Collaborative Foresight

We witness a pressing need to look further into the horizon, beyond the next deadline. We see a longing to make time and space to reflect, discuss and find ways to work with the new, think longer term and reflect on the unknown. We sense an urge to do this together with others, look outside of our organisations and usual contexts and to build on different perspectives, in community. This is why our approach to strategic foresight is Collaborative Foresight.

Collaborative Foresight is an inclusive, community-based, open-source and evolving way to work with the future. It draws on and contributes to the fields of strategic foresight, futures thinking, futures studies, speculative design and participatory design. Given our ability to tap into a 180-strong group of member companies—representing a wide variety of industries, scale and sectors—our approach is unique in how it relies on organisational knowledge-sharing to power collective futures-making. In Collaborative Foresight, we create space and time to move through knowledge-sharing into collective imagination, and then translation of emergent futures into strategies for action.

We’re building a Collaborative Foresight portfolio of projects that rely on collective sense-making and exploring new futures methods and tools to help individuals and companies become agents for positive change. We build on Media Evolution’s work in community learning, and we make the products, policies, services, and strategies that we co-create openly available. Our work is equal parts futures literacy, open-source “executive education,” and emergent strategy development to address today’s challenges and uncover tomorrow’s opportunities.

“...teams with future-minded leadership are 18 percent higher in innovation, 18 percent higher in performance, and >15 percent more resilient.” - Better Up Research Report

Collaborative Foresight for Teams

A method for teams to gain actionable futures-based insights on their work. It's a four-step process to use Collaborative Foresight to uncover possible, desirable and unknown futures for a focus of their choice. During the half-day workshop, the participating team imagines and reflects on the impact of multiple developments, visions and uncertainties related to their work.

The process helps the team to reveal new perspectives and opportunities and to align on how to work with the future going forward. Furthermore it helps the team to create a shared language around the future and builds their competencies in foresight and futures thinking. The workshop results in a roadmap of actions for the team to take on key insights that emerge in the workshop.

Learn more about the process.

Collaborative Foresight Cycles

In our Collaborative Foresight cycles, we bring our member organisations, partners and the wider community together for a four-month exploration into the future of specific topics relevant for the community. In the course of a cycle, we imagine a spectrum of tomorrows and examine the ethical implications of what we’ve collectively imagined. Then from the vantage point of our co-created futures, we unpack the relationships, skills, tools and strategies needed to move towards desirable futures.

We’ve explored AI in green transitions, emerging technologies and creative sectors, design and data ethics and rethinking what it means to create “smart” cities, and how digital work might change with assistive intelligence technologies.

The future is plural! By bringing together this broad scope of experience-, employment-, and education-based expertise to bear on a range of topics and industries, each cycle results in new knowledge, relationships, tools, and potential collaborations.

There are different ways to participate in a Collaborative Foresight cycle:

• Community collaborator: Join our public workshops to contribute to compact explorations of social gathering around the topic at focus, as viewed through the lens of the future. As a community collaborator, you’ll gain new perspectives on the urgencies of the present and help scan for signals and trends.

• Core contributor: Dive deeply into the topic in focus as a member of a core group of changemakers. Each cycle, we ask 15-20 members of our community to share their time and perspective in a total of four full-day workshops on the topic, guided by our Collaborative Foresight facilitators. You’ll learn some new tools, gain skills and a supportive network to bring futures-thinking and strategic foresight into your work.

We share the insights and ideas from each Collaborative Foresight cycle in a final seminar and a final book. We summarize the futures we’ve co-created in community, offer up reflections and insights from core contributors, and invite the community to continue to discourse in our next cycles at our annual gathering, The Conference.