Futuring IBEX: The Institute for Experiments with Business

In September 2026, Brave New Alps Fellow Kate Rich travelled to Istria, Croatia to work with colleagues from FoAM on the Institute of Experiments with Business (IBEX), a research, training and consultancy organisation, and a future home for the work she is doing with FRICTIONS. We are setting up IBEX as a speculative entity, a business support provider and a research centre for organising in conditions of uncertainty.

To celebrate the publication of the IBEX Business Plan as an Open Access document, we undertook a deeper layer of investigation, using a scenario-based method of futuring practised by FoAM. The futuring session ran over three days, organised around the question: What do we want to be doing in IBEX in two and twelve years? 

Futuring IBEX, with the Coaching by Numbers cards

We began by mapping the known, the presumed, the unknown and unknowable conditions around IBEX and its clients, manifesting a litany of issues (climate chaos, institutions cracking, overwhelm and overwork). From this gravelly start, we moved to materialise a set of projections of possible alternative futures in which other, more desirable technologies and priorities might take root – tools for conviality, nonscalability, diverse economies, grey sky thinking – in different combinations and to different extents. The process slipped swiftly out of the rational-seeming realm of business planning to draw in other organisational desires, embodied experiences and mythological dimensions.

Futuring IBEX: Critical Uncertainties. When we think about: What do we want to be doing in IBEX: what is important to pay attention to?

Applied to the question – What do we want to be doing in IBEX? – elements of alchemical, gravitational and animist business surfaced as central, alongside a commitment to working with dis/ability in its individual, collective and ecosystemic forms. We emerged with a set of vivid scenarios for IBEX, in which the drivers of business-as-usual had doubled down or opened up, in varied ways. These compact stories of business fiction (or “biz-fi”) can be used both as long-range sensors and as practical guides for action in the present.

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