Future Design Inquiries. August 2025
Hello from ENSO, a future design company. We’re sharing the things that make us think, bring us joy or shift our perspective.
What we’re reflecting on
The goo of thinking: A humble ode to human reasoning
I think there’s something magical about the creative process that is just good to talk about: the messy process that melts everything into a formless, fertile goo. When we study something, or get inspired, or even just provoked by something we see or hear or read—there’s a moment where I can feel it starting to melt inside me. The verbal input, the visual input, the data, the emotions—it all begins to lose its original shape. Like it no longer matters where it came from or what it meant. It just liquefies. It becomes goo. The goo of thinking. That’s how I started to call it after our last offsite. It’s that place where everything mixes into this dense, shapeless substance. And I don’t try to make sense of it too quickly. I’ve learned not to. I don’t chase meaning. I close my eyes. I try to stop judging. I let the bias go. I let the templates go. The accents, the prior versions of myself, the frameworks I’ve used before—they all dissolve. I let the goo do what it needs to do. I let it be.
During the latest ENSO off-site, we had the chance to sit with Julia Butterfly Hill. She carries a kind of understanding of life that is so wide and so tender. Physical and abstract, spiritual and grounded. She shared with us the story of why her name is Butterfly. And it hit me. It hit all of us, I think. She described the transformation of a caterpillar. And how, in the cocoon—in the chrysalis—everything turns to liquid. Like, really. Every cell breaks down into this primal soup formed of imaginal cells–isn’t it the best name ever? And from that goo, that weird mix of imaginal cells, every single part of the butterfly is built. Every cell has a role. And that’s it—that’s the process. Liquefaction. Transformation. Emergence. In Portuguese we say casulo—the cocoon. And I love that word. I’ve been inside many casulos in my life. And usually, those moments came during a crisis. And now that I think about it, it’s funny how close the words crisis and chrysalis sound. Maybe it’s not a coincidence. Maybe every crisis is a chrysalis. Maybe it’s the exact same thing. A moment where we don’t know who we are becoming. Where our shape disappears. And we’re just goo. Confused. In between identities. But not lost—just becoming.
Kirk Souder said something during the offsite that stayed with me: “A crisis is what you experience when your identity is changing.” That’s it. The crisis isn’t the end. It’s not the breaking. It’s the liquefying. It’s the process. And as much as we want to resist it, to hold on to what we know, to keep our shape—we can’t. And maybe we shouldn’t. “What you resist persists,” right? So I want to celebrate the goo. I want to thank Julia for that image. I want to thank crisis, even, for being the weird doorway into becoming. I want to invite more of us—not just as individuals, but as organizations, as cultures, as society—to enter the casulo. To trust the process. To let the shapes fall apart. And to know that something new can emerge. The butterfly is beautiful. But so is the goo. (MS)
Shared missions over lonely visions
We’re living in an era of abundant information, endless creative potential, and individual empowerment. That sounds like progress, and in many ways, it is. People are generating, sharing, expressing more than ever before. Everyone has something brilliant to say, to do, to launch. But when each of us pursues a different vision, no matter how beautiful they are, we risk becoming noise, and ultimately stasis. We no longer lack ideas. We lack alignment.
Something critical is being lost: our capacity to have faith that we can build together. The fragmentation not only isolates us from each other, but it also erodes our belief that we can build together. This isn’t just about disconnection, it’s about disorientation. So, Future Design, besides bringing clarity in chaos, is also an extraordinary way to create convergence that ultimately unlocks building together. By helping people and organizations find clarity in complexity, and then align around a shared mission, we are offering a healing process against noise, division, and disorientation. Once people have a shared mission, they naturally become community. We believe the future will be built not by lone saviors or scattered brilliance, but by communities aligned around what they love, what they need, and what they want to build. (MS)
The magic in the spaces between
I recently learned about the concept of vā, a notion from some Pacific cultures that refers to the relational space between people, between communities, or between people and nature. It says that this space is itself dynamic and meaningful, and that its quality shapes the wellbeing of everything around it. As Christina Figueres says, “It’s in that relational space that wisdom, power and energy reside.” It makes me think about our team at ENSO – we all come from different backgrounds (professionally and personally) and I think it’s the vā – the quality of the space between us – that makes us so much more valuable as a group than we are as individuals. As the world’s challenges become greater, it’s clear we’ll need these kinds of renaissance teams to meet them and move us forward. The more we understand the power in the relational space – not as an empty void, but as the place where wisdom and magic live and grow – the more we can nurture it, and leverage it towards meaning and success. (HS)
You have more power than you think
At ENSO we spend a lot of time trying to distill what people really need and want at this unique moment in time. What we’ve learned is that people are yearning for more clarity and more agency. They’re asking ‘What would a better future look like and how can I be a part of building it?’ I can relate. When the world’s problems feel so enormous, it’s easy to feel small and powerless. Like nothing you do can really make a dent. And yet Yuval Noah Harari recently reminded me of a simple truth: “History is done by minorities.” Change is almost never the result of a single person, or a massive crowd. It’s driven by small, determined groups who see something others don’t and act before everyone else catches up. Sparked by Rosa Parks and led by a local group including MLK Jr., the Montgomery Bus Boycott ignited the Civil Rights Movement. A small team of engineers and physicists at Bell Labs invented the transistor, laying the groundwork for all modern computing. A tight-knit creative group at Pixar pioneered 3D animation and revolutionized storytelling in film. Research backs this up too – Harvard researcher Erica Chenoweth proved the 3.5% rule, which shows that almost all of the time, 3.5% of the population actively participating in protests ensures serious political change. When the world feels immovable, remember: it only takes a few to start the shift. (HS)
These nuggets are curated by ENSO leaders Hanna Siegel (HS), Sebastian Buck (SB) and Mauro Silva (MS).
7 things that made us think, gasp, share and laugh:
- Rest in Peace the incredible poet and activist Andrea Gibson who gave us, among other things, the ultimate bucket list.
- No one: _____
Writer John Higgs: “Actually, I can explain how the evolution of the Internet resembles the evolution of the Beatles” (and it’s quick, charming and enjoyable) - You might be able to predict the occurrence of big geopolitical events based on pizza delivery cadence at the Pentagon
- Some very bad advice
- Power naps can lead to ‘a-ha’ moments
- You can train yourself to be more curious
- In 2006, a group of high school students were given an assignment: write to their favorite authors and try to convince them to visit the school. Five chose to write Kurt Vonnegut, who was the only one to reply.
What we’re working on
ENSO is a small, senior team so that we can work on just a few initiatives at a time. This allows us to go deep on some of the biggest challenges/ opportunities. Recently, we’ve been working on a few main missions with our partners:
- We have to redesign everything. We get to redesign everything. At this inflection moment of old systems breaking, widespread dissatisfaction and the AI explosion, we are thinking about how to redesign our world for abundance.
- Changing the world of work: the labor market is the engine of prosperity, but ~80% of people are not engaged or thriving. We’re working to change the system.
- Defining how the world’s most dynamic ecosystem can be harnessed to fight climate change: Finding a way to turn the incredible research, education and innovation into a new future for the planet, and for us.
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Reach us at news@enso.co
See you next time.
ENSO • 115 W California Blvd #9101 Pasadena, CA 91105