Siddhi Ashar on Collective Intelligence for an Uncertain World

Very excited to announce the next guest on On Second Thought: Siddhi Ashar.

Siddhi Ashar is the Programme Co-Lead for RiskSense at Dark Matter Labs. Her practice sits at the intersection of participatory foresight, systems change and civic governance. Over the last five years, she has designed multi-stakeholder collaborations, wargames, futures labs and scenario processes across food systems, climate adaptation, women’s leadership and civil society, working with governments, philanthropies, businesses and grassroots organisations across South Asia, Europe and the US.

In this conversation, we get into:

• What futures practice actually looks like, beyond prediction and trend forecasting
• Why imagination can be a tool for systems change
• How power, ownership and governance shape the futures we are able to imagine
• What food systems can teach us about resilience, climate and collective agency
• How games, wargames and immersive scenarios help people navigate uncertainty and competing interests
• What it means to build anticipatory capacity before crises occur
• RiskSense and the idea of citizens as a source of risk intelligence
• How everyday, local knowledge can become part of civic infrastructure
• Why collective intelligence may be less about finding the right answer and more about our ability to sense, deliberate and act together
• What Siddhi has learned from working across cities, climate systems, philanthropy and communities about building resilience from the ground up

A conversation about imagination, participation, power and building collective intelligence for an uncertain world.

More from Siddhi’s work:

RiskSense: https://risk.darkmatterlabs.org/ Mumbai Risk Clinic: https://risk.darkmatterlabs.org/mumbai-risk-clinic Berlin Heat Risk Clinic: https://risk.darkmatterlabs.org/berlin-heat-risk-clinic Changing Currents: https://www.forumforthefuture.org/blog/changing-currents-exploring-energy-system-transformation-through-immersive-futures