The Future, Backwards: Widening our Field of Vision to Align and Develop Better Interventions
Abstract
Environments where real-world interventions take place, are becoming more complex; interconnected, volatile, and uncertain. This means the number of factors that need to be accounted for in order for an intervention to work, is becoming overwhelming for top-down planning efforts. In such situations, networked planning teams must complement their expertise and enhance their reasoning processes. This creates an important rationale for Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE), to which innovative tools from “anthro-complexity” can be applied. The session introduces Future Backwards, a method that aims to create alignment and anticipatory capacity through shared understandings of an issue’s current state, as well as its potential futures, among stakeholders. It is a “side-casting” method, which capitalises on human cognition’s evolved tendencies to understand action possibilities via narratives. Including viewpoints of diverse people with lived experience in this way, holds the promise of helping intervention designer teams widen their field of vision – and ultimately, enable participants to plan their own context-sensitive interventions.
Recommended literature
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