Dreams and Disruptions

Overview

Dreams and Disruptions is a scenario-building card game that uses time horizons, drivers of change, leadership, and movements, as well as disruptors to create a stress-tested, anti-fragile vision of the future. The game can be played a number of ways but has a general structure of three parts, each one building on the previous one, and provides an increasing level of complexity to challenge the imagination and creativity of players.

The game incorporates inclusion and diversity of voices in emerging dreams of the future and overcoming/transcending disruptions. Values and ethics, ethnicity, cultural, and spiritual aspects are integrated into the game to arrive at holistic and anti-fragile scenarios.

The game was developed by the Center for Engaged Foresight.

The Game

The game Dreams and Disruptions has three dimensions:

Dreams. This dimension is about building scenarios. It utilizes time horizons, hybrid futures (preferred, weird, and worst scenarios), and drivers of change using NSPECT to create an alternative scenario.

Movements and Leaders. This dimension is about forging directions. It uses a list of leaders from diverse countries, backgrounds, races, and disciplines. It also includes a host of social and political movements that could steer a scenario into a certain direction.

Disruptions. This dimension is about overcoming stressors. This part uses man-made, natural, cyber, and existential disruptors applied to a scenario to stress-test it.

Embedded in the game are a number of foresight concepts such as time horizons, hybrid futures, drivers of change, leaders, movements, and different kinds of disruptors. However, one does not need to be a seasoned foresight practitioner to be able to play this game.

The game was originally conceptualized as a physical card game. However, pending the production of the card deck, the game is being used online through the card game development online platform Itinerary.