On this, our 99th episode of ‘From What If to What Next’, we have the first episode in which both guests actually joined my physically in the studio! I was joined by Ruth Ben Tovim and Anne-Marie Culhane, both extraordinary practitioners of community arts and what they call ‘the Art of Invitation’. I have learned so much from both of these extraord…

You're in for a bit of a treat here. In today's episode things are a little bit different: you usual Producer is your host, you usual host is a guest, we've woven some beautiful sound recordings into our episode to make it a sensory experience for you. Our other guest is Andrew Skeoch, sound recordist and author of the excellent book, Deep Listenin…

Today's episode is a beauty. It brings together Dr. Lyla June Johnston, an Indigenous musician, scholar, and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages with Nick Romeo, author of 'The Alternative', to explore 'What if there was an alternative to capitalism after all?' They bring such contrasting yet compl…

Here in the UK, the Right to Roam has been pushed into the news headlines by the activities of Dartmoor landowner Alexander Darwall, who just announced that he is appealing the recent victory for campaigners who overturned the ban on wild camping that he brought in last year. His actions have triggered a beautifully colourful and well-supported cam…

Better what, I hear you ask? You're in for a treat as I introduce you to futurist and futures designer Monika Bielskyte. She is one of the world's boldest and most adventurous futures thinkers, so you are in for a treat as we dive deep into her concept of 'Protopian' thinking, and so much more. Prepare for a super workout for your imagination! Plea…

Season's greetings to you! Here is your special Christmas day episode, appropriately focusing on the theme of compassion. Our guests are Jared Seide and Dr Ann Seide, whose work on compassion is amazing. To find out more about Centre for Council, click here. You might also enjoy this film about their "Cops & Communities: Circling Up" program, this …

As you'll have spotted by now, we're never ones to shy away from asking a good big bold What If question. This week we are diving into the question of how different things would be if we were to rethink the scale on which we operate, and were to root ourselves more closely in nature's own boundaries. The bioregional movement was a big thing in the …

The British Ecological Society’s REED Ecological Network (REED standing for Racial and Ethnic Equality and Diversity) was formed due to the very low levels of people of colour represented in the sector, and their feeling that "it’s easy to feel alone when working in ecology, the environment and related fields like agriculture". My two guests this w…

Jonathan Rhodes and Joanna Grover recently wrote a great book called 'The Choice Point' and work together as Imagery Coaching. They work with a wide range of organisations and individuals, building their capacity to be imaginative in a multisensory way. Naturally, their tools and their insights are highly relevant to the themes of this podcast give…

On some of our 'decade' episodes (well, 50 and 80 anyway) we changed from our usual two guest format to an in-depth conversation with someone who represents one of the great practitioners of the radical imagination in our times. And so today, in keeping with that 'tradition', we mark Episode 90 with a one-to-one conversation with Aisha Shillingford…

This week I'm joined by Aimee Lewis Reau and LaUra Schmidt, authors of 'How to Live in a Chaotic Climate: 10 Steps to Reconnect with Ourselves, Our Communities, and Our Planet'. They are also co-founders of the beautifully named Good Grief Network. Aimee also DJs under the name eXis10shAL (I mention in the episode that I would spell it here as it w…

This is a wonderful conversation. It's a deep dive into a powerful reimagining of who our energy system serves, and what it might look like. My two guests are both people who have given this a lot of thoughts. Elaine McMillion Sheldon is an Academy Award-nominated, Peabody-winning, and two-time Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker. Her most recent fi…

Welcome to one of those episodes of From What If to What Next that really gets under your skin. We are going to step out of our everyday commonplace universe and enter the parallel world of fungi that lives all around us, and really creates the world we live in. It’s a pretty wild ride. And I have two amazing guests for you, who will hold our hands…

When it comes to work that celebrates the radical imagination, Jayna Brown's recent book Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds is one of the most fascinating that I've read recently. Jayna is professor in the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute, and for this episode she is joined by Kevin Quashie, who teache…

This week's episode is just delightful. Meet Leah Black, currently leading the development of the new Regenerative Futures Fund for Edinburgh, and Shasta Hanif Ali is a writer, poet and anti-racism campaigner who works on racial equity and racial justice at Corra Foundation. I have to say that Shasta's time travellers' reflections from 2030 were po…

As soon as I started reading 'The Seaweed Revolution' by Vincent Doumeizel, I knew we would have to do an episode of this podcast about seaweed! It is a mind-blowing book about the many different ways in which expanding our relationship with seaweed could be good for us, our brains, our ecosystems and our climate, a book that sent my 'What If' brai…

This is a rather special episode, our first recorded in front of an actual audience! Recorded live at the wonderful Timber Festival, this episode takes on a big question and dives deep. Our first guest, Lucy Neal had, the previous day, presented a performance which explored how the near future would be transformed by the introduction of a Rights of…

Never let it be said on this podcast that we shy away from the big questions! I loved this conversation so much, it was one of those conversations that really opens up some expansive thinking and some new ways of looking at what might be possible. My guests are Lisa Witter, co-founder and board member of Apolitical, and CEO and co-founder of the Ap…

This week we are exploring how we do things, rather than what we do. We are diving into the concept of 'healthy human cultures' and how to build them. What would it mean if, in the organisations and movements we're part of, we set out to create the best conditions for a shared culture in which we thrive? Luckily we have two great people to help us …

Today’s podcast was recorded live in Paris, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower. As part of the wonderful ChangeNOW festival in the Grand Palais Ephémère I had the pleasure of sitting down with Otto Sharmer in the ChangeNOW podcast booth for an in depth conversation and journey into the future. Otto is the creator of the Theory U model of change, and…

You’re in for a treat this week. I so enjoyed this conversation. In this episode I was joined by Laura Baldwin, British Olympic sailor, Transition and XR activist, and co-founder of Sport LOCAL for Life, and David Garrido, who is a sports broadcaster, initially on the BBC, and now on Sky, with a particular area of expertise in the crossover between…

The diversity of the natural world is declining at a rapid rate, and has been for many decades. Many people present that as being an inevitability, a trade-off to economic progress. But what if we could create a future in which we enabled the natural world to regenerate? What would that look like, and what would it do to our ability to imagine a di…

We're back, and boy oh boy are you in for a treat. Since Episode One there were two guests I most wanted to have on this podcast. The first, adrienne maree brown, I was fortunate enough to speak to in Episode Fifty. The second I am sharing with you today. This time there's just one guest, and it is the brilliant prison abolition activist Mariame Ka…

Recent research, entitled The Future of Consumption in an 1.5°C World, carried out by the University of Leeds, C40 Cities and Arup, powerfully shows that the world’s comfortably off need to do the most to reduce the world's carbon emissions and need to reduce the impacts of their consumption by two thirds by 2030. But this will only happen if it fe…

This was such a beautiful conversation to be part of, with two old friends, and a story that I play at least a small role in. In 2015, Transition Network, an organisation I had co-founded, undertook a transition of its own, from a pretty conventional management model to a non-hierarchical structure that distributed power, using Holocracy. We had to…

We're never one to shy away from the big questions, and to dive deep into the remarkable and far more delightful world that could yet be created if we do so. This week we are joined by two truly great guests who help us explore the question of what our economics system and thinking could look if we were to consciously and ambitiously decolonise it.…