What We Do

Effective futuring is not a one-off project. Our consulting engagements offer on-going scouting for changes to your preferred scenarios over time. We also periodically huddle with you and your team(s) to stay aligned on organizational priorities and new thinking. This results in futures reassessments. We stick around to ascertain whether developments in real life conditions show some futures are actually happening. We produce new fictions together that immerse your organization in these adjusted scenarios. We produce new fictions together that immerse your organization in these adjusted scenarios. WHAT OUR WORK TOGETHER LOOKS LIKE We start engagements by exploring where your organization currently is through internal interviews combined with your prior research. What do you (think you) know and how do you know it? What do you think is and will be true but it’s just a hunch (so far)? Some of your people will also collect signals in your domain and about the Big Wide World. Next, we put your thinking and knowledge through the same processing that we do in the hypothetical situations in a Futures Literacy session. We arrive at new potential scenarios. We “play” with a few interesting ones – designing and making things that immerse your organization in that world, to help them feel what it might be like to inhabit. When it’s time to wrap up, your organization keeps all proprietary materials.

Futures Literacy is a mindset. It enhances imaginative capacities to foresee vivid implications that bolster sustainability and resilience. In Futures Literacy sessions your teams learn mind-expanding futuring methods and practices. We introduce ways to address niggling questions about where your purposeful efforts might lead in a changing complex world. We start with an intriguing hypothetical future situation. Then we collaboratively understand variables to arrive at potential scenarios. Then we get to the “playing” part – designing and making things that dwell in select scenarios that help the team feel what that world might be like. We conduct programs that immerse up to six participants in episodic thinking and artifact design from a half day up to 3 days. “Perhaps the most critical challenge is the need for futures literacy in the culture. Take politics and journalism, institutions that inherently deal with the future but that do not have a well-established habit of "rigorous imagining".” Stuart Candy, 2021, for the World Economic Forum

We’re scouts scanning the horizon. The explorers on the expedition. We’re investigators and translators, alchemists and visionaries. Soon, ethnofutures will be most of our work. Funding for this independent research will be tax-deductible.

We craft presentations that engage your audience and suit your event needs. We’re also very comfortable with guesting on podcasts. We also publish! Our most in-demand presentation is FUTURES 101. We explain what it’s all about with vivid, relatable examples and lots of audience interaction. Ask us to comment on futuring in various contexts, the state of futuring as a field, and possible futures in various domains. "This [talk] changed how I think about strategy." unprompted comment from a design studio consumer strategist at UN-17, 2024