Cassie Robinson – Emerging Futures: Patterning the Third Horizon

Media Evolution

Cassie Robinson
Associate Director of Emerging Future at Joseph Rowntree Foundation

“There’s always something growing and declining at the same time. I am ending and beginning at the same time.”

From external events such as the pandemic to the hyper speed development of AI and tech to the increasingly urgent climate crisis discourses, how do we navigate ourselves in the midst of all these life-changing events? Are all changes – particularly the ones that liken to the ending of a cycle – inevitably bad? How can we adapt accordingly and create pathways to what’s to come?

Using an array of frameworks, Associate Director of Emerging Futures and founder of Stewarding Loss, Cassie Robinson is of the belief that endings can be done better.

“The systemic transition is considering it as making good compost – composting improves soil, it provides nutrients, it stimulates the ecosystem, it builds up.”

Robinson’s frameworks aimed at the UK public sector and organisations like the NHS. But during the Q&A aspects relating to private companies also surface..The idea of hospicing endings might seem alien or unnecessary in profit-driven systems. But these rituals are natural part of our culture - from the personal to the organizational to the societal – and here Robinson expands on the work of e.g. Vanessa Reid.