UCL / FAN Club Workshop

11am – 2.30pm, Thursday, 5th July 2012

Jeremy Bentham Room, Wilkins Building

Wellbeing and the Future

Convenors: Peter Antonioni, UCL Management Science & Innovation

                                     Brian Bader, Foresight Analysts Network

                    Nicholas Maxwell,  UCL Science & Technology Studies

 As part of an initiative to peer into the role of well-being as part of the strategic environment, UCL is partnering with the Future Analysts Network to present a workshop on Well-being and the future.

 FAN club was initiated as a project within the department of Business Innovation and Skills (BERR as was) and now spun off into a network of policy makers and analysts looking into the deeper long term forecasting environment.

Introduction to the Workshop

Much has been made recently of using soft values, such as happiness, as measures of success, both positively and negatively. Whilst, for instance, Bhutan is lauded by some for using measures beyond Gross Domestic Product, others believe this approach futile or risky.

 We believe that there are many useful questions to ask about the ‘Well-being” agenda, in particular whether focussing on whether well-being can provide a new strategic inspiration for UK governance. University College London is investigating and is producing a future driven project due to report in Q4 2012 under the Grand Challenge of Human Wellbeing.

In this roundtable, we are inviting members of UCL’s academic to participate in considering wellbeing as a strategic variable. Using the future as a sandbox, we consider how elements of a wider wellbeing strategy might interact across narrowly defined ‘areas’.  Among the ideas we are open to consider are:

a.  How technologies may or may not help to engender the use of well-being indicators in wider policy.

b.  How our greater understandings of neurology and psychology changes our view of the construction of the person.

c.   Whether managing to wellbeing indicators is the same as promoting wellbeing.

d.  What any or all of the above mean in a short to medium term where budget restraint and subdued demand are the norm, and whether our experiences of protracted stagnation may change our attitudes to choice of wider indicators.

How the event is structured

Peter Antonioni and Nick Maxwell will begin with a brief provocation considering how we might consider and frame the long run view of well-being as a strategic variable.

We will be considering both how our idea of well-being might be constructed for strategic management, drawing on literature from many disciplines (and with the intention that this might provide openings for discussion of things we haven’t considered). We will do so given what we believe to be a short term environment that is resource constrained as well as a longer run environment that may not be so constrained.

 We will then break out into facilitated discussion, where different aspects of the provocation can be discussed. At the centre of these is the question of what else changes as we move from ‘purely economic’ (in inverted commas to reflect differing views of how economics captures the value of other indicators) to mixed or balanced well-being indicators.

 We are particularly interested in areas where there are key differences of opinion. As scenarists, the key question is not which view is correct, but what different views imply for the construction of different states of the world.

Programme

11.00 -11.15 Intro by Brian Brader (F.A.N.club) and Handover

11.15 -11.45  Provocation by Peter Antonioni and Nicholas Maxwell

11.45 -12.30 Group breakout: Groups will be given a set of materials and modeling questions to discuss. Key results are drivers and outcomes given, for instance, Futures Wheel methodology.

12.30 -13.00 Lunch and Networking

13.00 -13.30 Completion of groupings.

13.30 -14.00 Report Back

14.00-14.15  Close: What do our provocateurs and the audience think?

14.15-14.30 Hand-back to BB for close out and wash up.

Pre and post briefings

 The Pre-event briefing document will be completed before the event to allow circulation. It will summarize the state of the discussion, as we understand matters, identifying questions that we have asked and giving a précis of some of the directions we have taken. These will form the backbone of the presentation that we will give to the floor.

 We will produce a post-event write up summarizing the results of the day, and our considered reactions to them. These will filter into a second stage of engagement to round out some of the questions and gather a more diverse sample of opinion.