The Playbook
From the book How Do You See the Dog?
A Playbook to Navigate AI with a Futures Literacy Approach. Seven frameworks, one compass, and a very good dog.
Chapter 1
The Moment We’re In
By the spring of 2024, most of the school leaders I worked with had held at least half a dozen meetings about AI. A handful had written policies. A few had hired vendors. Few had asked their students what AI experiences mattered to them.
Here is what changed for the leaders who started using Futures Literacy: they stopped trying to answer the AI question and started asking a better one. Not “what do we do about AI?” but “what kind of thinking does this moment actually require?”
What to Carry: Futures Literacy is a learnable capacity. The pace of AI compresses decades of change into years. The question is not whether to engage. It is what kind of thinking you bring to the engagement.
Chapter 2
How Do You See the Dog?
Five people were there. Five people saw the dog. None of them saw the same thing.
The Jogger — The dog was an obstacle. The leader who sees AI as a distraction from the real work.
The Child — The dog was pure delight. The leader who embraces every AI tool with joy.
The Artist — The dog was a subject. The leader already imagining what students might make with AI.
The Grandparent — The dog was a memory. The leader holding AI up against what learning used to be.
The Bylaw Officer — The dog was a problem. The leader whose first instinct is to catch and contain.
What to Carry: Every person in a school is one of the five characters. You need all five perspectives at the table. Curiosity and openness are strategic assets.
Chapter 3
Stances for Aspiring Futurists
On the Scent — Attuned Curiosity
Sniff out the odd detail, the overlooked behavior, the small anomaly that hints at change.
Tilt-to-Consider — Playful Humility
Approach new ideas with the intent to play. This mindset values flexibility and empathy.
Co-Create — Relational Openness
Engage with collaborators, invite feedback, and co-create narratives with empathy and joy.
What to Carry: These stances are the orientation before the frameworks. The good news: these habits are contagious.
Chapter 4
Think Like a Dog
Sniff the Territory — What bigger system is this problem part of?
Circle Around — Phrase the problem three different ways.
Get Ready to Play — What does this need me to play with?
Dream Time — What do you need a break from?
Return to the Human — How do humans care about this issue?
What to Carry: Think Like a Dog is the pre-thinking before the thinking. If you skip the sniff, you build a strategy for the wrong problem.
Chapter 5
The Muddy Paw Prints
BARK: four lenses for noticing what is changing
B
Behaviors
What are people actually doing differently?
A
Artifacts
What objects are being created?
R
Rhetoric
What language and metaphors are spreading?
K
Knowledge
What counts as evidence? Whose experience is excluded?
What to Carry: Signals are everywhere. BARK gives you a sorting system so you can move from noticing to interpreting.
Chapter 6
REFRAME
R — Recognize Signals
E — Examine Assumptions
F — Flip the Logic
R — Render a Scenario
A — Ask New Questions
M — Make Meaning
E — Explore Possibilities
At every step, relational intelligence is the thread that holds it together.
What to Carry: REFRAME works best when you don’t skip the relational steps. The framework is designed to be done with others.
Chapter 7
What the Dog Knows
The relational intelligence no tool can replicate
Attunement is a way of being in relationship that makes learning possible. It cannot be automated, outsourced, or optimized. The DOG strategy puts that capacity into practice:
D
Disrupt Patterns
“What does this disrupt about the way we’ve been learning together?”
O
Open to Emotion
“Which emotions do we want to be extra open to?”
G
Grounded in Community
“What is something we need to know for sure?”
What to Carry: The DOG strategy is a twenty-minute tool for evaluating any AI decision through a relational lens.
The dog is waiting.
These tools work best when you use them with others — in conversation, in workshops, and in community.