthropology02Futures workshops, ideation & scenarios
What could be coming your way?
Find a possibility you cannot leave alone. Discover a wider world through design fiction. Or dig into a specific future through improvisation and dialogue. We teach the techniques, challenge woolly thinking and bring the consequences back to your organisation.
Explore our workshops03Courses of action
What could you do—and what follows?
Start with a difficult future. Explore how different responses change your position, what each asks of you and the dilemmas it creates. Antony brings the futures thinking; Simon brings experience of corporate and institutional decisions. Together, we work through the implications.
Explore the choices04Implementation
Make the strategy happen.
Turn your futures strategy into work the organisation can carry through. Find the allies, confront the obstacles, establish who owns the decisions and build support for change. Simon leads, drawing on decades of implementation inside government and global companies.
Explore strategy & implementation05The narrative
One strategy. Stories people can believe.
Your staff, customers, investors and the public need different explanations of the same strategy. Those narratives must be authentic, coherent with one another and true to what you intend to do. Antony makes complex subjects human and understandable. Simon brings deep corporate knowledge.
Explore narrative workStart with the question you face. Talk to us
Trusted at the highest levels.
Simon: global head of public-sector innovation
Antony: futures, scenarios and strategic wargames, 2020–25
Simon: vice president; government partnerships and innovation
Simon: head of the Financial Crime Branch
Antony: futures teaching and strategic games for NATO audiences
Antony: field producer on Emmy-winning VICE on HBO
Antony: broadcast documentary work
Antony: Amnesty International award-winning documentary work
Antony: commissioned films
Antony: commissioned films
Antony: film and media work
Antony: credit derivatives
Antony: broadcast work
Antony: broadcast work
Antony: field producer
Simon: author of Anyone Can Innovate
Innovation · Strategy · Implementation
Simon Willis
Adviser to heads of state. Innovation leader at Cisco and Mastercard.
Led the team behind Planetary Skin, the Cisco–NASA innovation named one of TIME’s 50 Best Inventions of 2009. Author of Anyone Can Innovate.
Simon: global head of public-sector innovationSimon: vice president; government partnerships and innovationSimon: head of the Financial Crime BranchSimon: author of Anyone Can Innovate“I have seen Simon’s strategic innovation work firsthand and can vouch for its impact. He goes beyond the innovation practices normally discussed and into the difficult but essential work of building alliances and driving implementation.”
“Simon is an incredible leader and innovation practitioner.”
Futures · Science · Documentary
Antony Butts
Award-winning futurist and filmmaker.
Five years as a senior futurist and wargamer at Dstl, the Ministry of Defence’s research laboratory. Taught futures to NATO. Wrote 30,000 words of speculative fiction dramatising future scenarios for senior civil servants.
Conceived, wrote and directed Balance of Power, a policy game about the future energy system. Winner of the Energy Institute’s Public Engagement Award, 2019.
Degrees in Physics and Security Studies; a Russian Language Diploma with Distinction. Deep technical experience in applied AI, data science and agent-based modelling.
Directed more than 25 documentaries. DOP on the Oscar-shortlisted Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer; producer on the Emmy-winning VICE on HBO. Amnesty International award winner, with films nominated for four other human-rights awards.
Antony: futures, scenarios and strategic wargames, 2020–25Antony: futures teaching and strategic games for NATO audiencesAntony: field producer on Emmy-winning VICE on HBOAntony: broadcast documentary workAntony: Amnesty International award-winning documentary workAntony: commissioned films“He connects ideas across sectors and gets people beyond the usual answers, into the difficult questions that matter. He stretches their thinking and brings out their best ideas.”
“Antony is an incredibly talented, unusual and dedicated filmmaker and was instrumental in producing the most powerful piece in our Emmy winning VICE HBO series.”
Inside the workshop
Fall in love with a future.
Wonderful, horrifying, strange or outrageous. We teach you to find a possibility you cannot leave alone, bring its world to life and connect it to yours.
Flip the assumption.
Visitors watch the lions.
The lions hunt the visitors.
VR-controlled robot prey turns the zoo into a survival game. Visitors pay for the thrill; predators get enrichment. A new attraction creates a new argument.
HuntedTurn one thing into another.
Plants need watering.
The garden wants your attention.
AI gives plants and fungi voices. An ecosystem becomes a pet, complete with arguments. Who sells the companionship, and whose advice is the owner hearing?
Companion GrowersBorrow a business model.
A country maintains an army.
A country buys invasion insurance.
Defence Obligation Contracts turn a military into an insurer. What happens when both belligerents have the same provider—or too many wars arrive at once? AIG with tanks.
Defence Obligation ContractsPossibilities worth following.
Underexplored shifts in power. Provocations with wider consequences. Specific possibilities, developed in depth.
Prior work · Organisational inquiry
Beyond the corporate answer
A two-month inquiry inside a multinational. Conflicting accounts revealed what the official picture left out.
Speculative study · Business
RoboStore
A market for robot skills becomes a competitor to the specialists who taught it. Who owns the learning?
Speculative study · Security
Death Zones
Territory becomes uninhabitable without being occupied. What happens to power when an army no longer needs to stay?
AI, ethics & economic power
The Desperation Machine
The most you’ll pay. The least you’ll take. What happens when both systems learn how little room you have to refuse?
Workshop tool · Ethics
AI dilemmas
The technology works. The benefits are real. Explore the difficult choices that success itself creates.
Design fiction · Defence & care
Care Home Troopers
A recruitment shortage meets a care-funding crisis. An outrageous bargain becomes an ordinary form.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
From ideation to implementation.
Five stages of futurist consultancy. We can join you at any one: understand the organisation, explore futures, examine choices, implement the strategy and tell its story.
Business anthropology
Organisational inquiry
The strategy says one thing. The organisation does another. We go inside and find out why.
Antony leads the fieldwork. Simon brings the senior-management perspective.
- Confidential interviews and observation
- The assumptions, interests and dependencies behind the official account
- Findings for the people who can act on them
Futures workshops, ideation & scenarios
Ideation & scenarios
Follow the possibility the brief leaves out. Build the world around it. Put something from that world on the table.
Antony leads, with Simon exploring what the scenarios mean for your organisation.
- Overlooked risks and opportunities, developed into scenarios
- The people, incentives and assumptions that make each world possible
- Stories, artefacts, films or games to bring it into the room
Courses of action
Dilemmas & strategic games
Start with an adverse future. Change the choices. See what follows when everyone else gets a move too.
Simon and Antony work through the choices with your team.
- An adverse starting scenario and contrasting responses
- A matrix or game showing how choices could change the outcome
- A record of what held up, what failed and what needs a decision
Implementation
Strategy into practice
Decide what to change, get the right people behind it, and work through the obstacles to doing it.
Simon leads, drawing on his work inside government, Cisco and Mastercard.
- A response matched to your aims and resources
- The owners, partners and support needed to carry it through
- A practical plan, with decisions to revisit as events unfold
The narrative
Internal & external narratives
Give staff, customers, investors and the public an honest account of where you’re going and why.
Antony brings the storytelling. Simon brings the experience of getting institutions to move.
- A clear account of the change and the choices behind it
- Messages for the people who need to understand it
- Briefings, scripts, films or presentations, as the work needs
Combine them as you need.
Typical shapes for a commission. We scope each one to your question.
Reimagination session
One day inside your existing process, plus the write-up.
Scenario sprint
Three to four weeks.
Exercise or wargame
Two to six weeks of design; one to two days of play.
Futures programme
Two to three months, combining scenarios, rehearsal and strategy. Organisational inquiry and implementation are scoped to the brief.
Futurist as a service
Regular time for sparring, research and scenario work as questions come up.
Talks
Keynotes, talks and screenings, followed by questions.
Talks.
Keynotes and talks, followed by questions.
The possibility and the decision
Simon and Antony together: one future found at the edge, then what an organisation should do about it.
Eleven ways to find a different future
Antony on changing the question, following the incentives and building the world.
Anyone can innovate
Simon on why good ideas die in large organisations, and how to get yours adopted.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Scenario development and creative futures research
Find the risk the brief leaves out.
Bring the research, the strategy or the question nobody wants to ask. We follow overlooked connections and awkward incentives into futures your current picture may exclude.
Who it’s for.
Foresight units that want sharper scenarios. Strategy teams that keep arriving at the same four quadrants. Anyone whose picture of the future feels too familiar, too narrow or too far from the changes that matter.
Why it stayed out of view.
Some risks sit outside the sector. Others contradict a cherished plan or cross a taboo. We look at what makes a possibility hard to see—and hard to say.
If the blind spot is inside the organisation, we can investigate that too.
What we do.
Start from your question
A technology, a market, a policy area, or the research you already have.
Find the overlooked connection
The use nobody designed for, the actor nobody modelled, the assumption that stops holding.
Build the mechanism
Who wants this? Who pays? Why do others join in? Follow the choices that could make a strange world ordinary.
Develop contrasting worlds
Two or three, so the differences between them show what matters.
Separate evidence from assumption
What is established, what is assumed, and what would change the picture.
Change the question.
Flip the assumption.
Visitors watch the lions.
The lions hunt the visitors.
VR-controlled robot prey turns the zoo into a survival game. Visitors pay for the thrill; predators get enrichment. A new attraction creates a new argument.
HuntedTurn one thing into another.
Plants need watering.
The garden wants your attention.
AI gives plants and fungi voices. An ecosystem becomes a pet, complete with arguments. Who sells the companionship, and whose advice is the owner hearing?
Companion GrowersBorrow a business model.
A country maintains an army.
A country buys invasion insurance.
Defence Obligation Contracts turn a military into an insurer. What happens when both belligerents have the same provider—or too many wars arrive at once? AIG with tanks.
Defence Obligation ContractsWhat you receive.
- A short set of developed scenarios, each with its mechanism, actors and early signs
- A one-page summary for leadership
- An assumption register your specialists can check
Shapes and timescales.
Reimagination session
One day inside your existing foresight process, opening up possibilities your inputs haven’t reached.
Scenario sprint
Three to four weeks from question to developed scenarios.
Futures programme
Two to three months, combined with workshops and a next move.
Example
Negative Territorial Power
Everyone debates robots that kill. We asked about the ones that make people leave.
Read itWho leads
Antony leads, with Simon on what each scenario means for your organisation.
Questions people ask.
How is this different from scenario planning?
A matrix explores the questions built into its axes. We also look for the possibility that never made it onto either axis. Once that world is on the table, a matrix can help explore how different responses change it.
Are these predictions?
They are possibilities worth examining. We explain what makes each plausible, where we are making a leap, and what it could mean for you. We do not assign odds we cannot know.
Can you work with our existing foresight?
Yes. Bring the scenarios and assumptions you already use. We look for what they leave out, including the possibilities that are difficult to raise inside the organisation.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Design fiction and experiential futures
Make a possible future impossible to ignore.
A future described in a report is easy to nod at. A future you can hold, read or play is harder to dismiss. We make things from inside it, specific enough that people argue about the consequences rather than the premise.
Who it’s for.
Leaders who need to understand a difficult future, teams who need to explain one, and programmes that need people to discuss what they would rather not.
What we make.
Each piece carries the thinking behind it: what makes this world possible and what it asks people to decide.
Stories
Short fiction from inside the future. Your Cleaner Will Become Your Doctor Now ends with a household robot’s reasoning trace, entered as evidence at a trial.
Future artefacts
Front pages, product catalogues, contracts, adverts, bills and evidence exhibits. The best ones look ordinary, which is what makes the future feel close.
Films
From a ninety-second provocation to an interactive drama like Balance of Power, where the audience decides whose advice a minister takes, then lives with the future they chose.
Experiences
Role-based sessions where people meet the future rather than read about it.
What you receive.
- The artefacts, ready to use in meetings, workshops or publication
- A note of the evidence and assumptions behind each piece
- Discussion prompts for the people who will use them
Shapes and timescales.
A single artefact
One piece, built around one decision, in two to three weeks.
A set from one world
Several artefacts from the same future, so people can explore it from different angles.
Film and interactive
Scripted and produced with specialist collaborators.
Questions people ask.
What is design fiction?
Objects and stories from a possible future, made to provoke discussion about it. The term comes from design and technology research; we use it for strategy and policy.
Will it look like science fiction?
Only as much as it needs to. A bill, a news story or a terms-of-service page often does more than a spaceship, because it shows how the future reaches ordinary life.
Can it be published?
Yes. If you want to use it publicly, tell us at the start and we’ll design for it.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Futures workshops and strategic wargaming
Start with the future you want to avoid.
Put an adverse scenario on the table. Change the choices that could produce it. Then let rivals, customers, officials and the public make their moves.
One bad future. More than one way out.
- 01 / Establish the world
Take the adverse case seriously.
Use it as the base case for the exercise. Who wants what, and how could their choices bring it about?
- 02 / Choose what can move
Change the bargain.
Pick two consequential choices or conditions. Explore what different combinations could produce.
- 03 / Let people respond
Find the next problem.
Play the responses. A way out for you may create an opening for someone else—or a new dependency.
The matrix helps people argue through choices. It does not calculate the future.
Who it’s for.
Teams whose plans depend on how others will respond. Leadership groups who need to feel a choice before they make it. Organisations that want their people to think differently about the future, not just hear about it.
Formats.
Reimagination session
A day inside your existing foresight process that opens up possibilities your inputs haven’t reached, and turns them into questions your team can take forward.
Flip the script
Teams work backwards from a design fiction to the choices that made it ordinary. Then they build their own future’s newspaper, manual and product catalogue, and play competitors reacting to it.
Archaeology of the present
Nobody designed the world you live in. Teams dig back through the problems and solutions that put something ordinary in place, one brick at a time, then build forward into a future of their own.
Wargames and tabletop exercises
Moves, counter-moves and injects, built on the evidence, with a debrief on where the plan broke. Antony designed exercises and wargames for UK government and NATO audiences for five years.
Live dilemmas
Your AI works. Your people are happier. Your results are better. So what’s the problem?
We create futures that put leaders inside the difficult decisions success can bring. Through stories and live dilemmas, organisations explore how AI could change their people, their judgement and their capacity to do something genuinely different, and decide what they would do before those choices become real.
The company finally understands you. Then you ask for a promotion.
Supercharged teams
AI that builds teams by how minds fit and what each person does best. Opportunities and pitfalls.
Teams are happier and results are better. Then the system predicts you should stay where you fit, using what you shared so the company could support you. And when five teams present five polished versions of the same idea, do you deliberately build teams your own evidence says will perform worse?
Your daughter’s favourite teacher has a client. It isn’t your daughter.
Free learning, curated curriculum
Discounted teaching in exchange for the provider’s say in what gets taught. Opportunities and pitfalls.
The robot tutor is patient, inspiring and extraordinarily good, and employers subsidise it to find future talent. Then you discover it has been encouraging some interests and quietly neglecting others. Would you take away the best teacher she has ever had because of who is paying it?
Your garden has found its voice. Who wrote its lines?
Bonding with nature
AI that translates your garden, so you can care for it as a companion. Opportunities and pitfalls.
You care for it more attentively because it talks to you, and notice relationships you used to miss. But when it asks you to favour one species, whose judgement are you hearing: a measurement, an ecological reading, or a personality designed to make you care?
Everyone makes a reasonable decision, and together they create an outcome nobody wanted. That’s where the work starts.
Run one with your leadersWhat you receive.
- The session, designed around your question
- A written synthesis: disputed assumptions, dependencies, responses and open questions
- A named next step for each issue the day exposed
Shapes and timescales.
Workshop
Half a day to two days, in person or hybrid.
Exercise or wargame
Two to six weeks of design, one to two days of play, then the synthesis.
Programme
A series of sessions across teams, building a shared picture.
Example
What a futures workshop should leave behind
A good day isn’t the deliverable. The record of what it exposed is.
Read itWho leads
Antony designs the session. Simon leads the synthesis and what follows from it.
Questions people ask.
Is wargaming only for defence?
No. It works wherever outcomes depend on other people’s choices: markets, regulation, public services, partnerships.
How many people can take part?
From a small leadership team to a full conference room. The design changes with the size, not the rigour.
What happens afterwards?
You receive the synthesis within two weeks. If a possibility deserves a response, Develop the next move picks it up.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Futures-led innovation and strategy
Confidential strategic advice.
Discreet, bespoke advice for C-suite executives confronting difficult decisions, unfamiliar risks and profound uncertainty.
Who it’s for.
Organisations that have found an important possibility, on their own or with us, and need to decide what to do about it.
What we do.
Clear the ground
Strip out the myths and assumptions that make innovation look harder, or easier, than it is.
Find the purpose
Agree what the organisation is trying to achieve, so options can be judged against it.
Generate the options
Test, build, partner, invest, influence or watch: responses worked through inside the world the possibility implies.
Secure support
Who needs to be involved, what they need to believe, and how to bring them with you.
Get it implemented
Work with the owners of the change: agree resources, launch the pilot or partnership, and resolve the obstacles as they appear.
What you receive.
- An opportunity brief
- Options compared against your purpose
- The people, partners and capabilities required
- A defined experiment or pilot, with stop and scale criteria
Shapes and timescales.
Opportunity sprint
Two to four weeks, from a possibility to a defined next move.
Innovation programme
Two to three months, including stakeholder work and pilot design.
Ongoing advice
Work with Simon as the response moves from agreement into practice.
Who leads
Simon leads, drawing on the method in his book Anyone Can Innovate (Pearson, 2025).
Questions people ask.
Do we have to start with your futures work?
No. If you already have a possibility you want to act on, we can start here.
Do you implement?
Yes. Simon can work with your team on sponsorship, partnerships, pilots and the obstacles inside the organisation. We agree the scope and responsibilities with you at the start.
Why separate this from the futures work?
Because the question changes. Asking “could we act on this?” too early pulls every unusual possibility back towards today. We keep the two questions apart, then join them deliberately.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
AI ethics
AI ethics that starts with the decisions you’ll actually face.
Hundreds of firms will help you deploy AI, and hundreds more will write your principles. We start somewhere else: with the specific dilemmas your organisation will face in the next 24 months, before they arrive. Then we help you build the framework to decide them.
What we mean by AI ethics.
For us, AI ethics is what you decide your AI may know about people, decide about them and do to them, especially when doing more would pay.
That last clause is the point. AI gives organisations new abilities: to combine data, to predict what individuals will do, to personalise every price and to act without asking. Each ability arrives with a race. If you don’t use it, a competitor will, and their prices, margins and speed become the market’s standard.
Ethics is what you do in that race, not the principles you wrote before it started. So we don’t begin with a theoretical framework. We begin with your next 24 months.
Dilemmas first. Framework second.
Antony finds the dilemmas.
For more than a decade Antony has worked out how technological and social trends combine and what they make possible, backed by a deep working knowledge of AI and robotics and five years of defence futures at Dstl. He builds the world your organisation is heading into, and finds the specific decisions it will force: who decides, who pays, and what your rivals will do.
Simon builds the framework.
Simon studied ethics at Oxford, as part of Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and again in his MBA, and has spent thirty years applying it inside governments and global companies. He helps you turn the dilemmas into a framework that holds: red lines, conditions and commitments, who decides what, and how to compete when rivals won’t hold the same line.
How we think a dilemma through.
The capability
What AI makes newly possible, cheaply and at scale.
The combination
What it combines with: other data, other systems, other incentives. This is where the surprises come from.
The pull
Who gains by using it, and what happens to those who don’t. Usually, a race.
The people exposed
Who bears the consequences, and which of them can’t see or contest what is happening.
The fork
The decision itself, with a real cost on both sides, and the person who has to make it.
Worked example
A CRM company in an arms race.
A software company sells customer-relationship and office-automation tools to mid-sized businesses. Its competitors have launched AI agents. The board’s message is simple: add AI, or we’re finished.
What arrives in the next 24 months
- Agents that act: they email, negotiate, discount, renew and chase payment.
- Enrichment that combines clients’ records with bought-in and scraped data.
- Predictions about individuals: who will leave, what they will pay, who is in financial trouble.
- Prices and offers personalised to one person.
- A vendor model that learns across every client’s data.
The race
Each capability makes clients more money in the short run, and each one a competitor ships becomes the market’s standard. Hold back alone and you lose deals. If everyone ships, end customers end up worse off and the regulators arrive.
The decisions it cannot delegate.
- What may an agent promise in the company’s name?
- May knowledge of a customer’s financial distress ever be used against them?
- Who can challenge a decision—and who has the authority to reverse it?
The framework we would build with them
Autonomy follows reversibility.
The agent may act alone where a mistake is cheap to undo. Commitments about money, contracts or a person’s access need a human.
A one-way valve on vulnerability.
Inferences about financial stress may only be used in the customer’s favour: to lower a price, give time or route them to help. Never to raise a price or press harder.
Every decision about a person comes with a reason and a route to a human.
If the system can’t explain it, it doesn’t do it.
Clients choose who learns from their data.
Training the shared model is opt-in, and clients are told what they get in return.
Disclosed by default.
People are told when they are dealing with an AI, and when an AI set their price.
And how it competes
Sell trust where it is worth most: to regulated buyers in finance, health and the public sector, who will have to show that their suppliers comply. Build to the rules before they arrive, and recruit allies for an industry standard, so that holding the line doesn’t mean losing alone.
How to hold a line when rivals won’t.
A framework has to survive competition, not just a board meeting.
Make it a product.
Trust sells, especially to buyers who must prove their suppliers are safe.
Set the default.
Let customers choose, but make the safe option the one they get unless they decide otherwise.
Find allies.
A shared standard turns a costly stand into the market’s rules. Simon has led UK delegations where international standards were made.
Move before the rules.
Regulation tends to follow scandal. Being ready early is cheaper than being retrofitted.
Disclose.
Practices that can’t survive being explained to customers rarely survive being discovered.
Pay the price knowingly.
Some lines are worth losing a deal over. Decide which in advance, not in a sales meeting.
What you receive.
Take one, or all four. Simon and Antony lead each one together.
Dilemma map
Two to three weeks. The specific dilemmas your organisation is likely to face in the next 24 months, with the capability, the pressure and the people affected behind each one.
Leadership session
One day working through the decisions with your leaders. They decide, disagree and find out where they really stand.
Decision framework
Four to six weeks. Red lines, conditions and commitments; who decides what; and how you compete when rivals won’t hold the same line.
Six-monthly refresh
The world moves. We revisit the map, retire the dilemmas you have decided and add the new ones.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Our futures.
Original work on AI, power and the rules we may end up living by. Start with a question that matters to you. Follow it somewhere less familiar.
AI, ethics & economic power
Who gets to decide the terms?
Working paper · Preview
The Desperation Machine
The most you’ll pay. The least you’ll take.
What happens when prices and pay both learn how little room you have to refuse?
Read the short previewRobotics · Ownership
RoboStore
Train the robot. Lose the business.
A skills store learns from its suppliers. What happens when it owns the expertise and the route to the customer?
Follow it to a decisionSecurity & sovereignty
A country can keep its borders and lose the life inside them.
Sovereignty · Infrastructure
Negative Territorial Power
You don’t have to own the land to decide what happens there.
A larger argument about power, explored through robotic guerrillas in The March and the coercive conservation of Radioactive Forests.
Explore the argumentDefence · Generational politics
Care Home Troopers
Your country needs your gran.
If technology changes who can fight, who should bear the risk? A mobilisation crisis becomes a fight over pensions, care and inheritance.
Enter the worldSociety & everyday life
Strange premises. Sometimes very particular opportunities.
Leisure · Robotics
Hunted
The lions hunt the visitors.
Visitors control robot prey. An odd reversal opens a question for zoos and experience businesses.
Explore the futureClimate · Dependence
Cool Centres
Miss a payment, and the cool room won’t let you in.
A family subscribes to places in a cooled shelter. What happens when protection from heat becomes a payment you cannot afford to miss?
Explore the futureOur ideas. Follow the consequences.
Original speculative work across business, power, ethics and everyday life. Each starts with a different question.
Care Home TroopersRoboStoreDeath ZonesSupercharged TeamsCool CentresThe Yum MachineWeather WarsThe School That Hires YouThe Patent ApocalypseCompanion GrowersThe Subscription MPHuntedGun DogsThe Advertising ButlerInterviewing EmbryosReal-life SuperheroesGamified AidFirst Chance to Eat
RoboStoreHappened alreadyBusiness & ownership
Everyone expectsA humanoid robot that does the chores.
Flip the scriptThe robot’s free. Caring for Grandad costs extra.
One body, many skills, every one a download. Each job teaches the store something, until the specialists who taught it find themselves competing with it.
Choose an idea. Grey is the familiar expectation; orange is the reversal.Use Next to explore our ideas. Grey is the familiar expectation; orange is the reversal.
Theme
2 of 18
Before Speculative Edge.
Work by our principals in their earlier roles, listed under the person who did it.
Simon Willis
Planetary Skin · Cisco–NASA
Led the team emerging from a History of the Future workshop. Named one of TIME’s 50 Best Inventions of 2009.
Public-sector innovation at Cisco
Global head of public-sector innovation, advising the leaders of large public organisations in more than 20 countries.
Government partnerships at Mastercard
Vice President, Public Sector Innovation: strategic government partnerships worldwide and climate-related product innovation.
HM Treasury and the FATF
Ran the Treasury’s Financial Crime Branch and served as the UK’s lead delegate to the Financial Action Task Force.
Anyone Can Innovate
Pearson, 2025. A practical method for getting new ideas adopted inside large organisations.
Antony Butts
Confidential organisational inquiry
A two-month multinational assignment commissioned by Simon Willis. Interviews, observation and an account of what lay beneath the corporate answer.
Documentary direction
Director of After the Apocalypse and DIY Country. More than 30 broadcast documentaries across direction, filming and production. Amnesty International award winner; Hot Docs world premiere and One World Media nomination.
Futures and wargames at Dstl
2020–25. Future concepts, scenarios and strategic games for UK government and NATO audiences; co-developed and taught the FATE foresight method.
Balance of Power
An interactive film and policy game on the future energy system, commissioned by USEF from RANJ. Energy Institute Public Engagement Award, 2019.
The Many Lives of “Lenin”
A simulation game of the war in Donbas, built from documentary research. Danyliw Research Seminar, University of Ottawa, 2018.
Regreening the Sahel
An agent-based model of how farmer-managed natural regeneration spreads. Beating Famine Sahel, Bamako, 2019.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Worked example for companies
RoboStore
Who gets to learn from whom?
The usual question
Which jobs will robots replace?
The question we asked
When a robot learns to do everybody’s work, who gets to own that accumulating ability, and what bargains will the rest of us have to make to use it?
RoboStore begins as a marketplace for robot skills. It could become the system through which people obtain professional services, and through which the knowledge behind those services accumulates in a few hands. The idea underneath is the enclosure of learning: the contest over who gets to learn from whom.
How the world develops.
An adverse starting world. Follow the bargain from useful service to dependence, then change the choices that produce it.
It starts by making help affordable.
A household buys one robot body, then adds a cook, a tutor, a cat sitter, a cleaner and a repair service. The store, Toggle, supplies distribution, billing and support, and discounts the robot, because it can recover the cost across every service the machine delivers. At the beginning, everybody benefits.
Every job improves the service, and strengthens somebody else.
Moggy, a cat-sitting skill, learns from every cat and every room it meets. If the store controls the records and the right to train on them, that experience improves the store’s own system too. A specialist can keep ownership of her code while losing the exclusive ability to produce the result customers pay for.
The store doesn’t have to replace anyone.
Moggy is listed in the store. Then pet care is bundled into Toggle Prime. Then the robot handles routine pet care itself. Finally the household just says what it wants, and the store decides who does the work. No supplier is deleted; most simply get fewer paid jobs.
Rivals can learn by watching.
Copying an incumbent’s data may be impossible; imitating its behaviour may not be. So the store offers a bargain: the robot costs less because its experience stays inside the ecosystem. The reversal follows. The robot with free software can cost more to buy.
The bargain changes when the robot becomes essential.
At first the question is “is this worth buying?” Later it becomes “what would I lose by leaving?” Owning a capable machine is not the same as dependable access to what it can do.
Who protects the specialist from the store?
The store can present itself as the specialists’ protector against unauthorised learners while learning from them itself. Learning flows in from its suppliers and does not flow out to rivals.
Four players, none of whom has won yet.
A scenario about incentives, not a claim about any company’s plans.
Skilled professionals and specialist developers
- Brings
- Judgement, techniques, demonstrations and domain knowledge.
- Wants to keep
- A share of the income, the customer relationship and control over how their expertise is used.
- Dilemma
- Joining gives reach and funding. Successful deployment may help someone else supply their service.
Toggle, the store
- Brings
- Affordable deployment, integration, distribution, billing and the assignment of work.
- Wants to keep
- The household relationship, recurring revenue and learning across the whole system.
- Dilemma
- It wants to absorb capabilities without making participation so unattractive that specialists stop creating new ones.
The robot maker
- Brings
- The body, hands, sensors, physical control, reliability and maintenance.
- Wants to keep
- Hardware margins, operational experience and influence over what the machine can do.
- Dilemma
- The store helps sell robots, but could turn the maker into an interchangeable supplier of bodies.
The computing platform
- Brings
- The computing and development environment the systems are built on.
- Wants to keep
- Continued use of its infrastructure across rival robot businesses.
- Dilemma
- It gains from many rival ecosystems, as long as they remain its customers.
What the premise rests on.
Pooling robot experience helps.
Models trained on data pooled across many labs and robot types have improved the capabilities of multiple robots. Open X-Embodiment, 2023
Behaviour can leak.
Machine-learning models can be reproduced with near-perfect fidelity from their outputs, without access to their training data. Tramèr et al., 2016
Returns follow complementary assets.
When imitation is easy, the profits from an innovation tend to go to whoever owns the assets needed to commercialise it. Teece, 1986
The scenario combines these. It does not claim that every skill can be copied by watching, only that imitation may become effective enough to change who wins.
“We’re away until Sunday. Look after Miso.”
The household’s whole instruction, from inside the scenario.
What it produced.
A design fiction, Your Cleaner Will Become Your Doctor Now: a pub conversation and the reasoning trace of a household robot that could print a child’s medicine in six minutes but may not, because her subscription has lapsed. And a paradigm, the enclosure of learning, connecting RoboStore to the Yum Machine and the Patent Apocalypse.
The asset isn’t the app. It’s the right to keep learning.
A copied capability may become less profitable. Exclusive access to the next generation of experience may stay valuable.
- The developer’s dilemma: how do you finance hard capability development when others can learn from the service without paying for it?
- The user’s dilemma: why should buying a useful service mean surrendering the experience produced in your own home or workplace?
- The specialist’s dilemma: how do you reach customers without depending on a platform that may learn to replace you?
- The public dilemma: how do you encourage expensive innovation without letting its financing create permanently closed systems of knowledge?
From scenario to choices
Change the bargain. Change the future.
Take the adverse world as the base case for the exercise. A specialist can be copied, trapped behind a gatekeeper, or both. Two axes let us explore what might change that.
Two choices for a specialist: who may learn from your work, and whether customers can buy from you elsewhere.
| The store is your only route to customers | You keep other routes to customers | |
|---|---|---|
| The store can learn from your work | Adverse starting pointYou train your gatekeeper.It learns your trade and controls your access to work. Leaving costs you both reach and income. | You can leave. Your expertise can’t.You can sell elsewhere, but the store may still use what it learned to compete with you. |
| You retain control over learning | Your expertise is yours. Your market isn’t.The store still controls visibility, fees and access. It can squeeze you without copying you. | You have room to negotiate.You keep both your expertise and alternatives. You may have to fund more of the development and distribution yourself. |
These are positions to explore. Contracts, technical access and bargaining power decide which choices are available.
Now put yourself in it.
Which position are your current partnerships taking you towards? What could you renegotiate? Who would help build another route to market—and what would they want in return?
Rehearse these choices with your teamDiscuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Security & sovereignty · A speculative framework
Negative Territorial Power
Power over what a territory can sustain—without governing the people who live there.
The spear—and what stops it.
To break a front line, an army has to concentrate force: assemble a spear, drive it through, then exploit the opening. Cheap autonomy, persistent sensors and machine endurance could make that spear devastating. They could also make it impossible to assemble.
That suggests two familiar futures: rapid breakthrough or grinding attrition. But follow the same technologies further and a third possibility appears.
Robotic guerrillas.
Imagine persistent autonomous machines disrupting the movement and organisation on which concentrated force depends. Both sides acquire them. Both find it harder to assemble their spear.
Now follow the consequences beyond the military contest. The same insecurity could make ordinary movement, work and life increasingly difficult across a country. The front line stops being a line. Denying the use of territory becomes an objective in itself.
You may be unable to take the land. You can still stop your opponent using it.
Ownership. Control. Viability.
A country can retain its borders, its government and the capacity to resist invasion while losing the ability to keep parts of itself usable.
Ownership
Whose territory is it?
Control
Whose decisions can be enforced there?
Viability
Who can still live, work and invest there?
Negative territorial power is the ability to impose persistent restrictions on another territory’s uses without taking responsibility for governing its population.
The question becomes: viable for whom, for what activity, and for how long?
They do not have to kill to change the map.
Lethal robotic guerrillas are one branch. Persistent, non-lethal disruption is another. Repeated failures, losses and fear could drive people away even where the state replaces what has been damaged.
Insurers withdraw. Lending tightens. Businesses stop investing. Families leave. Those who can pay buy protection; elsewhere, whoever can keep a community functioning gains authority.
This is The March: a possible return of insecure zones between centres of effective power, including zones inside a country. Formal sovereignty remains. Practical authority starts to fragment.
The crucial question is whether disruption could remain cheaper to sustain than protection. If that balance changes, so does this world.
“They replaced our car three times. We still left.”
A headline from inside the scenario.
Why the two familiar futures miss it.
Breakthrough and attrition ask how armies fight over territory. This scenario asks whether territory can remain usable at all. The technologies may be the same; the political world is very different.
That is why we stay with the awkward possibility. It reaches beyond military doctrine into insurance, infrastructure, migration and the bargain between a state and its citizens.
Change the land. Then leave.
Robotic disruption is one route to negative territorial power. Another is a temporary intervention that leaves lasting restrictions on what a territory can produce or sell.
Radioactive Forests explores the appalling bargain of making a forest’s resources commercially unusable in the name of protecting it. Here the aim is to preserve one use of land by excluding another. It asks the same political question: who can dictate a territory’s future without governing—or living with—the consequences?
What would you change?
- Which plans assume that defending a border also protects ordinary life behind it?
- What keeps a region viable when compensation alone cannot restore confidence?
- Where should protection be shared—and who gets left outside it?
- What would trigger a collective response to disruption that never becomes an invasion?
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Worked example for foundations and democracies
Flash Institutions
A million decisions. One negotiating bloc.
The usual question
How will AI assistants change shopping, banking and political messaging?
The question we asked
What happens when thousands of AI assistants negotiate together?
An assistant that buys something for one person is a service. Thousands of assistants negotiating together begin to look like an institution: buying blocs, investment funds and political organisations that form in an afternoon and bargain as one.
One capability, four arenas.
The worldbuilding follows the same mechanism, pooling delegated preferences, as it reaches further.
Products
A supplier used to dealing with individuals loses thousands of customers in one coordinated move. Customers bargain over prices and behaviour.
Capital
A bank sees separate accounts act as one. Money that looked dispersed becomes organised.
Politics
Subscribers finance candidates and agents negotiate priorities continuously. £10 a month buys you an MP.
Infrastructure
What commitments let a bloc act? When can a member interrupt their agent? Who supplies identity, reputation and dispute resolution?
Who gets heard?
In The Subscription MP, an organisation funded by members selects a candidate; the electorate still elects the MP. The same recurring revenue that gives members a voice also creates pressure to subscribe. The question becomes whose preferences the system can afford to hear.
What it produced.
Five connected futures, among them AI Flashmobs, The Subscription MP and The Innieverse, the infrastructure that agent blocs would need: identity, reputation, contracts and dispute resolution.
An organisation that thought it had many customers meets one counterpart.
So does a political party, a bank and a regulator.
- Who does a representative answer to when members’ agents negotiate continuously?
- Which consumer and competition protections assume customers can’t coordinate?
- Who should provide identity, reputation and dispute resolution for agent blocs: platforms, states or members?
- What would make collective bargaining by agents fair to people who can’t afford a good agent?
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Simon Willis. Antony Butts.
We lead every commission ourselves. Futures, strategy and the work of getting things done.
Simon Willis
Co-founder. Innovation, strategy and government.
Simon advises heads of state, governments and global companies on innovation, AI and digital sovereignty. Nearly four decades across government, global technology companies and GovTech.
A proven track record
As Global Vice President for Public Sector Innovation at Cisco, he led advisory teams to heads of state and national leaders, established smart cities and smart grid groups, and worked across health, education, energy, tax and justice.
He led the team emerging from a History of the Future workshop that developed Planetary Skin, a Cisco–NASA innovation named one of TIME’s 50 Best Inventions of 2009. The idea became a platform for environmental monitoring: Tropical Forest ALERTS launched in beta in December 2010, followed by a disaster-monitoring partnership with Brazil’s CEMADEN in 2011.
From 2020 to 2026, as Vice President for Government Innovation Partnerships at Mastercard, he led its flagship digital country partnership programme. His remit included public procurement, SME digitisation, inclusive growth, sovereignty and climate-related product innovation.
At HM Treasury, he headed Financial Crime, helped establish the Financial Services Authority and led work through the G7 and FATF. Earlier government roles included pensions equalisation, leading Motability and serving as private secretary to a Minister of State.
He has also been chief executive of The Young Foundation, Managing Director for Europe and Australia at Change.org, and International Strategy Director at OpenGov. He has spoken at the UN and TEDx.
His book Anyone Can Innovate (Pearson, 2025) sets out how ideas gain purpose, support and a route to implementation. He holds a first-class degree in PPE from Balliol College, Oxford, and an Executive MBA from IESE Business School, Barcelona.
- TIME · 50 Best Inventions, 2009Led the team behind Planetary Skin, developed with Cisco and NASA.
- Heads of state and national leadersInnovation advisory work with governments in more than 20 countries.
- Anyone Can InnovatePearson, 2025. How to get ideas adopted inside large organisations.
Antony Butts
Co-founder. Futures, systems and documentary direction.
An award-winning futurist and filmmaker. Five years as a senior futurist and wargamer at Dstl, the Ministry of Defence’s research laboratory; futures teaching for NATO; a career connecting technical systems, political power and human lives.
A proven track record
Antony: futures, scenarios and strategic wargames, 2020–25Antony: futures teaching and strategic games for NATO audiencesAntony: field producer on Emmy-winning VICE on HBOAntony: broadcast documentary workAntony: Amnesty International award-winning documentary workAntony: commissioned filmsAntony: commissioned filmsAntony: film and media workAntony: credit derivativesAntony: broadcast workAntony: broadcast workAntony: field producerFollow the people. Understand the system.
His particular strength is connecting an unfamiliar possibility with understandable human motives. Who would want this? What would persuade others to join in? How could it become normal? He follows the relationships, incentives and institutions that determine whether an idea takes hold.
At Dstl, the Ministry of Defence’s research laboratory, he spent five years as a senior futurist and wargamer, designing future scenarios and strategic games for senior government and NATO audiences. He co-developed FATE, developed and taught design fiction, and taught sociotechnical foresight to NATO participants. He wrote 30,000 words of speculative fiction dramatising future scenarios for senior civil servants, and has spoken at Chatham House and Ministry of Defence forums.
Documentary direction.
Antony is principally a director and has directed more than 25 documentaries. His career spans more than 30 broadcast documentaries across direction, filming and production, investigating political power, human rights and social change through sustained access to the people living through them.
After the Apocalypse
Director and cinematographer. Months living among communities around Kazakhstan’s former nuclear test site. A story of radiation, medical authority and a woman determined to have a child. Released in cinemas, broadcast on More4 and nominated for the One World Media Documentary Award.
“One of the most important and valuable films of the year” — Evening Standard, ★★★★
DIY Country
Director, co-producer and cinematographer. Sustained access to the people building the Donetsk People’s Republic in 2014–15, following the friendships, ambitions and power struggles through which a new order took shape. World premiere at Hot Docs, 2016.
Balance of Power
Writer and director. An interactive film and serious game about the future energy system, commissioned by USEF from RANJ. Winner of the Energy Institute’s Public Engagement Award in 2019.
He won the Amnesty International UK Media Award for reporting and co-producing Ingushetia: A Second Chechnya?, sharing the 2010 International Television & Radio award with Dom Rotheroe and Mike Chamberlain. His Donetsk film opened Docudays UA in 2015 and received an Artdocfest Jury Special Mention. His films have also been nominated for four other human-rights awards.
His wider credits include field producer on the Emmy-winning VICE on HBO and director of photography on the Sundance-winning Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, also a BIFA winner and Oscar-shortlisted. He has made films for broadcasters including ARTE, Channel 4, Al Jazeera and the BBC, and commissioned work for Save the Children and Greenpeace.
Scientific training. Social inquiry. Practical tools.
He holds a BSc in Physics from Imperial College London and an MSc in Security Studies from UCL. His earlier finance career included structuring credit derivatives at RBS and a role as head of risk modelling. Hard science, financial risk and social science give him different ways to examine the same problem; documentary fieldwork brings the people into focus.
He has studied and practised data science and agent-based modelling. His model of how regreening practices spread in the Sahel was presented at the Beating Famine conference in Mali. His technical experience includes R, NetLogo, C#, Unity and analytical web applications.
As Chief Futurist at Futur Energ Systems, he applies AI and software development to power-grid consultancy: a planning application for cable-laying routes and AI-assisted analysis of technical documents and conformance requirements.
A polyglot and fluent Russian speaker, he holds a Russian Language Diploma with Distinction from Moscow State University and spent eight years living in the former USSR. Working across languages and cultures taught him to listen for meanings that a familiar frame can miss.
That approach underpins his business anthropology. Simon commissioned him for a confidential, two-month inquiry inside a multinational: earning trust, following conflicting accounts and finding the pattern behind them.
- Documentary directorAfter the Apocalypse · DIY Country · Balance of Power
- Amnesty International · 2010International Television & Radio award, Ingushetia: A Second Chechnya?
- Energy Institute · 2019Public Engagement winner, Balance of Power. Written and directed by Antony.
- NATO · Futures teachingFive years at Dstl. Co-developed FATE and taught sociotechnical foresight.
- Physics & social scienceBSc Physics, Imperial. MSc Security Studies, UCL. Applied data science and agent-based modelling.
- Languages & fieldworkPolyglot. Fluent Russian; diploma with Distinction. Eight years living in the former USSR.
A track record at the highest level.
Leadership, government service, advisory work and commissioned productions. Select a logo for the biography.
Simon: global head of public-sector innovationAntony: futures, scenarios and strategic wargames, 2020–25Simon: vice president; government partnerships and innovationSimon: head of the Financial Crime BranchAntony: futures teaching and strategic games for NATO audiencesAntony: field producer on Emmy-winning VICE on HBOAntony: broadcast documentary workAntony: Amnesty International award-winning documentary workAntony: commissioned filmsAntony: commissioned filmsAntony: film and media workAntony: credit derivativesAntony: broadcast workAntony: broadcast workAntony: field producerSimon: author of Anyone Can InnovateIn their words.
Simon Willis
“I have seen Simon’s strategic innovation work firsthand and can vouch for its impact. He goes beyond the innovation practices normally discussed and into the difficult but essential work of building alliances and driving implementation.”
“Simon is an incredible leader and innovation practitioner.”
Antony Butts
“When Antony speaks, there’s a change of gear. He connects ideas across sectors and gets people beyond the usual answers, into the difficult questions that matter. He stretches their thinking and brings out their best ideas. He makes the future something you experience, rather than just talk about.”
“Antony is an incredibly talented, unusual and dedicated filmmaker and was instrumental in producing the most powerful piece in our Emmy winning VICE HBO series.”
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Unusual ideas. Unmysterious delivery.
Here is what commissioning us involves, so you can explain it to the people who need to approve it.
How a commission runs.
Brief
A conversation about what you’re trying to figure out. We come back within a week with a short proposal.
Scope
Questions, outputs, people, timetable and fee, agreed in writing.
Develop
Working sessions with your team. You see material as it develops, not only at the end.
Deliver
The outputs, a synthesis and a handover to the people who will use them.
Follow through
Work with the people carrying the response through, where the commission includes implementation.
What to expect.
Who does the work
Simon and Antony lead every commission personally. Associates join for specific expertise, and you’ll know who they are before they start.
Evidence and assumptions
We show what we are drawing on, where we are speculating and why a possibility deserves attention. Adverse scenarios give us a starting world from which to explore choices.
Confidentiality and publication
Client work is confidential by default. We sign non-disclosure agreements and work within your security requirements. If you want to publish, we design for publication from the start.
Intellectual property
You own what we make for you. We keep our methods and the ideas we brought with us, and you receive a licence to use any of them that appear in your deliverables.
Languages and location
English and Russian. Based in the UK, working internationally, in person or remotely.
Procurement
We can complete supplier registration and due-diligence questionnaires, including for UN agencies and government frameworks. Our capability statement summarises the essentials.
Typical shapes.
Every commission is scoped to the question. These are starting points.
Reimagination session
One day inside your existing process, plus the write-up.
Scenario sprint
Three to four weeks.
Exercise or wargame
Two to six weeks of design; one to two days of play.
Futures programme
Two to three months, combining scenarios, rehearsal and strategy. Organisational inquiry and implementation are scoped to the brief.
Futurist as a service
Regular time for sparring, research and scenario work as questions come up.
Talks
Keynotes, talks and screenings, followed by questions.
For procurement.
Speculative Edge is a trading name of Speculative Edge Ltd.
Contracts are with Speculative Edge Ltd, trading as Speculative Edge. Our capability statement covers the team, services, ways of working and contact details on two pages.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Analysis and Edge Papers.
Original, research-grounded analysis of emerging technologies, ethical dilemmas and shifting power. Published here, or written privately on your question.
Three questions to start with.
Working paper · Preview
The Desperation Machine
The most you’ll pay. The least you’ll take. When prices and pay learn the same vulnerability, who can still say no?
Read the short previewPower
Control a territory by making it unusable.
Persistent sabotage changes what it means to hold territory. What happens when denying control becomes easier than exercising it?
Negative Territorial PowerStrategic exposure
Train the robot. Lose the business.
A robot skills store learns from its suppliers. Follow who owns the knowledge, who reaches the customer and how four strategic choices change the outcome.
Read RoboStoreEdge Paper 01
How the future gets streamlined.
Foresight has to survive the organisation that commissions it. What gets lost on the way to the executive brief—and why we work there.
Read the first paperDon’t start with the probable. Start with the fascinating.
One workshop method: fall in love with a possibility, build its world, investigate it and explore your choices.
Start with the future you want to avoid
Build the adverse world. Change the choices. Explore what follows.
What a futures workshop should leave behind
A good day isn’t the deliverable. The record of what the day exposed is.
More futures.
Explore our original futures: ideas about power, business and everyday life, developed into worlds you can examine.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Edge Paper 01 · Our mission
How the future gets streamlined.
Each edit may be sensible. Together, they can leave out a future you need to consider.
Futures work has to become something a decision-maker can use. A mass of research becomes a set of scenarios. The scenarios become a report. The report becomes a briefing. The briefing becomes a page.
That work is essential. Leaders need a shared picture, choices they can compare and something they can act on. But each stage also selects what survives.
The future has to pass through an organisation.
An unfamiliar possibility may be difficult to explain, politically awkward or supported by fragments scattered across several disciplines. It may challenge an approved strategy. It may simply take too long to get across in the meeting.
A familiar future travels more easily. People recognise its drivers, understand its implications and know how to defend its inclusion. As the work moves upwards, these advantages accumulate.
The issue is bigger than an individual practitioner’s imagination. A team can see the problem and still have to deliver a report that fits the next layer’s requirements. Anticipating those requirements can start to shape which ideas it develops in the first place.
The institutional filtering of the future.
Evidence, plausibility, relevance and brevity are reasonable demands. Applied repeatedly, they can favour what is already recognisable over what needs a different frame.
A researcher anticipates the team’s response. The team anticipates its director’s. The director anticipates the board’s. An idea need not be explicitly rejected to disappear; it can be left undeveloped, softened or relegated to an appendix.
Ilmola and Kuusi’s research on organisational filters found that narrow, deep filters produced highly predictable outputs, while wider filters generated a greater diversity of issues.
Ilmola and Kuusi · Futures, 2006A useful map still has edges.
Scenarios and pathways make complexity manageable. A matrix can help a room compare choices in minutes. That is a real achievement.
But no set of axes captures every consequential difference. A possibility can share the familiar drivers and still produce a qualitatively different world. What matters is whether that difference gets explored or compressed away.
What if the front line swallowed a country?
Imagine small autonomous machines making large areas exceptionally difficult to inhabit, supply or govern. The strategic objective shifts towards denying territory, even where nobody can occupy it.
That possibility raises questions beyond a choice between fast manoeuvre and slow attrition: what happens to borders, sovereignty and civilian life when control becomes harder than destruction?
The same technological drivers could sit inside several familiar scenarios. This consequence still deserves an examination of its own.
Negative Territorial PowerWhy we founded Speculative Edge.
Our target is the underexplored possibility and its consequences. Sometimes the stakes are already enormous: who owns accumulated expertise, who can keep territory liveable, who can refuse a price or a wage. Sometimes we only discover the stakes by following an apparently minor idea. Sometimes an odd possibility matters to one particular business.
We develop these possibilities in depth: the world around them, the people and incentives that could sustain them, and the decisions they create. This is where we focus our commissions.
We explore what could make them possible and what would follow. Some turn out to be unproductive. Others expose a market, a vulnerability or a shift in power that the existing picture does not contain.
We call this working at the edge of the mean. It complements the broad, structured work of foresight. You need both.
Bring it back to a decision.
A provocative idea earns its place when it changes what you can see or do. What would you protect? What might you build? Which dependency would you reduce? What would make you reconsider?
Our work connects these possibilities to strategy, through analysis, workshops and confidential advice. Business anthropology helps us understand the organisation that will have to act on them.
Start inside your organisationKeep reading.
Start with the future you want to avoid
Build the adverse world. Change the choices. Explore what follows.
What a futures workshop should leave behind
A good day isn’t the deliverable. The record of what the day exposed is.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Start with the future you want to avoid
Build the adverse world. Change the choices. Explore what follows.
A useful futures exercise can begin with a bad outcome. We develop it far enough to understand who might bring it about, why it could appeal to them and what everyone else would face.
The base case is a starting point.
For this exercise, the adverse scenario is our base case. We use it to ask what could change its course. We do not need to decide that it is the most likely future before doing that work.
Choose what can move.
In RoboStore, a specialist may help train the platform that controls access to their customers. Two choices change the bargain: who can learn from the work, and whether the specialist has another route to market.
Put those choices on two axes. The four resulting positions expose different risks. Control over expertise helps, but dependence on one shop window remains. Another shop window helps, but it does not undo what the platform has learned.
Then let everyone else act.
The platform can change its terms. Customers can favour the cheaper bundle. Specialists can form an alliance. A public buyer can demand another arrangement. Each response changes what the others can do.
Leave with choices.
We use stories, matrices and games to uncover those differences. Simon and Antony bring different experience to the same question: what could you do, what might follow, and what would it take to act?
The result is a set of choices to examine while you still have them.
Keep reading.
How the future gets streamlined
Shared inputs, shared methods and shared incentives pull foresight towards the middle of the curve. Here is how to reach the edge without losing rigour.
What a futures workshop should leave behind
A good day isn’t the deliverable. The record of what the day exposed is.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
What a futures workshop should leave behind
A world you have thought through. A clearer view of your choices. And the ability to do it again.
A workshop asks a lot of your team: time, attention and the willingness to be challenged. The result has to survive beyond the room.
A world with consequences.
You have followed a possibility into the lives, institutions and interests around it. The artefacts, scenes and conversations give the world enough substance to question. Where does it hold together? Where does it branch? What does each branch mean for you?
The uncomfortable questions.
Keep the assumptions that broke, the dilemmas you could not settle and the responses worth exploring. A neat agreement can conceal the most useful thing the room found.
Choices you can return to.
Record what you might protect, change, build or stop. Note what would make you reconsider, what needs further investigation and who will take the work forward.
Techniques you can use again.
We teach the work as we facilitate it: finding a possibility that grips you, building its wider world, inhabiting it through dialogue and bringing it back to your organisation. The next unfamiliar development should give you somewhere to begin.
Simon and Antony keep pushing for specifics. A woolly idea is a starting point. We won’t let it be the result.
Find the workshop for your questionKeep reading.
How the future gets streamlined
Shared inputs, shared methods and shared incentives pull foresight towards the middle of the curve. Here is how to reach the edge without losing rigour.
Start with the future you want to avoid
Build the adverse world. Change the choices. Explore what follows.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Why the edge
Overlooked. Potentially consequential.
Some possibilities could reshape whole systems. Others matter only once you follow them—or only to a particular organisation. We develop those possibilities and work out what they mean for you.
The broad view is part of our craft.
Futures work has to compress complexity. That essential work is part of our skill set. But the process can favour what is already familiar, leaving consequential possibilities underexplored.
We help you look closer. Our commissions develop specific possibilities in depth and connect them to your decisions.
The longer argument: how the future gets streamlinedThree ways we can help.
01 / Underexplored
Big consequences.
Too little attention.
The issue exists, but its wider implications sit in a niche or between disciplines. We expand the world around it and follow what could change.
- RoboStoreWho owns the expertise when robots learn everybody’s work?
- Negative Territorial PowerWhat happens to sovereignty when making land unusable is easier than holding it?
- The Desperation MachineWhat happens when employers and sellers can both price your lack of alternatives?
02 / Consequences to discover
Follow the idea.
Find the stakes.
An idea can look minor, niche or merely provocative. Follow it into the right circumstances and the consequences become much larger.
Care Home Troopers begins with pensioners sent to war. Develop the world around it and care funding, inheritance, recruitment and family obligation become a coercive bargain. The satire opens a serious question about who gets to refuse.
03 / A particular opportunity
Strange ideas.
A use for someone.
A possibility need not transform society to matter to your business. We look for the overlooked idea with a particular audience, use or market.
Stag parties at a zoo, controlling robot prey while the lions hunt them. Hunted could mean a new kind of experience for an attraction operator—and new questions about animal welfare, visitors and what people will pay for.
What gets missed can change everything.
The financial crisis: seeing it was not enough.
Antony structured credit derivatives and was head of risk modelling in the years before the crisis. He saw it coming. Many others did too. Recognising a danger did not ensure the institution would act on it.
The British Academy’s reply to the Queen acknowledged the many warnings and described “a failure of the collective imagination”. Institutional incentives and the ability to act on a warning belong in the futures question too.
British Academy, 2009Why widen the view?
Hover to explore. Click or tap to keep a passage open.
Five out of 153.
Of 153 recessions in 63 countries between 1992 and 2014, the consensus of economists had predicted five by April of the previous year. Strong booms were missed too.
Consensus is useful information. It is also capable of missing a turning point.
IMF Working Paper, 2018A mobile market more than 100 times the forecast.
In 1980, McKinsey forecast the US mobile phone market in 2000 for AT&T. According to the World Bank’s account, the forecast was less than 1% of the market that actually emerged.
A missed future can be an opportunity as well as a threat.
Reported by the World Bank, 2007Only one firm in five was watching the periphery well enough.
In their 2006 work on peripheral vision, George Day and Paul Schoemaker reported that only 20% of companies had developed it sufficiently to stay ahead of competitors.
The point is to notice changes outside the organisation’s usual field of attention—and make something of them.
Day and Schoemaker · Wharton, 2006Future-prepared firms performed better.
Rohrbeck and Kum assessed large European firms’ preparedness in 2008 and followed their performance to 2015. The future-prepared group had 33% higher profitability and 200% higher growth in market capitalisation than the average.
This was an association with corporate foresight as a whole, rather than a test of any one method.
Rohrbeck and Kum, 2018Shell had rehearsed a different world.
Shell’s scenarios helped prepare its managers for the 1973 oil crisis before it happened.
Pierre Wack · Harvard Business Review, 1985Consequences deserve attention.
Forecasts are useful, and strange futures are not necessarily more likely. But an unlikely possibility can still matter enormously if it creates a market, changes what customers expect, undermines an advantage or rewrites the rules.
We explore what could make it happen, what it would change and what you could do. You do not need a spurious probability to ask a serious strategic question.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Start a confidential conversation.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough; you don’t need a finished brief.
Privacy and legal.
Company details
Speculative Edge is a trading name of Speculative Edge Ltd, registered in England and Wales. Company number 16528725.
Registered office: The Coach House St. Leonards Mansions, 19 West Hill Road, St. Leonards-on-Sea, England, TN38 0NA.
Email: hello@speculative-edge.com
Privacy
Speculative Edge Ltd is the controller of personal data collected through this website. If you contact us, we use your name, email address, organisation and message only to reply and, if you commission us, to manage that work. We keep enquiries for up to two years unless they lead to a commission, and we never sell or share your details for marketing.
You can ask to see, correct or delete the personal data we hold about you by writing to the address above. If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).
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About our futures
The futures on this website are possibilities developed to be examined, not predictions. Fictional scenes, companies, documents and headlines are labelled as fiction.
This page is out past the edge.
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Speculative Edge
Creative futures & innovation strategy
Futures away from the mean.
The futures others overlook.
We specialise in AI ethics, the changing nature of power, adverse scenarios and overlooked risks and opportunities. Original analysis, challenging executive workshops and confidential strategic advice for the C-suite.
Five ways to work with us
1. Find out what’s really going on
Business anthropology
The strategy says one thing. The organisation does another. We go inside and find out why.
2. Find the missing futures
Scenarios, stories and design fiction
Follow the possibility the brief leaves out. Build the world around it. Put something from that world on the table.
3. Rehearse the choices
Workshops and strategic wargaming
Start with an adverse future. Change the choices. See what follows when everyone else gets a move too.
4. Make it happen
Strategy and implementation
Decide what to change, get the right people behind it, and work through the obstacles to doing it.
5. Tell the story
Narrative for change
Give staff, customers, investors and the public an honest account of where you’re going and why.
Who we work with
Companies, governments, public bodies, international organisations and foundations.
What you leave with
- The blind spot. What the current picture leaves out.
- A world to examine. People, incentives and consequences.
- Something tangible. A story, campaign, film or game.
- Choices and outcomes. What different responses could change.
- A way to act. Owners, partners and practical next steps.
- An account of the change. Clear enough to explain and defend.
1 of 2
Speculative Edge
Capability statement
Who you would work with
Simon Willis
Co-founder. Innovation and strategy.
Adviser to heads of state and national leaders. Led innovation at Cisco and Mastercard and the team behind Planetary Skin, one of TIME’s 50 Best Inventions of 2009. Author of Anyone Can Innovate. Oxford PPE; Executive MBA, IESE.
Antony Butts
Co-founder. Futures, systems and documentary direction.
Award-winning futurist and filmmaker. Five years as a senior futurist and wargamer at Dstl, the MoD’s research laboratory; taught futures to NATO. Wrote and directed Balance of Power, the award-winning policy futures game. Physics, Security Studies and a Russian diploma; applied AI, data science and agent-based modelling. Directed more than 25 documentaries; Amnesty International award winner.
Associates.
- Imran Khan, defence and security futures.
- Lucas Pokrywa, conflict and security analysis.
Where we have worked
Simon Willis
Cisco; Mastercard; HM Treasury; Department of Social Security; Governments in more than 20 countries; UK delegations to the EU, UN, OECD and FATF; GovTech start-ups; Pearson.
Antony Butts
Dstl, UK Ministry of Defence; NATO audiences; USEF and RANJ; Save the Children; Greenpeace; UK Foreign Office; Al Jazeera English; Channel 4; HBO and VICE; ITN; ARTE; The Guardian.
Worked examples
- RoboStore for companies. Who gets to learn from whom?
- Negative Territorial Power for governments. The country survives. Its communities don’t.
- Flash Institutions for foundations and democracies. A million decisions. One negotiating bloc.
How we work
- Reimagination session. One day inside your existing process, plus the write-up.
- Scenario sprint. Three to four weeks.
- Exercise or wargame. Two to six weeks of design; one to two days of play.
- Futures programme. Two to three months, combining all four ways of working.
- Futurist as a service. Regular time for sparring, research and scenario work as questions come up.
Simon and Antony lead every commission personally. Evidence and assumptions are kept apart in everything we deliver. Client work is confidential by default, and you own what we make for you. We work in English and Russian.
Business anthropology
Tell us what’s really going on.
Independent organisational inquiry. We get beyond the corporate answer and find the pattern behind it.
The official picture only gets you so far.
The same strategy means different things in different offices. A decision made in the meeting gets unmade afterwards. The person everyone blames may be holding the place together.
We go inside. We listen, observe, follow contradictions and find out how the organisation actually works.
People stop giving the corporate answer.
Earn the conversation.
Long, confidential conversations, one to one. Find genuine common ground. Understand what matters to each person and why their position makes sense to them.
Stay curious.
Ask the apparently obvious question. Watch what happens outside the meeting. Let the last conversation change the next.
Put the accounts together.
Follow the gaps between them: hidden dependencies, informal power, rival assumptions and knowledge that never reaches the centre.
Access is part of the method.
Antony’s documentary work took him inside the emerging Donetsk People’s Republic, into conversations with Russian security forces and militants, and into families’ lives around a former Soviet nuclear test site.
He learned to build trust across sharp differences, understand people on their own terms and stay long enough for the rehearsed account to give way.
Inside a company, the same patience helps him understand Sales, Engineering and the regional office before deciding what their conflicting stories add up to.
A company we can’t name.
Simon commissioned Antony to conduct a sensitive, two-month inquiry inside a multinational. Antony travelled between locations, talked privately with people across the organisation and observed how it worked.
The client, the subject and the findings remain confidential.
“Antony proved himself unusually good at getting intelligent people to stop giving the corporate answer and tell the actual story. What impressed me even more is that he sees the pattern across all those stories and uses that to dig deeper.”
Commissioned the inquiry; now co-founder of Speculative Edge.
What you get.
- An account of what is happening beneath the formal strategy.
- The assumptions, interests and dependencies keeping it that way.
- A confidential report and discussion with the people commissioning the work.
- Options for what to change—and what would obstruct them.
Where it meets futures.
A risk can stay invisible because nobody has imagined it. It can also stay invisible because nobody can get it heard.
We investigate both. The inquiry can stand alone or shape the scenarios and choices that follow.
Commission the inquiry.
Bring the strategy, the organisation chart and the thing that doesn’t add up. We agree who we need to hear from, what access the work requires, how interviews will be handled and who receives the findings.
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Narrative for change
Where are we going—and why?
An honest account of change, for the people who have to live with it, fund it or choose it.
People need an account they can believe.
Staff want to know what changes for them. Customers want to know why it matters. Investors want to know where the business is going. Each needs a different explanation of the same decisions.
We work through those explanations with you. Where they contradict one another, we go back to the strategy.
What we make.
The central story
What is changing, why you are responding and what you have chosen to do.
The difficult answers
Who gains, who gives something up and what remains undecided.
The form it needs
Leadership briefings, internal conversations, public presentations, scripts or films.
Built into the work.
The narrative develops as choices are made. Antony brings documentary storytelling; Simon brings experience of getting change understood and supported inside institutions.
Commission it on its own or as part of the strategy work.
Stories built from the inside.
Antony directed After the Apocalypse and DIY Country, earning sustained access to people inside profound social and political change. He wrote and directed Balance of Power, the Energy Institute award-winning interactive film and policy game.
He knows how to find the human story in a complex system. Simon knows the decisions, alliances and constraints that the organisation has to live with. The narrative has to hold up to both.
“Antony is an incredibly talented, unusual and dedicated filmmaker and was instrumental in producing the most powerful piece in our Emmy winning VICE HBO series.”
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
A future by Antony Butts
Your country needs your gran.
An ageing population. A recruitment problem. A care bill. Watch three problems become one very tempting bargain.
Speculative fiction by Antony Butts. These campaign materials and the letter are fictional.
The familiar picture
An ageing population strains defence, pensions and care.
The reversal
What if the state offered to fund your old age in exchange for front-line service?
Robotics makes older recruits useful. Young people become too valuable to lose. Care bills and inheritance give families a reason to accept a bargain they once found unthinkable.
When age stops being the dividing line.
Suppose a major war creates dangerous jobs that still need people, but no longer demand youthful strength. Younger citizens are scarce; their work keeps civilian life going. Older citizens can serve. Who should bear the risk?
That question could turn mobilisation into a struggle over the bargain between generations. Care Home Troopers follows one disturbing answer. It depends on a crucial condition: enough roles must exist that older people can perform and affordable robots cannot fill.
01 / Make it desirable
Your army needs your bad habits.
Vigilance. Determination. Survival instinct. A recruitment campaign turns insults into military virtues.
02 / Make it pay
Leave them the house.
The appeal shifts from patriotism to the care bill. Service protects the family home. Refusal starts to look selfish.
The strategic risk sits between policies: a military staffing problem becomes a solution to a care-funding problem, paid for by people with fewer alternatives.
03 / Make it routine
Tick one box.
Colin is 76. He is eligible with adaptations. He can enlist, request a review, or decline and lose care funding and part of his pension.
The form does the work the posters began. The extraordinary bargain has become an administrative choice.
What would change this world?
Keep the military capability. Change the bargain around it.
Keep care independent of service.
Would recruitment still work if refusing left pensions and care untouched? What would the state have to offer instead?
Change who bears the danger.
Remote roles, civilian work or front-line deployment create different bargains. Who gets to decide which one counts as service?
Give each side a voice.
Let older recruits, families, defence and care providers argue their best case. Where does consent become pressure?
Discuss a commission.
Tell us the decision you face, what is changing and what your current view may be missing.
Executive workshops
Build a world. Bring it back to yours.
Find a possibility you cannot leave alone. Bring its world to life. Explore what it could mean for your organisation.
Three workshops. Start where you are.
01 / Find the possibility
Fall in love
with a future.
Wonderful, horrifying, strange or outrageous.
We teach you why fascination matters and how to find a possibility you cannot leave alone. Then we help you do the work to bring its world to life: research it, follow its consequences and connect it to yours.
Back to your world: what could this possibility open up, threaten or change?
Techniques for finding the spark.
Flip an assumption. Turn one thing into another. Start with an injustice, a desire or a premise for a film. We teach ways to find the idea that grips you—and how to use that fascination to keep working when the first route fails.
Inside the method02 / Future discovery
Design fiction.
Build the wider world that affects you.
Explore how a development could unfold through government, politics, other sectors and everyday life. We teach you to make the artefacts those worlds produce, turning an abstract possibility into a lived reality you can question.
Back to your world: how does your company respond? Which dilemmas can it no longer avoid?
Make the world feel lived in.
A government letter. An election leaflet. A product launch from another sector. An insurance policy. We help you make the artefacts and work out the institutions, interests and everyday lives behind them. Each one reveals another part of the world affecting your business.
03 / A specific future
The deep dive.
You have pinpointed a future. Now get inside it.
We help you build out the wider world around it. Through improvisational acting and dialogue, we construct a narrative and make that world feel lived in. Follow the consequences, the competing interests and the responses you had not considered.
Back to your world: where are you exposed, what choices do you have, and how might others answer?
Put people inside it.
Improvise the conversation between a customer and your company. Play the regulator, the competitor or the person your plan overlooks. Dialogue builds a narrative; the narrative exposes motives, conflicts and consequences. Follow how each response changes the world again.
In every workshop
This is a boot camp.
Simon and Antony are expert facilitators. Your team’s time and money are on the line. We will push you into uncomfortable places and challenge your thinking and assumptions. If an idea is woolly, we will be brutal with it. We want your best work.
We won’t stop at “the future”, because there isn’t one. We help you build out the tendrils of possible worlds and guide you towards the parts that matter to you.
From that world, back to yours.
Every workshop returns to your organisation. The possible worlds branch; we help you follow the consequences that matter, your core dilemmas and your courses of action.
- What does it reveal?
Find the exposure.
Which assumptions stop holding? What new needs, dependencies or sources of power appear?
- What could you do?
Face the dilemmas.
Explore the choices, who gains, who loses and what each response asks of you.
- What happens next?
Give others a move.
Follow how customers, competitors and governments might respond—and what that changes for you.
The techniques serve the question.
Flipping assumptions, design fiction, improvisation and wargames give us different ways to develop and challenge a world. We choose what will make your team think harder.
Hire us at any stage.
Hire us at any stage—or through the whole process, including the story you tell.
Five stages. We can join you at any one of them.
Simon has led innovation programmes at Cisco and Mastercard and advised heads of state. Antony has investigated multinationals from the inside, designed futures and wargames at Dstl, and taught futures to NATO.
01Business anthropology
Find the tribes. Question the assumptions.
What does your organisation believe about the future—and its place in it? We listen across the business, follow conflicting accounts and find the tribes inside it. See where you are getting things right, where you are going wrong and what the official picture leaves out.
Explore business anthropology02Futures workshops, ideation & scenarios
What could be coming your way?
Find a possibility you cannot leave alone. Discover a wider world through design fiction. Or dig into a specific future through improvisation and dialogue. We teach the techniques, challenge woolly thinking and bring the consequences back to your organisation.
Explore our workshops03Courses of action
What could you do—and what follows?
Start with a difficult future. Explore how different responses change your position, what each asks of you and the dilemmas it creates. Antony brings the futures thinking; Simon brings experience of corporate and institutional decisions. Together, we work through the implications.
Explore the choices04Implementation
Make the strategy happen.
Turn your futures strategy into work the organisation can carry through. Find the allies, confront the obstacles, establish who owns the decisions and build support for change. Simon leads, drawing on decades of implementation inside government and global companies.
Explore strategy & implementation05The narrative
One strategy. Stories people can believe.
Your staff, customers, investors and the public need different explanations of the same strategy. Those narratives must be authentic, coherent with one another and true to what you intend to do. Antony makes complex subjects human and understandable. Simon brings deep corporate knowledge.
Explore narrative workStart with the question you face. Talk to us
What does your team need to confront?
Bring an open question, an emerging possibility or a future you already need to understand. We will shape the workshop around it.
Inside the workshop · Fall in love with a future
Don’t start with the probable. Start with the fascinating.
Wonderful, horrifying, strange or outrageous. We teach you to find a possibility you cannot leave alone, bring its world to life and connect it to yours.
Fall in love. Then do the work.
Falling in love with an idea gives you a reason to fight for it. To keep working when the first route fails. To bring your imagination, knowledge, emotions and analytical thinking to bear on the same possibility.
You can fall in love with a terrifying future.
Think of The Terminator or The Purge. You can love the premise, want to explore its world and care fiercely about making the story work without wanting to live there.
That is the kind of love we mean. The fascination that keeps an idea alive in your mind after you have left your desk. If it leaves you cold, find another.
- 01 / Find the spark
What won’t leave you alone?
A desire, an injustice, a ridiculous business, a film you wish existed. Start with something that makes you want to find out more. The first idea can be rough.
Full Metal Jacket. With pensioners.
Care Home Troopers began with Antony’s anger about intergenerational inequality and the idea of older people sending the young to war. Reversing the roles suggested a satire he wanted to write.
Following that premise led into care costs, inheritance, recruitment, assistive technology and family obligation. An angry joke became a world with its own bargains and pressures.
Care Home Troopers - 02 / Bring it to life
What would have to happen?
Work backwards. Who wants this? Who could make it happen? What would need to change—in technology, economics, politics or ordinary life? Research those questions and let the answers alter the idea.
Be Geppetto. The idea is your Pinocchio.
You want this thing to come alive. That desire makes you try again when a detail will not work: read another paper, change the setting, find a different motive, imagine another person’s response.
You start noticing relevant things elsewhere. A conversation, a story or a technical development supplies a connection. You are giving the possibility sustained attention, and using more of what you know.
- 03 / Follow the world
What else becomes possible?
Follow the people, incentives and consequences. One development enables another; someone finds a use for it; someone else resists. Let the idea branch. The interesting discovery may be somewhere you did not intend to go.
Could the world’s greatest environmental hero be a monster?
The radioactive forest begins with an appalling conservation premise: make a forest’s resources unusable so nobody exploits them. Stay with the question of motive and a different issue appears—environmental protection used as coercion.
Who claims the right to protect a place? Who lives with the consequences? Under what political conditions might a monstrous bargain attract support?
The wider question can lead elsewhere: what happens when making territory unusable becomes a form of power?
Explore Negative Territorial PowerCan science create a new kind of scarcity?
Another starting point: an ordinary object with an extraordinary hidden history. Imagine new scientific techniques making previously unknowable origins verifiable. Could a grain in a watch carry a history worth more than a diamond?
The question leads from materials to authentication, status, branding and ownership. A technical advance might create a new category of luxury. It is a possibility to investigate, with the science still to establish.
- 04 / Investigate and challenge
Where does it hold up? Where does it break?
Look for enablers, constraints, emerging signals and evidence against the scenario. Ask other people to inhabit it and answer back. A story, artefact or game makes the consequences easier to examine.
Keep what survives scrutiny. Change what does not. Fascination sustains the enquiry; it does not settle the answer.
- 05 / Explore the choices
What would you do in this world?
Bring the scenario to the organisation’s decisions. What could you protect, build, change or stop? Take an adverse world as a starting point, vary two consequential choices and explore the resulting matrix. Then give everyone else a move.
RoboStore: one adverse scenario, four outcomes
Falling in love supplies the persistence. These techniques help you find the spark, develop the world and explore its consequences. Scanning, scenarios and wargaming bring other ways to examine it.
Eleven techniques for finding the spark.
01Flip the assumption.
Visitors watch the lions.
The lions hunt the visitors.
VR-controlled robot prey turns the zoo into a survival game. Visitors pay for the thrill; predators get enrichment. A new attraction creates a new argument.
Hunted02Swap something obvious.
A robot dog carries a gun.
A real dog carries a robot gun.
Change one element and the proposition changes. Then ask what it does to policing, responsibility and the distance between an officer and the use of force.
Gun Dogs03Turn one thing into another.
Plants need watering.
The garden wants your attention.
AI gives plants and fungi voices. An ecosystem becomes a pet, complete with arguments. Who sells the companionship, and whose advice is the owner hearing?
Companion Growers04Make the annoyance desirable.
Adverts get in the way.
The advert solves your problem.
A service knows what has broken, finds the part and checks it fits. Advertising becomes a useful butler. Trust becomes the scarce resource.
The Advertising Butler05Ask who else wants it.
Flying cars for the wealthy.
Flying wheelchairs.
Change the user and the world opens differently: mobility, tourism, access and the right to take risks. Who was missing from the original market?
06Follow the worst incentive.
Everyone needs shelter from extreme heat.
Survival is a subscription.
A guaranteed place in a cool room becomes a service. Then ask who can afford it, who controls access and how an essential refuge becomes a source of power.
Cool Centres07Make the extraordinary mundane.
Food printing is an expensive novelty.
Dinner comes from a cartridge.
Work backwards from an everyday appliance. Who buys it first? What gets cheaper? The machine may be affordable because the ingredients are locked to a subscription.
The Yum Machine08Start with a desire.
Parents want the right child.
Meet the adult before choosing the embryo.
An imagined fertility service lets parents interview a simulation of a future child. What happens when the real person refuses the life selected for them?
Interviewing Embryos09Match needs nobody puts together.
Refugees need safety. Employers need labour.
A floating workforce.
Ships connect workers to seasonal jobs while ports restrict their freedom. Follow how states, employers and workers adapt to the bargain—and who loses the ability to refuse.
10Stay with the taboo.
Make the forest worth more alive.
Make its timber unusable.
A contaminated forest is a monstrous conservation bargain. Stay with the provocation long enough to expose the coercion: who could impose it, and who would be made to live with the consequences?
11Borrow a business model.
A country maintains an army.
A country buys invasion insurance.
Defence Obligation Contracts turn a military into an insurer. What happens when both belligerents have the same provider—or too many wars arrive at once? AIG with tanks.
Defence Obligation ContractsThe mission is wider than the method.
Speculative Edge exists to explore consequential futures that organisations overlook. This workshop approach is one way into that territory. The wider work also needs evidence, comparison, judgement and a route to implementation.
Why you need the broad view and the edgesBring this thinking into the room.
Start by finding a future you cannot leave alone, discover a wider world through design fiction, or take a deep dive into a future you have already identified. Simon and Antony lead the room and push the thinking.
From a workshop to Planetary Skin.
Simon led the team emerging from a History of the Future workshop that developed Planetary Skin with Cisco and NASA. TIME named it one of its 50 Best Inventions of 2009.
The point of the room is what it makes possible outside it.
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
Working paper · Preview
The Desperation Machine
The most you’ll pay.
The least you’ll take.
What if the most profitable thing AI could learn about you was how little room you have to refuse?
Personalised prices could find your ceiling. Personalised pay could find your floor. Both could read the same constraints: children, care, debt, time. A good salary would offer little protection if you could neither walk away nor wait.
We call this option inequality. The deeper risk is that systems which profit from a lack of options could make those options harder to regain.
What would this mean for you?
Commission a private study of the exposure in your sector, the choices facing your organisation and the consequences of taking them. Or put your leadership team inside the scenario.
An original possibility · Cool Centres
Miss a payment, and the cool room won’t let you in.
More trees and more air conditioning.
The possibility.
Deadly humid heat hits cities whose grids can’t keep up. A Dhaka family pays every month for four places in a cooled shelter ten minutes from home. They’ve never used them.
What it asks.
- When does protection from heat become a subscription people cannot refuse?
- Who guarantees access when the power system itself is under strain?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · The Yum Machine
Free dinner. The cartridges cost a fortune.
Food printers that pipe your own ingredients into shapes.
The possibility.
The machine makes the meal. Whoever owns its feedstock owns the business.
What it asks.
- Who controls the ingredients when the kitchen becomes a platform?
- What does a household really own when dinner depends on a subscription?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · Weather Wars
Do as we say, or no rain.
Geoengineering as a shared climate response.
The possibility.
An intervention that improves one country’s weather can worsen another’s. Repairing the climate becomes a question of security, bargaining and coercion.
What it asks.
- Who may change the weather when the consequences cross borders?
- What happens when one region’s adaptation becomes another’s loss?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · The School That Hires You
Free school. Your teacher’s on commission.
AI tutors that personalise learning.
The possibility.
Employers subsidise the teaching because it finds and develops future talent. It works. Then you notice which interests it encourages, and which it quietly neglects.
What it asks.
- What does a school owe the student it is also training for work?
- Who can change direction once education and employment become one bargain?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · The Patent Apocalypse
She made medicine in her flat. They sent the bomb squad.
AI that speeds up invention.
The possibility.
Invention engines generate new drugs and materials faster than anyone can use them. It looks like abundance, until you ask who owns the inventions.
What it asks.
- Who benefits when generating inventions becomes cheap?
- What happens to innovation when navigating claims becomes harder than having an idea?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · Companion Growers
The basil isn’t speaking to the tomato. Whose side are you on?
A smart planter that tells you when to water.
The possibility.
AI and sensors give plants and fungi voices, and the garden becomes a household drama. When it asks you to favour one species, whose judgement are you hearing?
What it asks.
- Whose advice does a talking garden give?
- What happens when affection for an ecosystem becomes a sales channel?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · Hunted
The lions hunt the visitors.
VR safaris and bigger enclosures.
A stag do at the zoo.
Visitors put on VR headsets and control robot prey inside a predator enclosure. The lions hunt the visitors. Bored animals get something to chase; the stag party gets a story it will tell for years.
A strange reversal opens a serious question for zoos and experience businesses. Could an attraction offer more intense encounters while changing the animals’ daily lives for the better? Where would enrichment end and exploitation begin?
The wider world matters: animal-welfare expectations, visitor behaviour, insurance, operating costs and what happens when customers demand a more extreme experience.
The choices.
- What makes this enrichment for animals—and who decides?
- What would an attraction operator need to resolve before selling the experience?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · Gun Dogs
The dog goes in. The cop stays in the car.
Robot dogs that carry guns.
The possibility.
Real dogs still beat robots on stairs, rubble and fences, so the gun goes on a real dog. The officer picks the target and authorises the shot from the car.
What it asks.
- Who is responsible when human judgement, animal behaviour and a machine meet?
- How does a familiar animal change public acceptance of an unfamiliar use of force?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · The Advertising Butler
The adverts are the best bit now.
Adverts that interrupt the programme.
The possibility.
The service knows what just broke in your house, finds the part, checks it fits and sorts out the purchase. The advert feels like a visit from a knowledgeable butler.
What it asks.
- Whose interests does the helpful agent serve?
- What would make its recommendations trustworthy?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · Interviewing Embryos
Meet your child before deciding to have them.
Screening embryos for inherited conditions.
The possibility.
A fertility service offers parents a conversation with a simulation of the adult their child might become. Selection turns into an encounter with an apparent person.
What it asks.
- What happens when the child refuses the life their parents selected?
- What is the service actually promising it can know?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · Real-life Superheroes
Michigan just deputised Batman.
Exoskeletons that help factory workers.
The possibility.
Armour and augmentation go on sale. Some wealthy buyers don’t want them for work: they want to police their own neighbourhoods.
What it asks.
- Who gets the authority to intervene?
- What happens when a private capability becomes a public responsibility?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · Gamified Aid
Save a life. Climb the leaderboard.
Technology that makes donating more efficient.
The possibility.
Families needing help advertise themselves, and donors compete on impact scores. Humanitarian response becomes competitive participation.
What it asks.
- Whose priorities set the rules?
- What does the game reward—and what does it leave out?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility · First Chance to Eat
What’s coming back on the menu?
De-extinct mammoths in zoos and rewilding parks.
The possibility.
Everyone pictures the restored animal in a reserve. Who pictures the trophy hunt, the designer pet, or the restaurant selling the first mammoth ever eaten?
What it asks.
- Who gains bargaining power from a new food system?
- Which dependencies disappear, and which replace them?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.
An original possibility
A country buys invasion insurance.
What happens when defence becomes an insurance contract?
Invasion insurance.
A country buys a defence contract. The provider promises military protection if it is attacked. Pool enough countries and risks, and defence begins to look like insurance.
Then ask what happens when both belligerents have the same provider, several conflicts arrive together, or honouring a guarantee threatens the insurer’s survival. AIG with tanks.
What would you need to know?
- Who decides when the obligation has been triggered?
- What makes the promise credible when fulfilling it becomes ruinously expensive?
- How does buying protection change the buyer’s behaviour?
Tell us what you’re trying to figure out.
A subject, a technology, a brief, or something you can’t quite put your finger on yet. A few lines is enough.