https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ca1rX9yKws
We create future scenarios
We are therefore both a strategic think tank and a creative studio. For the future cannot be measured, calculated or explored with probes. Knowledge and insight are necessary, but are not enough to bring the future to life. It also requires imagination. Only when the future becomes visible and tangible can we make decisions about it.
How we think about future
Step 1: Overview
Zooming out is essential to capture the societal force field and the technological trends that impact your challenges.
Often all attention is taken up by internal processes and problems. We can help you to move beyond that, and to relate the major shifts in the world to your context.
Step 2: Vision
The future is not something that has to happen to us. We can shape it, influence it and, to a certain extent, bend it to our will. But then we need to know what we want and why we want it.
That is why we make inspiring and urgent visions of the future. The more concrete the better, because then we will have something to talk about, and something to choose.
Step 3: Insight
Zooming out and looking ahead are the prerequisites for the final step: insight. Insight into how we need to change today in order to bring ourselves closer to a desired future.
What is the right strategy? What to encourage? What to prevent? What to invest in? We provoke the insights and deliver the scenarios that allow you make strategic choices today.
Impact Scenarios
Future scenarios that inform, confront and inspire
Knowledge of one’s own organization is not enough to create an inspiring vision, effective policy, or resilient strategy. This is why we provide our clients with a clear understanding of the changing world beyond.
During our immersive scenario workshops, we take you to a future that is relevant to you. A future that explores the societal and technological trends that matter to you. A future that informs, confronts, and inspires. That creates the intellectual and creative space in which we can ask all the right questions.
Supported by our partners we can then develop an inspiring vision and a resilient strategy together.
During our impact scenarios you will make an intellectual journey as well as a journey of the imagination. You are confronted with insightful intellectual frameworks, with relevant future case studies and with futuristic user journeys.
Bloom
Explores the impact of the digital revolution on the education system
Bloom is an impact scenario that we developed for the Dutch VO-Council and PO-Council. (These counsels represent most elementary- and secondary schools in the Netherlands.) The VO-Council and the PO-Council wanted to know what the Digital Revolution meant for the manner in which education will be provided in the future.
To investigate this broad question, we developed Bloom. Bloom takes them to a possible future that is as confronting as it is inspiring. During the workshop, they gain insight into the deeper promise that a digital society holds, but also what societal and educational challenges this poses.
The scenario is developed in such a manner that we easily can build upon it to explore emerging questions or themes.
More on bloomworkshop.nl
Token
Explores the impact of digitization on the financial sector
Token is an impact scenario that examines the impact of digital revolution on accountancy and the tax system. We developed this scenario in collaboration with The Up Company.
The scenario explores the historical relationships between social trust, financial architecture, and the emergence of a new information technology. It is a journey into the future of money.
More on tokenlabs.nl
Gaia
Explores the impact of light and darkness on the city
Gaia is an impact scenario that explores how urban lighting and safety can be nature-inclusive, healthy and magical in the future. Thus producing an urban nightscape that doesn’t emit harmful light pollution.
The future scenario explores how we can bring the starry sky, the largest natural landscape we know, back over the city.
Our trend briefings and strategic explorations help your organization understand emerging trends and technologies, make long-term strategic choices, and explore innovative directions.
We provide insight into the cultural trends and technological developments that shape your sector or market and offer possibilities on how your organization can position itself.
Trends and Strategy
Insights and foresights that help you make choices
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKlUn6L3nqc
Keynote Talks
Get your audience thinking
We are always happy to share our knowledge and our craftsmanship.
Our historic-futuristic frames, our scenarios and our future imaginary will provide your meeting with inspiration, depth and urgency.
In addition to our commissioned work, we are always looking for new creative ways to share our research with the public.
Public Projects
Always in search of new ideas and ways to share them
About us
Edwin Gardner and Christiaan Fruneaux
Edwin (left) was once trained as an architect at TU-Delft and Christiaan (right) was once trained as a historian at the University of Amsterdam.
In 2012 they started Studio Monnik because they were curious about the contours of a truly sustainable and equal society. How could such a future society work and feel? And in line with that question: how can you think about the future in a credible way at all?
After five years of research, they presented the World Tree model, a historical-futuristic lens with which they could develop credible future scenarios. Since then, they have been helping companies and governments to get a grip on the rapidly changing society.
The next step for them is to make their societal analyses, future scenarios and imaginations part of the public debate. In the hope that it can inspire long term thinking. That is why they started writing the weekly newsletter Atlas of the Long Now (in Dutch, for now) and why Everything will be alright, an illustrated guide to Amsterdam in 2091 will be published this year.
Do not hesitate to approach Edwin or Christiaan.
The World Tree Model
An intellectual framework that looks back 1000 years and 100 years into the future
The World Tree model is a historic-futuristic thinking frame with which we make our historical trend analyzes and future scenarios.
The World Tree model is an interpretation of Western modernity, what preceded this historical metaculture and what may follow it. With this conceptual toolkit we feel comfortable looking back a thousand years into the past and a hundred years in the future.
If you want to know more about the World Tree model, subscribe to our weekly newsletter in which we write about it regularly (at the moment only available in Dutch).
The Atlas of The Long Now
The newsletter for long-term thinkers
The Atlas of the Long Now is a weekly newsletter in which we explore societal trends and technological developments, new historical-futuristic frameworks, and credible future scenarios.
The newsletter is a weekly toolbox for future thinkers and future makers. Sign up and travel with us, from historical insights to future horizons.
Subscribe to our (Dutch) Newsletter on dechrononauten.nl
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