The Overview of Legacy...

The consistency of collaboration….

What would happen if everyone started to think big at once, and started to align towards a collective envisioned future?

To me this is an interesting thought to ponder and one which was further piqued after learning more about Futures Literacy during NPC24, Minneapolis. Turns out I'm not the only one thinking about the future with Legacy in mind; in fact there were rooms with hundreds of planners contemplating Legacy Planning, learning about it and using there imagination to envision a collective envisioned future over timeless timelines. So what could happen if everyone, collectively started to think big? Let’s see where this this one takes us!

Astronauts talk about the Overview Effect. A select few have had that jaw dropping experience of making their way into orbit and seeing our pale, blue jewel in all its primitive and majestic glory, set amongst an ocean of darkness, stretching infinitely across the universal imagination. They talk about how fragile the planet looks, how precious the thin layer of atmosphere protecting us is, they come back crashing to Earth determined to change the way humanity views itself. They want us all to embrace the Overview Effect, that collective wisdom, only a few have felt and heard. Yet, does anything change?

What is changing though; through the efforts of some of the leading Legacy Masterplanners is the opportunity through reusability of rockets and a desire to create an off world industry of space tourism, in orbit manufacturing and Space Based Solar infrastructure, is humanities access to space and a rippling of consciousness through the next era of Overview, as more people access the vast beyond and share their snapshots of mental and visual amazement.

What’s any of this got to do with planning, I can hear loudly coming from the minds of some readers. Just hold that thought for me.

Well….this Overview Effect, is just simply readily available to all of us right this moment in time. It’s the act of thinking big again; it’s the ability to think outside the confines of the norm; the ability to project mental images into the foresight of one’s imagination. The art of manipulating your mind’s eye to cast a vision of reality into your hyperlocal space around you. We’re so used to being gravitationally locked to the ground, we’ve forgotten that our minds soar across the Universe with ease, experiencing all it’s wonders whilst sitting comfortably cruising at 66,000mph. Take the time to just stop and ponder that reality for one moment. Our minds have the ability to soar across the Universe, whilst we travel at unimaginable speeds, sitting comfortably in a world where we can all access abundance.

This is where we begin to question as we’ve done previously, why is it so hard to think big? Why should we think big? More to the point, why wouldn’t we? Why would we not want to wake up with the Overview Effect, a feeling which resides within all of us whilst eating our Weetabix or whilst we’re stuck in traffic or whilst we type an email or a report or whilst we’re collectively designing a Masterplan Vision…well we can…you did it for a second or a minute or 2 a few minutes ago, if you were reading with intent. You can do it again; consistently, once we understand these concepts are just mental alchemy, the world and its problems become smaller & the solutions become clearer to see. Your big idea, your reality and your purpose merge into a single pixel.

The next challenge we face, is how do we talk about these concepts? How we do shift consciousness on mass? I alluded to this in my previous blog that we’ve lost the art of communicating as Masterplanners – more pertinently I think we’ve lost the science of what we are talking about. We lost the ability to think big, through fear and in turn we lost the capacity to talk about big ideas, collectively and consistently.

As if by magick, the now of the renaissance was replaced by the now of modern day life. The Last Renaissance period on Earth was just words spoken in a certain manner. We had the time, or time had the words to speak in such a manner where certain individuals had the ability to comprehend complex concepts and society were debating concepts of complexity. In today’s society where the magick of information is available to us all by the wave of a wand and google – should we not collectively have no hindrance to on collectively thinking big again?

Let's imagine a scenario where a new Renaissance of Thought emerged, a scenario where the fear of thinking big, using our imagination to it's full capacity was the norm. A vision of where consistent dialogue about our big ideas was taking place. As planners is it our responsibility to facilitate the conditions for this to emerge? Is it a role we ever stop to consider about the why and how we are planning for the future in every aspect of the built environment. We have the ability to inspire, spark debate about the key fundamentals of how we live and operate within reality, but if we're approaching our why from a position of fear and thinking on the smallest of scales, we're only creating a reality which is narrow, limited and rooted in negativity.

In this modern era, ever more apparent in recent years, we need a new vision of the future, we need new messages, bigger, bolder ideas, innovative solutions and a consistent image of Overview. We can only do this by being bolder about our conversations and our visions of the future; where the frame of reference start from Overview; then root in the now within our hyperlocal space and backcast from timeless horizons. If we start to think and think big again, our imagination of the possibilities and solutions will emerge. Individually our imagination muscles will collectively strengthen the envisioned view of the future. A vision which is emerging with Foresight Planning and Exploratory Scenario Planning and the seeds being sown across the globe. It's this envisioned future that will start to emerge, that collectively we can all align towards. Surely our big ideas, individually similar on the collective whole, by now should be contributing to the sum of the greater parts?

Once we have that envisioned future, firmly in our imaginations, with an aligned narrative, framed and backcasted from a horizonless reference point in the future and within the now of our hyperlocal space; then we'll collectively be masterplanning our best future. Add positivity into the mix and then the sun might rise on our Overview Effect everyday...oh wait...it does, right?

So, we don't have to be an astronaut to see, feel and change our viewpoint. We're all astronauts, we've just forgotten what it means to be living on an O'Neill Cylinder, travelling at 66,000mph, masterplanning our reality all around us, on an endless journey through the vastness of the Universe!

The question next is what happens when we start planning on Universal scales....the next bastion of Strategic Planning.

Start seeding that mentality into the next generation of planners; then you'll find an aspirational, thought provoking, big idea generating and fearless generation of "Universalist Masterplanners"! Crikey, that's where this one took us...a collective noun for a new generation...less NPPF, more Universalism!

With that in mind, I wonder how planning with the Universe in mind would solve more pressing challenges such as the Global Housing Crisis?

Elysium perhaps? A question I've posed before...

"Who's planning system and version of reality do you use for that?"