Create better futures with an understanding of your values

Hi, I'm Charlotte Kemp, Futures Alchemist. I'm a futurist keynote speaker and workshop leader, and I work with organizations to help them to prepare their teams to take the organizations into the future. In my pursuit of futures thinking and deeper understanding of the future we're trying to create, I've become aware of how incredibly important our personal values are in thinking about the future. So I took some time to explore my own and to see where my values reflected in my personal life and my professional life. So these are the 3 values that I work with when I'm doing futures work. The first one is agency. Agency is the capacity for an individual to take action on their own lives, to not be micromanaged, not to be restricted in terms of what they can or cannot do, to to really be able to explore their humanity, their creativity, their genius. Agency doesn't mean rebellion, doesn't mean chaos. Agency is an awareness of the responsibility to deal with the consequences of the actions we've taken. My second value is that of alchemy. I call myself a futures alchemist. Alchemy is the ancient proto-science of trying to take certain elements and turn them into something else. So we all know the story of trying to turn lead into gold, but it wasn't just that economic motivation. Alchemists were really trying to explore how to move, how to change, how to transmute something into something else. And for some of them, it was also a spiritual pursuit. In terms of alchemy, I like to think of it as a science, a bit of science, a bit of experimentation, a bit of mixing elements and catalyst together, maybe a tiny touch of magic, in order to create something new from something old. So when I work with organizations and we're, we're trying to craft a futures plan for a company, I'm the catalyst working with the elements that the company has, their expertise, their industry experience, their company history, all the knowledge and wisdom in that, in that organization. And we come together with a bit of science, the futures models that we have, a lot of experimentation and maybe a touch of magic. And we can create something new that that organisation can pursue, that they can express the future that they're looking for, that their employees, their stakeholders are looking for, that perhaps they can have an influence on their broader profession. And then my third value is transcendence. Transcendence means to go beyond. It's not just a striving for, for more, for, for acquisition. It's, it's really a deep seeking for what we are really capable of, of being as humans. What are we able to create, to innovate? How can we come and solve new problems? How can we take new information, solve old problems? What are we really capable of as a species? And I think we, we really can go beyond a lot of the limitations we've set for ourselves in the past. So futures thinking is helping us to explore how to transcend our limitations of the past or our worldviews in order to become something more, to create, to add value to our profession, to our industry. So I've expressed agency, alchemy, and transcendence in my own life, in the work that I do personally. But when I work with a company, I'm really helping a company to transcend their past, to transcend the limitations of their current marketplace, to create an alchemy that mixes the futures models that we have, the experience that I have, the insight and the wisdom that the company has, so that they can create new opportunities for their employees, for their staff, for their stakeholders, for their board members, to really explore the agency they have to create a future for themselves that is their future that they are wanting to live and to express. That is the work that I do as a futures alchemist.