Futuring IBEX

Climate, social, technological and political turmoil form a relentless backdrop to our organisational lives, yet the organisational forms, norms, stories and habits that we have often seem inadequate to navigate these changes. We are setting up IBEX as a speculative entity, a business support provider and a research centre for organising in conditions of uncertainty. IBEX's remit is to run experiments in ways of doing business that deliberately probe the boundaries of what is possible.

In parallel to the publication of the IBEX Business Plan as an Open Access document, we met to undertake a deeper layer of investigation, using a scenario-based method of futuring practised by FoAM. The futuring session ran over three days, organised around the question: What do we want to be doing in IBEX in two and twelve years? 

We began by mapping the known, the presumed, the unknown and unknowable conditions around IBEX and its clients, manifesting a litany of issues (climate chaos, institutions cracking, overwhelm and overwork). From this gravelly start, we moved to materialise a set of projections of possible alternative futures in which other, more desirable technologies and priorities might take root - tools for conviality, nonscalability, diverse economies, grey sky thinking - in different combinations and to different extents. The process slipped swiftly out of the rational-seeming realm of business planning to draw in other organisational desires, embodied experiences and mythological dimensions.

Applied to our question - What do we want to be doing in IBEX? - elements of alchemical, gravitational and animist business surfaced as central, alongside a commitment to working with dis/ability in its individual, collective and ecosystemic forms. We emerged with a set of vivid scenarios for IBEX, in which the drivers of business-as-usual had doubled-down or opened up, in varied ways. These business fictions (or "biz-fi") can be used both as long-range sensors and as practical guides for action in the present.