Agonistic Futures
Workshop · Full day (6h) · 8–16 participants
From 35 000 kr
One issue. Two groups. By approaching the issue from opposed points of view we create a conflicting description of the scenario with multiple levels of consequences and knock-on effects. What you find in the overlap is what you couldn't have found any other way.
This suits you if…
- You want your team to have genuinely argued a future to thrash out both opportunities and threats before you commit to a position on it.
- You have a decision, a direction, or an emerging situation that your organisation agrees on in the room — and you want to know what that agreement is costing you in blind spots.
- You've been thinking about something for months without getting to the bottom of it. You want a structured way to exhaust the underlying conflicts without causing strife in the team.
What you take home
- Pre-session discussion about the issue or provocation you want to work on, as well as discussing the composition of the workshop group.
- Documented futures wheels from both positions — the full consequence maps, not a summary.
- Synthesis: consequences sorted by significance for your current context, as identified by the group on the day.
- A clear account of what each position could see that the other couldn't — the asymmetry is often the most actionable output.
What happens
Every session is built around a provocation — a specific, arguable statement about the future that reasonable people can take different positions on. You either arrive with one, or we find it together.
If you arrive with a provocation: the session goes straight into the agonistic mapping.
If you don't have one yet: the session opens with a facilitated conversation to identify the right provocation for your context — the thing with the most consequence and the most genuine uncertainty attached to it. This is part of the session, not homework.
Once the provocation is set, two groups are formed. Each argues from a different position — not a good side and a bad side, but two legitimate different perspectives on the same future. Each group builds a futures wheel with first order consequences independently. Once that's done the groups continue mapping knock-on effects on what both groups have produced, listing consequences three levels deep: what happens first, what that produces, what that produces in turn.
The most useful material is almost always in the territory where the two wheels overlap or collide — consequences that both positions identified, or consequences that only one position could see. That asymmetry is the finding.
The session closes with a synthesis step: sorting what emerged against what actually matters for your organisation's current priorities. The output is named, ordered, and tied to decisions rather than left as an abstract map.
Book a call
Book a free 30-minute call — no sales pitch, just figuring out if any of my formats fit your situation.
Contact me
An early version of this format was run as a public session on the future of personal wearables such as smart glasses, continuous health monitors, always-on devices. Two groups mapped consequences from opposing positions: one from the perspective of people who see wearables as useful tools, one from those who see them as a surveillance and social problem. By the third level of consequences, the communal mapping had arrived at the same territory — the emergence of "alternative spaces," zones defined by whether wearables were permitted or not — from completely different directions. Neither group had anticipated it. That convergence is what the format reliably finds.
