From What If to What Next

Imandeep Kaur, or Immy to her friends, is the Director and Co-Founder of Civic Square in Birmingham, their Director of Mission and Strategy. She is, to put it simply, one of the most inspiring people I have ever met, and to me she is one of the great guardians of the collective radical imagination.

Together with many people and partners, Civic Square are reimagining land stewardship, finance, governance, and deeply committing to ecological building design, bio-based material retrofit, and enabling a wider built environment transition. Their focus on how we build locally-rooted resilience to climate change by...

This month's episode is a conversation with producer Jordan Flaherty about the incredible new Afrofuturist film 'Space to Breathe', of which the promotional material states "Space to Breathe is an Afrofuturist science fiction hybrid documentary, framed with a future where there are no prisons or police.

The year is 2070 and Sojourner is a young genderqueer filmmaker who sets out to understand how abolition came to be, through history's archives on the movements of the early 21st Century". See more here. It was a joy to meet him and discuss the film in depth, and in this episode...

Kate Pickett was co-author of the seminal 'The Spirit Level', and she just published her new book 'The Good Society: and how we make it'.

'The Good Society' is an utterly brilliant and compelling vision of what a more equal future fundamentally rooted in care would look like. I can't recommend it highly enough. It draws on a wide array of empirical evidence to bring alive what such a future would be like. It was a huge honour to sit down with Kate to explore some of the themes in the book and where they overlap with...

The second (Episode 102) of my rejuvenated and back-in-your-life podcast, 'From What If to What Next' features my conversation with the fabulous Solitaire Townsend.

Following 2025's New York Climate Week online, the key thing that caught my attention was Solitaire standing up and boldly stating 'Fuck Doom'. She told Climate Week "Fuck the sad little "last generation" memes. Fuck climate being served up as clickbait.  Fuck the guilt and grief shoved down our throats.  Fuck waiting for the end of the world like it's a season finale".  In my chair many miles away, I whooped in support. I wan...

It's deeply exciting to be able to present your first new episode of 'From What If to What Next' in almost 2 years. As the months have gone past, I've had a sense that there was more still to do, more conversations to be had. From the research I did for 'How to Fall in Love with the Future' and since, I've come across so many amazing people with stories that you read need to hear, with important things to say at this moment in time.

The guest in our first return episode is the person I...

And here we are. Episode 100. What a journey! Thank you so much for being a part of it with me. I could not be more delighted by today's guest, who I have wanted on this podcast since its inception. It's the wonderful writer, educator and poet Walidah Imarisha, one of my great she-roes. I really hope you are going to love the conversation that we had. And this episode starts with a couple of BIG announcements which I won't spoil, I'll leave you to dive into them.

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 extraordinary women. The question we dive deep into is "What if invitations to participate in civic life were creative and caring?". You are going to love this one. The video Ruth mentions about the 'Town Anywhere' exercise is...

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 Listening to Nature. You can find his Listening Earth catalogue of nature soundscape albums here. This episode was such a joy to be part of, I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed...

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 complementary perspectives for a conversation that, at times, takes the breath away. I hope you love this episode. My deepest thanks to them, and to you for your support of this podcast, and Ben Addicott, as always, for his audio pixie dust sprinkling.

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 campaign, and growing political support. This week we bring together Nadia Shaikh and Lewis Winks, both of whom campaign for a right to roam, to explore what it could actually be like to have a right to roam, how it would impact...

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!

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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 one about LAPD officers talking about working with "council huddles" and a presentation Jared and Ann did for a cohort of Law Enforcement leaders on compassion training for police officers.  I really hope you love this episode, and thanks so much for y...

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 1990s and faded away a bit, but is now back with a bang, and we speak to two of its key proponents, Erika Zarate and Daniel Christian Wahl to find out more. How...

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 week, Bushra Schuitemaker and Reuben Fakoya-Brooks are both members, and in spite of working in quite different ecological sectors, are active founder members of this network. How did it start? What does it do? And how does it actively fire the imaginations of t...

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 given that, as bell hooks once put it, "what we cannot imagine cannot come into being". I hope you enjoy our conversation and that, at the end of it, your own imagination feels like it has had a good workout too! As always, thanks...

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, whose work I just love. She is Artistic Director at the fabulous Intelligent Mischief, whose work includes the fabulously-titled Secret Society of Black Utopians. She wrote a brilliant article recently in Yes! magazine which I highly recommend. What a delight and an honour to...

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 was too time-consuming to spell it out on the podcast). We had a fascinating discussion about their 10 Steps to Resilience and Empowerment in a Chaotic Climate model, about imagination, and about the inner skills we need for t...

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 film is the utterly brilliant 'King Coal' (see the trailer here).  Rosemary Harris, from Platform, was part of the creation of the recent 'Our Power' report, which you can read here. I hope you enjoy this discussion and the possibilities it will open up i...

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 on our deep dive into this fascinating world. Dr. Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian is the Curator of Mycology at the New York State Museum, and her forthcoming book has possibly the best...

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 possibly the most beautiful we've yet heard on 'From What If to What Next'.

You are in for such a treat, some real possibility-stretching reflections on how the world of philanthropy needs to adapt to the times we're in. I hope you love...

 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 teaches black cultural and literary studies and is a professor in the department of English at Brown University. Together they take us on a deep dive into our What If question for this week and into many areas of discussion.

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' brain racing. When we connected and planned this recording, Vincent suggested for our second guest Nancy Iraba, a marine scientist, seaweed entrepreneur, and founder of Healthy Seaweed Cafe in Tanzania. Together, let them transport you to a...

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 Nature Act, and our second guest Paul Powlesland, a lawyer specialising in the subject, had appeared in the play and has done a lot of work on what legislation designed to protect the rights of nature might...

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 Apolitical Foundation, and Graça Fonseca, former Portugese Minister for Culture and much more besides. My hope is that after listening to this conversation, you will be able to look at the deeply unloveable si...

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 unpick this one. Leila Hoballah is an organisation designer, a community builder, a facilitator and a coach, co-founder of makesense.org, one of the leaders of Boundless Roots, a collective...

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 spends much of his time teaching the model to groups around the world. The previous day he and I had both been speakers at the festival (you can see him here and me here). We...

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 sport and sustainability. How would it be if the world of sport became one of the key drivers for the great Transition that we so need to see? 

Stand by for the kind of passion, the n...

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 different future? This week I am joined by Rebecca Wrigley, Chief Executive of Rewilding Britain, and by Eduard Muller, an educator who was involved in the transformation of Costa Rica, the only country in the...

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 Kaba. I've admired her work, and her writing, for years now, and it was such a delight to spend 45 minutes in conversation with her. I'm not going to say anything more, other than that...

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 feels like a move towards something rather than being dragged away from something irreplaceable, if it feels thrilling, like something that spreads and becomes contagious. And, perhaps most importantly, if everyone can see that it is improving, rather than i...

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 learn how to do it, and were brilliantly supported by Université du Nous, who support and advise organisations on how to do this. 

For this episode of FWIWN I am joined by Sarah McAdam, one of the ke...

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. You're going to love this one.

My guests are Prof. Sunny Singh, writer, novelist, public intellectual, and a champion for decolonisation and inclusion across all aspects of society, and also Nonhlanhla Makuyana (t...

If you were one of those kids in school who stared out of the window most of the time, this episode is for you.

I'm joined by Kwesia X, aka City Girl in Nature (check out her many amazing videos), and by Ben Rawlence, author of three books, most recently The Treeline and founder and director of Black Mountains College.

It's a beautiful and thought-provoking conversation. Just how different could our education system be, and how would the imagination flourish if we made those changes? Classrooms? So last year.

Today's episode brings a big idea, like a really BIG idea, one that you may initially need to suspend disbelief in order to settle into but which, hopefully, by the end, you'll be fizzing with the possibilities of.

I'm joined by Della Duncan, Renegade Economist, host of the Upstream Podcast, a Right Livelihood Coach, founding member of the California Doughnut Economics Coalition, and so much more, and also by Jennifer Hinton, a systems researcher and activist in the field of sustainable economy who is currently a researcher at Lund University, in Sweden, and a senior research fellow...

This week I'm joined by two of the greatest practitioners of the imagination that I know. Dr. Penny A Hay is an artist, educator and researcher, Reader in Creative Teaching and Learning and Research Fellow Bath Spa University and Director of Research, House of Imagination. Signature projects include School Without Walls and Forest of Imagination. Ruth Sapsed is the Director of Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination (CCI), an arts and well-being charity that cultivates creative communities in Cambridgeshire and beyond. Their Artscapers report is essential reading for anyone interested in boosting the imaginations of young people, deeply inspiring.

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This episode of 'From What If to What Next' focuses on Utopianism, on our ability to imagine better futures. This is such an amazing conversation with two people who know more about Utopias than the rest of us.

Alex Zamalin's work first came to my attention through his book 'Black Utopia', which I hugely recommend, and which introduced me to so many great ideas and thinkers. And more recently, Gregory Claeys' book 'Utopianism for a Dying Planet: Life after Consumerism', was similarly impactful, opening many new doors in my mind. To bring them together for a conversation...

It's time for our Christmas special. We wanted to leave 2022 on a high, with a hugely inspirational story of imagination in action, of imagination going big, one that will leave your mind fizzing with possibility. Recently, Camden Council in London became the first UK local authority to offer Imagination Activist training to its staff. 32 people took part over 8 weeks in a course designed to expand their imaginations and to make them ambassadors for the imagination within the organisation. It was a huge success.

In this podcast we speak to Phoebe Tickell, of Moral Imaginations, who designed and...

The advertising industry is one of the key things driving the levels of consumption that are pushing us towards climate breakdown. But there are people within the advertising industry who are trying to push things in a different direction.

In this episode, we speak to Lisa Merrick-Lawless of Purpose Distruptors, and strategy director and writer Michael Hines, to enter into a future in which the advertising sector has stepped up as a key driver in the change we need to see. As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts... In the podcast a couple of things are...

This is not a podcast that shies away from the big and important What If questions, and today we're reaching out for one of the big ones of our time. Homelessness is one of scourges of our times, and is on the rise. But is it unavoidable and inevitable, or is it just the result of a series of decisions that could just as easily be made differently?

Our two amazing guests, Ana Rausch and Sam Tsemberis, are doing incredible work, which is already showing great results, using the 'Housing First' model. By the end of this...

You're in for such a treat. Today's episode is about beavers, and what the future would look like if we allowed them to reshape the world in the way they are so incredibly good at. During the summer I went to Cornwall and fell in love with beavers, which inspired this episode. My two guests are Chris Jones, whose farm I visited to see the beavers, and Eva Bishop, whose work with the Beaver Trust is about promoting their wider re-introduction. This is such a beautiful conversation, and I challenge you not to also fall in love with beavers...