Reclaiming Hope for Alternative Futures

You’ve heard of Three Horizons, Two Loops, Icebergs and maybe even MLP, but how about the Petals? This new model provides a timely update to systems change work, recognising that “all these models, without fail, position the radical as outliers – trying to break in – rather than centre-ing them as dominant forces of change, reinforcing their radicalism as oddity.” Responding to the “system-level dismissal or sniggering at those suggesting an alternative,” the model’s creators “wanted to convey emerging and alternative futures practitioners less like oddities or outliers and more like a new beginning at the heart of the model,” recognising that “what we call emergence is not often new at all, but rather being resurfaced or finally noticed by the mainstream.” Maybe “we’ve just been looking in the wrong place, blinded by the light of capitalism”, maybe what we need to replace an economic system “which continues to dominate despite having such an overwhelming and obvious incompatibility with human and planetary survival (let alone social and racial justice)” is already blooming.