RE:START Program Structure

The arts and humanities are uniquely well-suited to explore uncharted territories, such as our current reality. An approach merging of business, design and the arts teaches participants to look beyond the crisis, offering a structured approach for reimagining their organizations to address what’s coming next.

Day 1: Re-Defining Society
The first day of the program explores present day societal challenges,and trends of disruptive change in relation to the social shifts underlying them. You will learn how to map and make sense of these changes by using the cone of possibility model, deductive and abductive reasoning, and scenario building to map what might be possible. 

Day 2: Re-Starting Business
The second day of the program focuses on the role of organizations and business in the near future. As the world changes rapidly around us, what changes are here to stay and which will return to a prior equilibrium? You will learn how to: dissect the future scenarios created during day one; make sense of what you have discovered; and design for change. 

Cone of Possibility
The 'cone of possibility' comes from Hermann Minkowski's work in the early 20th century and is one of the core ideas we will put to work in this course. Minkowski was a German mathematician who theorized the addition of time to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, positing four-dimensional “space-time”, now known as “Minkowski spacetime”. Minkowski spacetime illustrates that since a particle cannot move faster than the speed of light and cannot go back in time, all future positions that particle can take are found within a cone shaped space – the cone of possibility. 

We’ve adapted Minkowski’s idea into a 4-step model that allows us to map possibilities in the future and translate them into plausible scenarios for organizations (see image).