Prototyping Futures Through Play and Games
with Futures Facilitator Jeff Rogers
What if the future makes more sense when we treat it like a game?
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa Kay Solomon is joined by Jeffrey Rogers—futures facilitator, lifelong learner, and co-founder of PROJECTORY—to explore how play, prospection, and curiosity help people prepare for inevitable uncertainty. Jeff is an expert at designing experiences, workshops, and games that help leaders feel the future, not just think about it.
Together, Lisa and Jeff unpack why the future is “too important to leave to the futurists,” and how all of us can build their capacity to imagine, experiment, and act with more confidence.
Jeff shares stories from youth leadership trips, corporate workshops, and global facilitation work that reveal how people learn best when they’re invited to experiment, reflect, and play their way into new futures.
You’ll learn:
Why prospection, or an ability to imagine forward, is a superpower we’re all naturally equipped with
How games create low-stakes environments for exploring high-stakes ideas
How simple imaginative activities (like interviewing a child about their future) promote agency and perspective
Why designing your future self is just as important as designing future strategies
Jeff’s favorite books and games, so that YOU can put his great ideas into action
This episode will encourage you to stay open, curious, and willing to try things that might not work (yet). Jeff’s approach makes the future feel expansive, collaborative, and wonderfully human.
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Lisa Kay Solomon: I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today. Today I'm joined by futures facilitator Jeff Rogers. Jeff doesn't just talk about possibilities. He creates experiences that help people live into them, test them, and feel them. In this episode, Jeff and I talk about how games are crucial in navigating complexity and how to bridge the gap between our future selves and our present selves.
Jeff also shares some of his favorite futures resources, including his sci-fi book collection. If you're someone who doesn't only hope that things get better, but is ready to make them better, then let's dive in. Jeff Rogers, I'm so excited to welcome you to How We Future.
Jeff Rogers: Thank you so much. Thrilled to be here.
Lisa Kay Solomon: We've known each other now for many years, which is an absolute benefit to me and the work I've been doing since meeting with you. Every time we talk, though, whether we're working on an actual project together or we're just hanging out, I always leave feeling more energized about what's possible. There's probably a lot of folks listening to this that are meeting you for the first time. I'm curious, how would you introduce yourself? When you tell people, "This is what I do for a living," at a dinner party or hanging out, what do you say?
Jeff Rogers: That's usually an absolute disaster, a train wreck intro. I have been workshopping it for a long time, mostly by trying to help my parents understand what I was doing professionally. I often actually default to futures facilitator. I do think of myself as a facilitator, first and foremost, that I am there to support conversations, to design and facilitate experiences, and as much as possible, have those actually be in service of an exploration of futures. That's where I like to start, futures facilitator, and see how quizzical the look I get in response is, and then I'll go from there.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I love that. I appreciate that you've actually been actively workshopping it because it is-
Jeff Rogers: [laughs] It's been a long-term challenge.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Well, listen, I have almost everyone in my family going, "What exactly do you do? I know you do good stuff, but what exactly is it?" I think it is a challenge because it doesn't yet exist as a field. I think people know what a meeting is. They know what it's like to facilitate a meeting. This idea of facilitating futures is somewhat of a new concept. I've heard you say, "The future should not just be for the Futurists," and this idea of bringing this work to more people.
Jeff Rogers: Yes, too important, in fact, to be left to the vanishingly small population that self-identifies as futurists, which also tends to skew towards certain demographics. I think one of the things that you and I have really shared over the years, and both centered in our work, is trying to make those conversations and those explorations more accessible and feel like they are more open, more inclusive, more participatory, that everybody has something to offer, and that we can all learn from each other in doing this thing.
I also think one of the challenges of articulating exactly what it is that you or I do is that it takes different forms. I could tell people, "Oh, I'm a workshop designer," or "Sometimes I make games," but part of the beauty, I think, is that we're always looking for and discovering new ways of helping people explore and experience futures. It's open-ended by design. I think that's the way it ought to be.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I love that. I would say that's the beauty of the design part, which is meeting people where they are.
Jeff Rogers: I think one of the ways that I like to open Futures conversations and bring people in is by emphasizing the fact that they already have this capability, that superpower of prospection, that we can all imagine futures. We can do interesting things with them. We can even imagine multiple futures, not just one. We can stay up at night thinking about all the things that could go wrong. [chuckles] The word for that would just be anxiety.
[laughter]
The other word is this prospection, and being able to imagine forward and then recognizing not only that we have that capability, but that you can do cool things with it. If you can see a range of possible futures, you can start to ask yourself some questions, like "Which of these are favorable? Which ones would I like to make more probable? Are there things that I could do to increase the probability that one of these possible futures might actually be the one that we wind up with?" That's all really natural.
Actually being intentional about it is where people can discover some of their agency. I think that's a lot of ultimately what we're trying to do. Starting from the point of helping people recognize that they all have this capability. They probably just undervalue and underutilize, and underappreciate it.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I love that framing so much. It always reminds me of the Wizard of Oz lesson. It's in you all along. [laughs] I'm not sure we all have the red ruby slippers, maybe we do, a futures agency. It's in us. That last point about it being undervalued and underutilized. I think, Jeff, you come to this work from a very unique place, which is that you've worked and spent a lot of time with our youngest futurists, helping teach them how to grow and learn and develop themselves.
I know that was hugely formative for you and your approach. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your work with some early folks in experiential ways and how that's informed now the work that you're doing with executives and leadership teams across the world.
Jeff Rogers: Happy to. This is one of the fun things we get to do as creatures who can think forward and backward in time. I can look back on my very messy, nonlinear career path, and now I can project some coherence on it in retrospect. One of the things, if I had to stitch a red thread between the early years, [laughs] that I was feeling out what I could do in the world. I did do quite a bit of work in experiential learning and outdoor education, and youth leadership development.
I took kids on backpacking trips in the Sierra, I was a sailing camp instructor for a while. I have had a lot of different roles from that time, and I'm getting eventually into corporate learning and development and executive leadership, and the Futurist focus. In every stop along that career path, I think I was trying to help people do things together that they didn't necessarily feel like they could do on their own or that they couldn't do as well on their own. I love that collaborative aspect of it.
I also really like some of those early things that you emphasize in experiential education and youth leadership, getting people to step outside of their comfort zone, getting them to try new things, getting them to be open and okay with being wrong. When it comes to futures, we're going to be wrong about all kinds of things. We need to be. We would love to be able to precisely forecast everything, but that is an illusion. We'll never get there. What we might be able to do is be wrong in interesting ways and ways that actually give us a new perspective on choices and paths and contingencies.
Some of that same spirit of tapping curiosity and a passion for exploration and discovery, and a collaborative journey. An experience that we're going to build together. That I can pull pretty neatly from some of those early years. I would also add to that just in terms of how we engage people and particularly how I approach the craft of facilitation. I think a lot of the things that I do well now are things I learned working with kids. You know I'm very big on play as a modality for learning and exploration.
We all recognize that it works really great for the little animal. Then at some point, we say, "Oh, well, now that the animal's bigger, they need PowerPoint decks and white papers." Those are fine things, but there are other great ways of exploring and imagining. Often, I think that can and should involve play.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh, hallelujah. Totally agree.
Jeff Rogers: Very simple audience here.
Lisa Kay Solomon: You and I, one of the most fun things that we do when we work together is to think about how do we introduce this game or how do we get them to be more playful in a way that doesn't trigger this huge threat response? Because, as you said, somewhere along the way, you said, "Hey, as you've gotten bigger, let's get more serious." Even when we have research that suggests we learn better during play, we work better with others during play, but yet nobody says we have a really difficult problem to solve, let's go play a game. Okay, speaking games, you play a lot of great games.
I wonder if you want to share, maybe a game or two, because one of the things we want to do in How We Future is to make this very practical and tangible. Do you have a favorite game or two, Jeff, that you love to play with us older animals who may be a little bit more resistant to the idea of play?
Jeff Rogers: Yes. I'll start with one that is not actually a game, straight up, but it is an imaginative activity that I think is really powerful in opening people to conversations about futures and also their agency and shaping them. I think I've mentioned this to you before. I have some friends at an innovation and L&D agency called Stoked, and this is one of their favorites. You probably know some of these people through the design school at Stanford. They have connections there.
One of their favorites that I have enjoyed co-facilitating with them is something we'll do often at the beginning of a high-level leadership executive education program that's going to have a futuring component. We'll ask them as a preparatory piece to do a quick interview, talk with someone that is maybe a family member, someone close to them, ideally a young person, like if they have a child or a niece or a nephew, something like that, and ask them to describe the future that they imagine for themselves 10 years or 15 years down the line. Maybe even illustrate it.
That adds an extra layer of fun. They'll all do this. They'll have their little interview. They'll hear from this young person who, in some way, is connected to and meaningful to them. Then they'll come to the program, and they'll share that out. We'll also ask them about how they felt when they were hearing about this future. Where were they surprised? What resonated with them? What was their response as they were listening? Almost inevitably, these adults find, as they're hearing these visions of the future, that they start to ask themselves reflexively what their role in it is.
How could they make that vision a reality for this young person that they care about? What could they start to do today to make that future a little bit more likely, to bring it a little bit closer, to be a steward of this imagination, of this vision of a possible, and in this case, a preferred future that they in some way are already connected to and that they care about, that they're invested in because it matters to someone else. Already, they're starting to discover their agency.
They're starting to think about how they put the present in service of the possible future, how they connect their actions today toward a vision of tomorrow, and one that is probably going to play out and extend beyond their own lifetime. All of that winds up being really powerful just in orienting you to connecting your imagination of possibilities and maybe even seeing some possibilities that didn't occur to you immediately. That opens you to that wider range of possible futures, and then using them to get a new perspective on what you can do as a partner or as a parent, or as a friend today. I think that's a tremendously powerful, simple thing. I love it.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh, it sounds amazing. There's so many things embodied in that modality of, first of all, this idea that we have the power, as you said earlier, to prospect, to imagine a future that's a little bit further out than maybe we're comfortable with, and that intentional prompt to think about it and put some texture to it and, as you said, maybe even illustrate it, taps into other parts of our brain to make it more concrete. That design and simplicity gets at some interesting research I've read from Hershfield over at UCLA that talks about the fact that we tend to think of our future selves as strangers.
That there's something when we get too far out that feels so disconnected from where we recognize ourselves today that we don't even make that connection that it's the same person. If you think of your future self as a stranger, then in many ways, you're not going to have the same level of empathy that you might have. That just small, even fun exercise that may seem super simple and easy at the time, but actually gets into these deeper layers is such a powerful way to break some of those barriers.
Jeff Rogers: I agree 100% and I think that's a lot of why it works so well.
Lisa Kay Solomon: There's another game I've seen you play that I have to ask you about, which is to help leaders get more comfortable with emerging complexity. To do that in an incredibly experiential and immersive way that is very fun but also has quite the kicker of a punchline. I wonder if you could talk about that one.
Jeff Rogers: Absolutely. As I did with the previous interaction, I want to give a little bit of attribution and lineage to this. I know that this game has been floating around for a long time. In fact, one day I spent an afternoon trying to chase down the origins online. I was able to get back to the early aughts. I actually found a collection online of summer camp and youth leadership activities. This was in there, which was interesting. Now, I didn't learn it until probably about 10 years ago. I encountered it actually from a friend of yours. Robert Poynton was the first person to show me The Chair Game.
You can read about it online. I know Rob's written about it. Other people have written about it as well. It is a human systems dynamics game. The dynamics play out in ways that are really rich and actually allow for a range of possible frames. I like to talk about this game in that context of navigating uncertainty and complexity in an environment where you have limited information and limited influence. I'm sure when this is framed for youth leadership at a summer camp, it's probably a lot more about collaboration and communication and listening to and learning from others.
Understanding how you can be a good leader and also how you can be a good team member. The idea is that you have a group of participants in a pretty open game space with one chair per person. For reasons that will soon become apparent, I think it's good that the chairs don't roll. You have one chair per person, and the chairs are randomly distributed with enough room to walk between any of them safely. A few feet between each chair. You ask one person to stand up.
Now there is an empty chair. That person now becomes what I call the chair zombie. The chair zombie has one goal in mind, and they are looking for an open chair to sit down. Right now, it's the chair that they got up from. They have to walk. It's not the new school zombie where they're super fast. I like them to be lumbering. Also makes things a little bit safer for everybody involved. They're walking, and they are trying to occupy an open chair. Everybody else gets to work together.
They get to work on a team. They also have one goal, and it's to keep the chair zombie from getting into that open chair. They cannot restrain the zombie physically. They can't hold them back. They can't form a wall and block them. The way that they keep the zombie from getting the open chair is by occupying it. If anybody gets up to move to a chair, they have to go to a different one before they come back to the chair they started in. You can't get up and pop back down.
If you're up, you're up. They cannot move the chairs. That's the other rule. That's pretty much it. It's really simple. You present it to people, and they're like, "Oh, yes, sounds easy." This is the beauty. It sounds easy, but it's not because you have to do it with other people. You don't know exactly how the other people in the room are going to respond once the game starts. I like to run it with at least 20 people. I have played it with up to about 150. That gets pretty raucous.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Sounds dangerous.
Jeff Rogers: Yes, but usually, the first round goes for somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds. It's an absolute disaster. People are mystified by how difficult this thing turned out to be. I like to play several rounds, and after every round, ask people what happened. It gives them an opportunity to reflect. It gives them an opportunity to point fingers if that's the kind of crowd it is. It gives them an opportunity to ask questions for clarification. I played the game one time, and it was an intact corporate team. They played the first round in total silence. Only afterward, they said, "Hey, Jeff, are we allowed to talk to each other?"
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh, my gosh.
Jeff Rogers: Yes, which is a beautiful moment. Yes, because you ask, well, why would you think you couldn't? That actually surfaces an interesting learning that very often in an unfamiliar, uncertain environment, we try to draw on analogous experiences, things that seem like they might be valuable points of reference. You're like, "Oh, I've played something like this." Very often, we assume boundaries and limitations that may not exist. That's actually a thing you can take out into the real world.
How often are you in an unfamiliar environment, and you don't actually explore it as thoroughly as you could, or you don't ask for clarification? Instead, you might be assuming that certain options are on the table or off the table, that might not be the case. I would argue that that's often how people approach futures. We don't actually fully explore the limits and contours of our agency, and we just assume that some things are fixed or they can't be done.
Lisa Kay Solomon: It's fantastic. I've watched you play that game, but hearing you describe it in this way allows me to even understand its brilliance at a whole other level. It reminds me of a great quote, you can learn more from an hour of play than a year of conversation. I just think about all of the different levels of debrief and conversation you can have from that. As you were saying, anything from what are our cultural norms? How do we show up? This idea that we just assumed we couldn't speak.
What does that say about the culture? What does it say about collaboration and trust? What does it say about our own beliefs about being better at something than we might actually be? As you described it this way, I never really thought about it as a derivation of musical chairs, a game we played when we were all young. If you think about musical chairs, which is super fun and could get a little raucous, too, the cues involved are a little bit more linear and bounded than what you're describing in the chair zombie games.
There, it's like music cue, off, on. Usually, the chairs are in a row, not scattered. Sometimes we can think that because it feels a little familiar, we're going to be expert at it. Then going back to this wonderful point you made earlier about our natural abilities as humans to both reflect what happened in order to prospect what could happen, and to do that in a way that has an element of fun but also has a lot of seriousness behind it.
Jeff Rogers: Yes. This is part of why games are so great for learning and exploration in general. It creates an extremely low-stakes environment to explore concepts and ideas that can be very fraught. How we navigate complexity, how we show up as a leader and a learner when we have limited information, limited influence, and we can't necessarily just tell everybody what to do top down. It allows us to explore that kind of thing in a space where the outcome doesn't matter.
Actually, you learn faster and tend to make progress in a game like that by running quick cycles because I'll always say after the first round, well, we didn't have a strategy, we didn't have a plan. I say, okay, great, I'll give you a minute, and you can decide on what to do. You can coordinate. It's always interesting there, too, to see how long they'll debate what they should do. Someone inevitably will say, "Well, we should have one person telling everyone what to do," which, as you can imagine, is set up for failure.
It's interesting to see that sometimes they have this bias toward, well, we should debate the thing to death before we just try something new. You've given them an environment where the cost of running an experiment is basically zero. They have a really good opportunity to quickly validate or invalidate an approach and learn. That's another thing that people can take away is what are my biases? When the game starts, if I'm thinking musical chairs, what do you do in musical chairs?
Well, you keep moving. You all stand up and start moving, but this is a game where actually that's making it more complicated. It's a really beautifully designed interaction that I, now playing this for, I think, close to 10 years, I feel like I still see new things that are rich and transferable aside from the fact that it's just super fun.
Lisa Kay Solomon: It's great. It's super fun. I know you work with a lot of leaders, Jeff. Again, we're trying to make this practical for folks and fun. A, to open up their horizons, that there's lots of different ways to approach the future. There's no one right way. This isn't a show for a recipe or a single process. The future feels pretty serious right now. There's a lot happening that is, as my colleague Scott Dorley says, that is making our nervous systems nervous.
When you are working with a leader or a group that knows they want to bring people together to talk about the future and serious issues, how do you help them get comfortable that this lighter side, or perhaps a little bit more game-oriented or play-oriented approach, might actually be more effective? What are just some ways that exchange unfolds? Just to get people that are looking for new approaches, that are hoping that it might actually be fun, and that fun part doesn't necessarily take away from the seriousness. Just curious about tips you might have of trying to get more people more comfortable with this way of entering into conversations about the future.
Jeff Rogers: As I said earlier, I like often to start with something that feels relatable and very human, and not overburden things with jargon and terminology and heavy conceptual frameworks. I'll introduce the idea of prospection, but through that interaction, I talked about where it actually starts with you exploring a future that you are connected to and care about, and might reflexively assume a position of stewardship and care for. Then you can pretty easily connect that to, if you wanted to, within the organization that you may actually be enabling a set of futures for your teams, for your employees, for your stakeholders.
They may have things that they desire that they want, and you have an opportunity to understand those visions by starting those conversations and listening, and then reflecting on asking yourself, "Well, what can I do with these? What is my role? What is my responsibility?" I think having an entry point like that is at once accessible, but also I think pretty deeply resonant. People see that there is a creative practice here, but also it's getting to something serious. Same with that chair game.
I will frame it up as a game, and we will have fun, but as we go, I will push harder and harder on some of those things that I think will be valuable takeaways for a leader and for a learner, and for a team within an organization. For me, a lot of the craft of facilitation, as I try to practice it, is being able to toggle between these moments that feel exploratory, open-ended, freeing, creative, and then actually reflecting on those and asking, "Well, what do we take from that experience?"
This is actually something that I picked up from you, that the future is an area where we don't have any experts. There's not somebody in the room that we can turn to who's going to tell us everything we need to know about the future. Instead, we can try to design experiences that allow us to learn, that allow us to ask new questions that might be rich and valuable. Easing people into the creative practice of it, so then we can do some of the analytical reflection, synthesis, distillation. I think the two need to go hand in hand. If you have all of one and not the other, you're not maximizing the value of the experience.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Oh, my gosh. There's so much I love in that. What I hear you say is really having a lot of empathy for where the group is, where the team is, where the leader is at that moment, and trying to work with them to help them grow and shift and move enough that it really might open up, versus break them because you're pushing too fast. Jeff, I could talk to you forever, as you know, but I want to end with some final gifts, maybe to our listeners. You may recall that in the book I wrote about designing conversations called Moments of Impact, one of my favorite parts about that book is the starter kit we had at the back.
That was like, look, we wrote this book, but we also know you all are very busy people and probably won't have time to read all of it, so just go to the back, the starter kit. Where we say, hey, ask these questions, try these things, read these things. I want to end in that same spirit. What are some questions that people should be asking, particularly if they're interested in more expansive approaches to the future, whether in their personal lives or professional lives? Are there great questions maybe they should be asking themselves or their colleagues?
Jeff Rogers: I love this approach, by the way. Questions that I think are particularly rich or useful or fun, just asking yourself or your team, whatever group you're talking futures with, how our present actions or strategy, leadership, what have you, how that actually aligns with the futures that we want to enable. There's not a direct linear thing where we can say, "I do this today, and it creates this perfectly in accord vision of tomorrow five years down the line." Instead, it's always probabilistically, and it's thinking about what kinds of bets can we be making in the present that might increase the likelihood of a future?
What are some little things that we can nudge while also learning in the right direction so that we're refining our vision of the future or futures as we're working towards our preferred futures? I think that is a continuous reflective practice of just asking yourself, "Are these really aligned? Am I using today to serve the tomorrows that I want to see?"
Lisa Kay Solomon: I love that question. It really connects with something I've heard you say a lot around learning with the future and not having an antagonistic response to it. I love that question around alignment and that it's an ongoing question. It's not one and done. It's something you can keep doing.
Jeff Rogers: This is another thing that I'm always thinking about, and we've talked about a little bit, and also ties back to my early youth leadership days. I remember I had a couple of experiences where I had a group of teenagers for a few weeks. They were from all over the country. They didn't know each other. Some of them were away from home for the first time on a backpacking trip. At the beginning, I would remind them that they had perhaps a unique opportunity.
That they're away from their family, they're away from their friends, they're away from all the things that people already know or assume about them. They have an opportunity to think about who they would like to be. They can practice some new things. They might be able to treat this as an opportunity to explore who they would like to return as when they go back to their world. Maybe if you're a little more shy, this is a time where you play with a new behavior of being a little bit more outgoing.
I was always happy to talk with them about how they might do or be that thing. Very often, that one actually is by asking other people more questions. If you're someone who talks a lot, maybe this is a time where you try listening. That's another thing that I always try to emphasize when leaders and learners are thinking about the future, to remember that we're not just prototyping and designing futures. We're also prototyping and designing our future selves.
That you too are a prototype and you can reflect on who or how you would be if you were designing a character, and you dialed up this aspect of yourself plus 10 points, or I'm going to give myself a new superpower that I can try here in this situation. This is another place where gameplay is really great, but I really encourage prototyping your future self by picking up and exploring new practices today, playing with them.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Thinking about your choices through the lens of a prototype for yourself and your future self is something we can all try in that way.
Jeff Rogers: Yes, or I remember actually attending a web session that you hosted at Stanford a couple of years ago, where you had Leah Zaidi, another futurist that you and I are both fans of. She talked on that session about approaching early stages of your career and professional development as LARPing. You can try these different things and explore them, and experiment in them. I think we can do the same to a certain extent with some of our behaviors and our mindsets, and maybe even some of the things that we want to experiment with developing as practices that might actually prove adaptive as we're continuing to navigate this uncertain future.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Bringing back the LARPing. I love it. For those of you that are not into gaming jargon, LARPing stands for live action role play. I love that, though, because the format of that asks you to take on different personas, which, as you said, might be an accelerating move to get us to become more adaptable. Okay, Jeff, my last question for you, because I know you are a voracious learner. Suggestions on resources or places where people can read or listen opportunities for them to broaden their own horizons.
Jeff Rogers: Lisa Kay Solomon has a fantastic LinkedIn learning course, Leading as a Futurist, which I definitely recommend.
Lisa Kay Solomon: Okay, thank you very-- We're out of time. Thank you so much. Longest promo ever.
Jeff Rogers: That is a great starting point, I will say, and it is easily accessible. I would also say for people who are interested in futures facilitation piece, that How to Future?
Lisa Kay Solomon: Scott Smith.
Jeff Rogers: Scott Smith. That's a great toolkit. It's really accessible. That's another book that I go back to often. Gamestorming as well is one. If you commingle those books and you get a bunch of interesting futures ideas, and then some games and frames from Gamestorming, you're off to the races, you're ready to design workshops. The things I wanted to get into that are less likely to pop up elsewhere, I love books that get you to think about time and time scales.
One that I came across recently that I really enjoyed was called Timefulness by a geologist named Marcia Bjornerud. It is a beautiful book that gets you to think as a geologist and also, in a certain sense, think about time on geologic non-human scales. Then, of course, it does relate back to the human scale and the decisions we make and the systems we build and how those interact with and ultimately affect these larger geologic scales and processes. It's a beautiful thing.
I like stepping out of our human bias in that sense. Related to that, I'm a big sci-fi fan. I can't do this and not recommend some science fiction. One of my favorite sci-fi books that I think is under-read, perhaps, is a great sci-fi writer named Jeff VanderMeer. He's written a bunch of stuff that's awesome. One of my favorites of his is called Born. It is a dystopian future. It's a ripping story. It also has some non-human characters that you develop surprisingly deep, empathic connections to.
I was in tears at the end of that book. Part of what I thought was so remarkable about it is that you do find yourself relating to and [laughs] feeling deep empathy for this weird range of entities. The level of wizardry involved in telling a story like that is that weird and that affecting, I think is really awesome and is a great thing when we're thinking about futures and stewardship of futures. We have an opportunity to broaden the scope of our empathy and think about who and what we need to be taking care of and looking out for.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I can't wait to check it out. Wizardry and weird storytelling. First of all, my huge appreciation for you, Jeff, for being on this journey with me, not only of this new journey of this podcast, but journey in the futures life and in life more generally. Not only are you a fantastic futures facilitator, you are a phenomenal friend. I just want to say how much I appreciate your spirit of generosity. And your spirit of care is, in and of itself, adaptive, resilient, proactive stance towards the future. I have benefited from that greatly myself. I want to thank you for all of those things.
Jeff Rogers: Absolutely. Fully and warmly reciprocated. Lisa, you're the best. I very much look forward to seeing the futures that you shape through your work and hope to be involved as long as I can. Thank you again.
[music]
Lisa Kay Solomon: Thank you for listening to this episode of How We Future featuring Jeff Rogers. It was super fun to hear Jeff's approach to inviting more people to imagine futures through play and games. Chair zombie game, anyone? I hope you'll join me next time for more conversations on shaping the future optimistically, practically, and intentionally. I'm Lisa Kay Solomon, and I hope you have a great week.
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Links from the episode:
Gamestorming (practices by David Gray and Sunni Brown)
