A futures thinking method
Menagerie of Postnormal Potentiality
Name and tell apart different kinds of surprising, high-impact futures so we can prepare for them.
Draft, to be confirmed by Dr. John.Not all surprises are the same shape. A black swan is the thing nobody saw coming. A black elephant is the thing everybody saw and nobody acted on. A black jellyfish is something familiar behaving very strangely once it reaches a certain scale. Naming which creature you are dealing with changes what you can do about it.
How it works
- Black swans: nobody saw it coming.
- Black elephants: everybody saw it, nobody acted.
- Black jellyfish: something familiar behaving strangely at scale.
You’ll try it on xenobots — machines built from living cells, which fit none of the old categories.
Module 2 · Bioconvergence and XenobotsA widely predicted, high-impact event that people choose to ignore. The evidence is already on the table.
Something familiar that scales up or cascades through feedback loops into something far stranger than expected.
A rare, surprising event outside our current models. You cannot predict it, only build the capacity to respond.
The three tomorrows run from the extended present on the left to unthought futures on the right. Sort each signal about bioconvergence into its creature.
Experts have warned for years that biotech regulation lags far behind the science, yet few rules change.
Cheap gene-editing kits spread from labs to hobbyists, and small experiments start to combine in unexpected ways.
Xenobots are found to self-replicate by gathering loose cells into copies of themselves.
Living-cell robots become a standard medical tool, and demand for bioengineered tissue snowballs across hospitals.
Public trust in science is falling, a trend surveyed and reported every year.
Method source: Ziauddin Sardar and John A. Sweeney, The Three Tomorrows of Postnormal Times, Futures (2016)