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Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Volume 262! News on the New...
Good morning of becomings of the aspirational technical details,
This is a very special and unusual week for us in the newsletter world: we are excited to share some new developments in our larger ecosystem.
Over the years – really the last two decades: as experimental innovation consultants, wearing many differing hats – some appearing to position us far from the normal logics of innovation consultants, we have worked quite broadly and globally.
We’ve worked with organizations, groups and communities – facilitating everything from large-scale transformations to retreats, intensives, workshops, keynotes, classes, discussions and exercises. In all of these, we always wanted to connect and engage in richer, more expansive ways with pretty much everyone we met, which led us to evolve what we did: experimental forms of coaching, mentorship, and a practice of open, ongoing conversations with anyone who asks. Critical to all of this was the creative and co-evolving dance between developing experimental practices and the theorizing of novel concepts.
And it was out of this expansive community-focused development of our engagements and our intra-woven interest in developing new practices and concepts that this newsletter began more than five years ago.
The newsletter has been really transformative for us: it has become a place for us to experiment in a sustained and ongoing manner. It has allowed us to extend the conceptual research loop of our practice — a looping that has always involved a diversity of forms of experimental making, doing, probing, and living that folded into it understanding, challenging existing knowledges, putting them to work, and then co-evolving with our own conceptual innovations that were coming out of this ongoing work and then looping back into it: making-think as a singular experimental dynamic.
In all of this experimental activity over the last five years, the newsletter has allowed the conceptual research + community engagements to take on a life of its own.
The weekly and sustained nature of the newsletter has powerfully catalyzed how our practice could contribute directly and pragmatically to the larger collective movement for the ongoing transformations in how creativity and innovation are practiced – really a transformative movement in how the key questions of what it means to be actively alive are being approached. For us, this broader transformative movement has six key aspects:
Most importantly, all of this has led to a rich, sustained and ongoing dialog with so many of you. With each newsletter, we have received astonishing email responses – responses that have changed how we approached things and opened new avenues of experimentation that then have looped back into the newsletter.
The newsletter has also led to many, many video conversations, which have become their own ongoing conversations and friendships. And these have often evolved into discussions in other mediums – and occasionally, when we (or you) are traveling, into wonderful in-person meetings and collaborative projects.
Slowly, the newsletter has become something more and different from how it began. Very early on, they were more like bulletins noting things of interest we had come across during the week; these changed into one-off newsletters on key aspects of creativity, and now they have evolved into sustained expansive experiments that develop over a series of newsletters. And as we, and the newsletter, have grown and transformed, so has our readership – it has vastly expanded and become far more engaged.
Wonderfully, and perhaps most importantly, we – and you have been transformed by these practices – co-emerging with their emergent propensities. We have readers bringing the work of the newsletter into ecological projects, design processes, organizational innovation processes, facilitation, academic research, and their own newsletters. The newsletter has become something qualitatively distinct from how it began, and we are excited to continue to evolve with it.
It is a strange thing to pause and count what has emerged from a weekly practice – counting is not how we tend to sense things, and yet the numbers, when we finally looked at them, surprised even us.
Over the last five-plus years, across 261 volumes, we have written something on the order of 706,000 words together in this newsletter. If that number is hard to imagine – and it is – it comes to roughly nine books of three hundred pages each. Alongside these, and growing out of the newsletters, we have written 129 glossary entries – another 42,000 words, a book and a half – defining the new terms that emerged as a result (emptyfullness, being-of-a-world, feedforward) and re-illuminating older ones that might have been unfamiliar or too familiar (affordance, exaptation, propensity). We have shared over one hundred bibliography entries – the books that we've been in dialogue with, that informed our work – and, for the more seasonal among you, our summer and winter reading lists.
We realize our newsletter, Emerging Futures, is not a light read. Some of you have told us so – gently, and sometimes not so gently. We have been accused of being prolific, of being, at times, overwhelming. We plead guilty. But we would say this in our defense: none of this was ever meant to be consumed the way a thousand-word newsletter is consumed, skimmed between two meetings and forgotten by lunch. Every volume is written by two humans, slowly, in the thick of our own practices, and it asks something of you in return – time to read, time to absorb, time to experiment with it in your own field and see what emerges – a slower, richer practice. Some of you have made it a Friday ritual. Others tell us they set aside a particular hour, a particular chair, a walk. We think this is right. The newsletter lives in the slowness it argues for – we are going slow to go experimentally and transformatively, and allowing ourselves to be pulled by the meanders. That is the practice, and the practice does not compress.
In the dynamic, entangled thickets of our practices – moving across, between, and outside of academia, organizational consulting, facilitating, designing, and writing the newsletter – things have also been transforming. Part of what we realized in our consulting work is that there needs to be parallel spaces that allow a creative community of practice to meet and openly be of a slow creativity.
The radical nature of the shifts we have been experimenting with – relational, enactive, emergent, pluralist, pragmatist – cannot be held by a text, a workshop, or a talk alone, however impactful these might be. A concept read on a Friday is one thing; a concept tried experimentally on Tuesday, with a community, a practice, a client, a studio, a classroom, a garden, a team, a forest – and then brought back to others who are trying it in their own worlds – this is something qualitatively different. It is where a way of thinking becomes a rich way of doing, and where the doing feeds back and changes approaches.
Why? Because creativity, as we have been arguing for 261 volumes, is not in the head. It is in the relational enactive loops – the co-emergent dance of collective practices + environments + tools, + concepts. A newsletter can be an active node in the loop. It cannot be the loop. For that, we, in dialog with many of you, came to understand that an experimental place was necessary. A place where the many of you working with these practices could meet – in dialogue, in shared experiments, in the slow collaborative making of a different approach to creativity.
So, about eighteen months ago, we beta launched WorldMakers: a mostly online global community of practice where emergence, creativity, and change-making come alive alongside practitioners across five continents – the perennially curious, facilitators, educators, designers, consultants, researchers, artists, leaders, and all those searchers who knew that there must be genuinely other ways to engage creativity.
And here we have to confess to something else. Once we had a place for the work to live, the work grew – and it grew in ways we did not – and could not, fully anticipate, as emergent things tend to do.
Emerging Futures, the newsletter, sits at the center of WorldMakers. Every Friday, a special edition of the newsletter is published there – with an audio recording of the text, extended with topical context and deeper exploration, delivered as a podcast so it can be listened to on a commute, in the studio, while making dinner or intermittently on a long run in the rain. And, more importantly, every volume across the entire archive has its own discussion – a place where members post what they noticed, what they tried, what did not work, their questions – in an ecosystem where others in other fields on other continents work it through with them.
Out of this, two podcasts a week emerged. To date, 152 episodes:
Out of this, roughly forty creativity exercises a year emerged – each an embodied provocation, something concrete to take into your own practice and see what it does there.
And out of this, the live events. To date, we have hosted 59 live video events – topical discussions, interviews with figures working at the edges of emergence, short lectures that open into extended dialogue, hands-on workshops (some in the kitchen, others on the floor, and yet others out in the field), member-led events, and collaborative walks. Eleven more are scheduled for this fall season, beginning September 17, 2026. For those who cannot attend – and with members spread across so many time zones, someone is always unable to join – each event is recorded, transcribed, and recapped, and the discussion continues afterward on WorldMakers.
You can see that we have leaned into this – heavily, and with real joy. The newsletter has become the exaptive catalyst of something far larger than a newsletter.
Which brings us to the unusual part of this week's volume:
Emergent Futures Lab is the two of us, Jason and Iain. Everything above – the 706,000 words, the glossary, the bibliography, the podcasts, the exercises, the live events, the platform they live on – has been made by us, alongside the consulting, teaching, and design work that has funded it. We have reached the point where, for this to keep creatively and collaboratively evolving, it needs to sustain itself. And, equally importantly, to simply be able to evolve in these new collective directions, there have to be some changes that we are excited to share (Worldmakers and the Newsletter+). But first, we want to be transparent about what is and is not changing about the newsletter:
We realize that everyone arrives at this work with different levels of interest, time, and need. So there are two ways in, and the first is smaller than a cup of coffee.
If the live events and the weekly rhythm of WorldMakers are more than makes sense for you right now, Emerging Futures+ keeps your inquiry alive. It is the newsletter, made interactive: every Friday the long-form volume extends the experiment – working through what affordances, exaptation, enactive cognition, and worldmaking look like in specific practitioner contexts – and Emerging Futures+ gives you a place to engage with it, and with others engaging with it.
$60 a year, or $6 a month. Start with $1 for your first seven days. Cancel anytime.
And if what you want is the whole of it – the rich community of practice – the live events, the ongoing discussions and exercises, the complete library of every podcast and every event – then WorldMakers membership is the second way in. Members have everything in Emerging Futures+, and:
Live Events – approximately thirty-five a year. Topical discussions, interviews with key figures working at the edges of emergence, short lectures that open extended dialogue, hands-on workshops, member-initiated events, and walks. Each event is recorded, transcribed, and recapped for members to reference.
Two podcasts. The Deep Dive (weekly) works over the current newsletter's concepts at length – the how and why behind each volume, what is driving the approach, where it came from, and where it is going. The Spotlight (most weeks) riffs on what is emerging in WorldMakers or in our creative practices – occasionally featuring guest practitioners who use this work to shift how they facilitate, teach, lead, and make.
Audio newsletter. Audio versions of each newsletter, delivered as a podcast, enhanced with topical context and deeper exploration.
Exercises. A library of 40+ exercises, each an embodied provocation you can use to experiment with our approaches and take into your own practice.
Archives and library. The complete archive of newsletters – 260+ volumes, searchable, cross-referenced, organized by theme and series – along with the library of live events, both podcasts, and every exercise.
The complete annotated bibliography. Currently 102 books and growing, across complexity, emergence, worldmaking, and the fields with which these ideas are in dialogue. The reading list behind the book, our framework, our approaches, and our practices.
Ongoing dialogue. The community is where your work gets tested, and a creative life thrives. It is where you can post a question on Tuesday about something you tried with a client or in your studio and have four practitioners across three continents working it through with you by the end of the day. It is also where you can share your personal experiments, an interesting photo, or something from your daily routine as your everyday creative practices now weaves and breathes expansively with an extended community.
$597 a year, or $60 a month. Start with $1 for your first seven days. Cancel anytime.
Both trials are the same: a dollar for the first week, an opportunity to explore and engage with these practices and communities – see what we have been collectively and experimentally cooking up. If it is not for you, you can cancel anytime, and the newsletter keeps arriving free on Friday, as it always has.
We are always experimentally curious about the multiple and the emergent – and all of this, too, is an experiment. We do not know exactly what WorldMakers, or the newsletter, will become as more of you step into it and begin pulling its novel emergent potentialities in directions none of us can sense. That’s the point – creativity is alive.
As ever, have a beautiful experimental and engaged week!
Until next week - keep difference alive,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
+++
P.S.: The question we hear most often from newsletter subscribers is: How can I participate more deeply in this work?
We have two ways:
1. Emerging Futures+ is where the newsletter becomes alive: post your comments, questions, or thoughts alongside practitioners across five continents, connecting each volume to their own work. Plus the extended audio version for a commute, join 2 live events per year, and the full searchable 260+ volume newsletter archive.
🧨 Start with a $1 trial for 7-days… Then $6/month or $60/year. Cancel anytime.
2. WorldMakers is where the newsletter gets practiced. Facilitators, educators, consultants, and researchers experimenting with emergence and change-making. In dialogue, in shared experiments, in the collaborative making of a different approach to creativity. Members have access to everything in Emerging Futures+, plus thirty-five live events a year, two weekly podcasts, bi-weekly creativity exercises, and the complete annotated bibliography.
💥 Start with a $1 trial for 7-days… Then $60/month or $597/year. Cancel anytime.
