The issue
The quality of a preferred future depends on the quality of knowledge allowed into the room.
Technical expertise is essential, but cities are also shaped by lived experience, cultural memory, local relationships and knowledge of Country.
How this affects Australians and Queenslanders
For Australians, inclusive foresight can improve the legitimacy and delivery of major national housing, infrastructure and climate decisions.
For Queenslanders, communities and institutions can detect local effects early enough to influence choices rather than merely react to them.
The second-order cost of excluding knowledge is poorer implementation: overlooked impacts surface later as redesign, delay or resistance.
A preferred future would create a disciplined process in which different forms of knowledge challenge and strengthen one another.
This shifts the central question from:
Which experts should make the decision?
to:
Whose knowledge would most improve the decision—and what prevents it from influencing the choice early enough?
Knowledge in City-Making IFM
IFM Phase One – Unique Uplift: Create a knowledge system that welcomes evidence and experience into an ambitious preferred future.
IFM Phase Two – Universal Interest: Establish shared respect, transparency and trust in how knowledge is weighed.
IFM Phase Three – Uniting Possibilities: Unite technical expertise, First Nations knowledge, lived experience and cultural memory.
IFM Phase Four – Unaligned Factors: Realign engagement and decision timing so excluded knowledge can influence choices early.
IFM Phase Five – Unicity Synthesis: Synthesise diverse knowledge into traceable, accountable and adaptive decisions.
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Originally published on LinkedIn: Dr Colin Russo on LinkedIn