Foresight. Systems. Action.#
Nobody has the definitive map for what’s coming. This is awkward, because people keep asking Ariella for one. Her actual work is helping people find their bearings together and so the job of navigating belongs to everyone, rather than one expert standing at the front pretending to know.
She is an Honorary Professor in the School of Cybernetics at ANU, Professor of Foresight at Adelaide University, Co-Director of SA Futures Agency, and Program Lead for Foresight and Decisions at the One Basin Cooperative Research Centre. Over 20 years and across 26 countries, she has sat with governments, communities and organisations as they face the kind of tangled, fast-moving change that no amount of expertise can resolve by itself, and has helped them build the ongoing capacities to sense together, learn together, and act together as the world changes. She uses scenarios to keep several possible futures alive at once.
Through SA Futures Agency she is helping build the skills, communities and culture South Australia needs to meet whatever turns up. She thinks the future belongs to everyone, and she behaves as though she means it.
Out of hours she is a devoted hand-knitter, currently deep in an intarsia project called “Worn Memories,” a member of the 10F Consortium, and a contributor to the Futures Council of the National Security College. She maintains that knitting and foresight are the same skill: holding many threads at once and trusting an image will appear from the tangles.
Areas of Expertise: Foresight, Scenario Thinking, Critical Systems Thinking, Systemic Resilience, Participatory Action Research, Collective Sense-Making, Difficult Conversations, Social-Ecological Systems, Adaptive Capacity, Collaborative Action, Realistic Hope.