Mount Vernon Ventures Spring 2024 Transformation R+D Report

IMAGINE THEN, ACT NOW

Futures Literacy for Learning Organizations

Mount Vernon Ventures is a Transformation R&D Company, an integral part of The Mount Vernon School Organization, based in Atlanta, Georgia. Ventures has a team of industry-recognized experts and practitioners partnering with educators and leaders worldwide to strengthen brand identity, deepen organizational innovation, scale community impact, and build a transformative curriculum.

Mount Vernon Ventures publishes a quarterly Transformation R&D Report, analyzing impactful topics in education for leaders and professionals navigating a complex world. Exploring the drivers, signals, and trends affecting the education sector, we serve schools by conducting extensive research, synthesizing ideas, identifying their implications, amplifying their potential, and providing recommendations for any school to consider.

Lead Writer & Researcher: Jared Colley

Editor: Ann Marsh Rutledge

Creative Direction: Kelsey Mruk

Layout Design & Typesetting: Sabrina Hampton

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First published in 2024 by Mount Vernon Ventures

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IMAGINE THEN, ACT NOW

Futures Literacy for Learning Organizations

Lead Writer & Researcher: Jared Colley

INTRODUCTION

We live in unprecedented times with increasingly complex trends driving change, transformation, and even decline in our societies and schools and/ or collapse of our environment. It is no surprise that three out of the five top challenges identified by current Heads of Schools are (1) Responding to conflict in and about independent schools, (2) Caring for students and staff during stressful times, and (3) Ensuring the school’s sustainability 1 What school leaders need right now is a robust form of “futures literacy” or “a universally accessible skill that builds on the innate human capacity to imagine the future’ in order to help people better understand the role of the future in what they see and do.”2

Futures studies expert, James Dator, envisions four general ways we can make sense of future trajectories as we take on top challenges like those mentioned in NAIS’s recent study:

1. A Continuation Future where business as usual and the status quo for the most part stays the same.

2. A Limits and Discipline Future where behaviors must adapt to internal and environmental limits.

3. A Decline and Collapse Future where system degradation or failure emerges and is resolved and/or exacerbated

4. A Transformation Future where new technologies, businesses, or behaviors change the game3

In reality, school leaders face challenges and opportunities that could involve any of these four paths.

It is our goal to provide insights, tools, and frameworks that can help organizational leaders seize the opportunities for transformation while avoiding the risks of collapse or getting stuck in the same old status quo. We know how challenging that can be because, “In reality, the speed with which businesses and organizations are forced to confront future questions requires an agility more akin to rapid software development or minimum product design. There’s seldom time for a six-month exploration of any topic, with multiple stakeholder meetings and expert soundings. A multi-day sprint is the more likely use case for the approaches defined here.”4

To gain the agility necessary to respond successfully to the top challenges facing schools we need a new approach, beyond the traditional forecasting practices, that helps us optimize the best strategic position. We need an approach that understands that there are multiple probable, plausible, and possible futures. The way we strategically position ourselves in the face of these futures can ensure that we influence matters toward a more preferable future, one of regenerative transformation.

Two recent stories illustrate why it’s necessary to think of futures in terms of multiple probable and plausible scenarios. The first story takes place in June of 2020 when all of us were blindsided by a plausible future that very few of us saw coming: the COVID-19 Global Pandemic. Leaders from The

Mount Vernon School were asked not to design one virtual plan and one in-person plan for reuniting our school community for the 2020-2021 school year. Instead, the Head of School smartly demanded that leaders design eight to ten plausible scenarios, each requiring a different schedule and return to campus plan, ranging from virtual to hybrid scenarios to full in-person schedule prototypes. Leaders knew that some of these scenarios would never happen. Some may see this as a waste of time. However, the investment in dreaming up so many probable and plausible scenarios, allowed Mount Vernon to successfully reunite the community in August 2020, and in an agile way which kept the preferable future at the forefront – namely to keep the doors open for the 2020-2021 school year. This looked different as circumstances rapidly evolved and shifted, thereby necessitating the deployment of more than one scenario strategy.

The second story that comes to mind took place around January of 2023. OpenAI recently released its latest Large Language Model, ChatGPT-3, and

teachers were rightfully anxious, even panicked in some instances. Teachers all over the world asked “What is our policy when it comes to AI in the classroom?” Teachers were demanding for their leaders to forecast the future of AI developments to select the most optimal policy which could mitigate any and all challenges presented by this quickly developing, new technology. That would have been a losing strategy. Instead, The Mount Vernon School asked teachers to imagine probable and plausible scenarios, which were simplified into three situations:

1. The excited, early adopter of artificial intelligence who wants to put AI to use right away with their students.

2. The worried skeptic of artificial intelligence who is inclined to ban the technology altogether.

3. The suspicious teacher who suspects that AI has been used in a way that compromises academic integrity.

TO GAIN THE AGILITY NECESSARY TO RESPOND SUCCESSFULLY TO THE TOP CHALLENGES FACING SCHOOLS WE NEED A NEW APPROACH, BEYOND THE TRADITIONAL FORECASTING PRACTICES, THAT HELPS US OPTIMIZE THE BEST STRATEGIC POSITION.

What we discovered at Mount Vernon was that we didn’t need a policy as much as a strategic position that was ready to address any of these scenarios. “Futuring,” writes Scott Smith, “is about understanding the landscape of potential futures in such a way as to guide better decision making in the present.”5

To address some of the top challenges Heads of Schools are facing we need what Jay Ogilvy calls a scenaric stance : “a state of constructively maintaining multiple states of possibility in mind at the same time – considering, processing, evaluating, and being ready”6 This is an integral part of the kind of needed “futures literacy” mentioned earlier. Futures Foresight expert, Nikolas Badminton, speaks about leaders adopting a systems perception , which “helps to see the interconnectedness between human and natural systems as well as complex consequences of decisions.” 7 Scenarios-based planning specifically serves as a framework for adopting this kind of heightened perception, an approach this report seeks to define, explore, and identify both implications and next steps for schools and other organizations.

Too many managers, when faced with overwhelming complexity, “aren’t goal-seeking, but ‘ills-avoiding’ – aiming constantly at strategies for avoiding pain, harm, or constraint…”8 A scenarios-based planning approach to futures foresight practice empowers managers and leaders to move from maintaining the status quo when faced with probable and plausible challenges to being able to see the opportunities for transformation as well. “We do have the capability to effect dramatic change,” writes Badminton, “but we’re failing because we’ve largely allowed our most critical tool to languish –human imagination.”9 Yet, to bring it back to one of

the opportunities before us, AI researcher Melanie Mitchell makes plain that one thing that separates us from robots is “being able to use your mental models to imagine different possible futures.”10

This research is meant to do just that: to evolve and grow our mental models such that we see not dystopian or utopian futures but protopian opportunities, which are preferable “state[s] that [are] better today than yesterday, although it may be only a little better…” Protopias are “a continuous dialog,” writes Badminton, “more a verb than a noun, a process rather than a destination, never finite, always iterative, meant to be questioned, adjusted, and expanded…”11

And a scenarios-based approach to futures foresight work provides just the right mental model for that kind of agile, iterative work that our complex futures will continue to demand of us as organizational leaders and visionaries.

The definitions, identified trends and implications, and the next steps we provide are intended to equip and empower, not just leaders, but diverse teams of engaged educators to develop together a “futures literacy” that prepares all of us for the inevitable uncertainties that define our times. That way we can work collectively to ensure that our unknown futures prove to be preferable ones, all because we are strategically positioned to make the most out of any and all of the inevitable challenges and opportunities that lie before us.

How might we as schools equip all learners to use this work to design a better planetary existence in our complex, more-than-human world?12

FOUR LEVELS OF FUTURING

As leaders and stewards of schools during complex times, we need to prepare to engage in all levels of futuring work.

DEFINITIONS

For the purpose of this report, we have narrowed the focus of futures thinking and “futures literacy” as it relates to scenarios-based futures foresight practice which can be used to help organizations make better decisions today and to shape the future they want for their organization. Identifying and defining key terminology allows this report to speak to big picture ideas with specificity.

Origins of Futures Studies

Records of forecasting the future have been around since humans started writing down their stories, the most popular, Western example being the Oracle of Delphi. For millennia humans have sought sacred insight about that which is, by its very definition, unknowable, namely the future.

Sociologist and futurist, Wendell Bell, situates the foundations of modern futures studies, not in ancient Greece, but in the context of the rising complexities and disruptions of 20th century global development. “The mobilization brought on by World War I,” he writes, “enlarged the organizational capabilities for establishing futures thinking in the institutional structures of modern societies and created a favorable social psychological disposition for doing so.”14 The Great Depression, followed by the spread of centrally-planned Communism and later World War II, demanded even larger scale approaches to the kind of strategic planning and expert-informed forecasting that WWI made so necessary for so many nations. During this time, prevailing schools of thought on futures studies suffered from two precarious assumptions that proved more problematic as 20th century developments and complexities continued to accelerate: (1) that the future, to some degree, is predictable, and (2) that the future can be harnessed and, to some extent, controlled.

Futures work continued to grow and expand through the research at organizations like RAND, the Hudson Institute, and the Institute for the Future, and became a legitimate field of academic study in the 1960s-70s, with programs at the University of Massachusetts, the University of Houston–Clear Lake, and the Alternative Futures program at University of Hawaii at Manoa creating some of the

first credentialed programs. Assumptions, however, were beginning to change, and new frameworks and methodologies were adopted accordingly.

The introduction of the idea of alternative futures was an important development that widened the scope from thinking about a singular, likely future to doing more expansive futures work, making clear that forecasting that which may or may not happen could remain too narrow in scope and therefore doomed to fail in a global context where complexity continues to increase at accelerated rates on an interconnected, planetary scale.

Thinking about the origins of futures studies, and the move we’ve seen from expert-based attempts to forecast the future to more expansive perspectives we’ll explore in this section, Zachary Stein’s recent call to action in his philosophical work on education in a futures studies context seems relevant.

Using a simple graph, he demonstrates how the level of complexities we face both now and in our future exceeds the capacities of individuals (even experts) to solve or respond strategically to those challenges. He calls it an educational crisis; we call it a crisis of human competency.

Adapted from Stein, Zachary (2019). Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools, Technology, and Society, Bright Alliance. p. 18

One example he considers is the ecological challenges before us: “The climate crisis is actually a crisis of human decision-making… If the demands of building sustainable systems and lifestyles are more complex than the capabilities of those asked to do so… then no matter how much funding we throw at sustainability technologies our efforts will fail… The greatest threat to the biosphere is not individual pollutants but the low level of human capability with regard to relevant decision-making domains.”15

What this means is that we need more than expert forecasting to position ourselves strategically to face, shape, and overcome the challenges the future holds for us, whether they be ecological challenges or something else entirely. Otherwise, we risk perpetuating a cultural or organizational “crisis of perception” because a single expert or oracle cannot see all alternative, plausible futures. As cited earlier, Scott Smith reminds us that “Futuring is about understanding the landscape of potential futures in such a way as to guide better decision making in the present,”16 and if Zachary Stein is correct about our incapacity to make certain decisions, then we need

new futuring tools that push us beyond forecasting and strategic planning.

Three Laws of the Future

In this context, James Dator, one of the founders of the University of Hawaii’s Alternative Futures program, offers Three Laws of the Future:17

1. The future cannot be predicted because the future does not exist

2. Any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous

3. We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us

Dator’s first law serves as a critique of our tendency to overestimate the immediate future. Think of predictions that, by 2020, we would have fullyautonomous, self-driving vehicles, something we’re not that close to solving actually and we’re well into the decade now. His second law, however, helps us understand our opposite tendency to

WE NEED MORE THAN EXPERT FORECASTING TO POSITION OURSELVES STRATEGICALLY TO FACE, SHAPE, AND OVERCOME THE CHALLENGES THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR US, WHETHER THEY BE ECOLOGICAL CHALLENGES OR SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY.

underestimate the far future. I’m sure the idea that you could use a single device to book a flight, check in with your therapist, shop for a new car to be delivered to your house, and make trades on the stock market, all while traveling in an airport, would have sounded ridiculous to many people living as late as the latter part of the 20th century, but here we are, all equipped with the power of a smartphone right at our fingertips. Dator’s third law becomes all the more important if we don’t take these first two insights seriously, because the tools we use are shaped by our beliefs about the future and in turn those tools either widen or narrow the scope of our perception and therefore our understanding of what the futures could be.

With this in mind, the question becomes how might we adopt tools that shift our perception and expand our foresight to see a variety of probable, plausible, and possible futures? And for what purpose are we invested in such work? Is it possible to approach this work with the goal to influence outcomes towards a more preferable future?

From Forecasting to Foresight

Kees van der Heijden describes the traditional practice of strategic forecasting as “a statistical summary of expert opinion” whereas what he calls “scenarios” serve as “conceptual description[s] of a future, based on cause and effect.”18 Forecasts are data-driven, led by experts, and meant to predict as accurately as possible the most probable future. Scenarios, on the other hand, are informed by data but driven by imaginative storytelling, constructed from a diversity of perspectives and team members, some expert and some not, for purposes of envisioning multiple probable, plausible, and possible futures.

“Forecasting assumes that it is possible and useful to predict the future,” writes van der Heijden. ”It is closely related to the rationalist assumption that there is one right answer and the art of strategy is to get as close as possible to it.”19 He describes in detail how scenarios function for a very different purpose: “Scenario planning has a fundamentally different, more processual oriented, starting point, based on the assumption that there is no one best answer, and there is a point beyond which accuracy cannot be improved… Scenario planning assumes that the future cannot be predicted and therefore irreducible uncertainty must not be swept under the carpet. Making a prediction where there is fundamental uncertainty is seen as a basically dangerous notion as it takes away from the decision maker the insights needed to come to a responsible conclusion.”20 This is one of the crucial differences between scenarios-based foresight and traditional forecasting: whereas expert forecasters are hired for purposes of helping reduce uncertainty, futures foresight that utilizes scenarios increases opportunity by accepting that some uncertainties are irreducible, and to deny this could cause what van der Heijden calls “a crisis of perception.”

Knowing When to Forecast

Of course, it’s important to remember that forecasting is a valuable and necessary tool or “mental model” for certain contexts and circumstances, especially if we think about both our time horizon and the levels of certainty we are dealing with. “We have to forecast. We couldn’t drive the car with the lights switched off altogether. The important thing is to realize the limits of our view. Making predictions beyond our capability to forecast lies at the bottom of the crises of perception discussed above.”21 For instance, if a risk, challenge,

or opportunity is right in front of us and certainty is high while uncertainty is low, then we are most likely in a position to forecast with greater confidence. In the fall of 2021, for instance, a dissatisfied group of parents in the urban area of Atlanta published a series of leading questions meant to challenge unsuspecting teachers into having unnecessary, politically-charged conversations, and the parent grassroots organization announced on their website that they would be asking these difficult questions to school faculty across the greater urban area. This was right in front of us; we certainly knew the kinds of questions that would be asked, and we were able to forecast and develop a strategic plan for responding as a united community in ways that were honest and true to our values.

At that same time, we were also dealing with the rapidly-evolving conditions of COVID-19, and as mentioned earlier, certainty was lower and how long the pandemic would extend into the future remained unknown. It was the perfect opportunity to exercise foresight using a mental model shaped by scenarios-based planning methodologies

Knowing When to Shift to Scenarios-based Planning

Scenarios first became a popular approach to strategy at the Royal Dutch/Shell company under the leadership of Pierre Wack, who adopted the method from Herman Kahn at the RAND Corporation.22 It was later popularized even more

Adapted by Jared Colley from Kees Van Der Heijden, 1997

by figures like Peter Schwartz and Jay Ogilvy at the Global Business Network.23 For Wack, when using scenarios, “The aim is to develop projects which are likely to have positive returns under any of the scenarios… Decisions are never based on one scenario being more likely than another; project developers optimize simultaneously against a number of different futures which are all considered equally plausible, and treated with equal weight.”24

It was important for Wack that scenarios be seen neither as good nor bad, just plausible, which makes sense in a context where one’s goals and values are to remain profitable as a company no matter which future proves to be the lived reality. One of the scenarios dreamed up by Pierre Wack’s team was a situation comparable to the oil crisis that later happened in the 1970s, and due to their strategic work they were not only more prepared than most energy companies; they also went from being the tenth largest and most profitable energy company to being number three.

Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby emphasize that scenarios are less about statistical or quantitative analysis and more about engagement in collective meaning-making: “By taking ideas of scenesetting, sufficient worldbuilding and in some cases the use of personas that audiences could identify with, the practice of futuring was effectively able to shift from analysis to engagement.”25 They add that scenarios…

• …are always plausible: “They work best when they represent futures and underlying building blocks of trends and drivers that aren’t so unthinkable that they can easily be dismissed.”26

• …leave a lot of room to experiment

• …don’t predict the future any more than any other futuring tool

• …can be “creative vignettes” or “fictional user stories”: “they provide a narrative in which different trends and forces can unfold, move, interact, and illustrate their relevance, as well as providing a space where tensions can surface usefully.”27

• …should only be as detailed as needed, what Scott Smith sometimes calls “lossy futures.”28

• …aren’t meant “to ‘sell’ a future but to give it depth and believability.”

Kees van der Heijden adds the following advice for scenarios building:

• More than one scenario is needed to reflect uncertainty, but more than four scenarios can become impractical.

• They need to be internally consistent using logical, cause-and-effect thinking

• They must inspire idea generation, create test conditions, and challenge participants with new perspectives

The Futures Cone

To sum up so far, it could be beneficial to consider Wendell Bell’s outline for the five tasks of futures studies:

1. The clarification of goals and values

2. The description of trends (scanning and sense-making signals)

3. The explanation of conditions (understanding drivers)

4. The projection of possible and probable futures if current policies are continued (foresight through understanding likelihood)

5. The invention, evaluation, and selection of policy alternatives in order to achieve preferred goals (shaping preferable futures)29

In the Next Steps section of our report, we will explore tasks one through three in greater detail, but to understand the differences between probable, plausible, possible, and preferable futures, as implied in tasks four and five, it is necessary to examine one of the more popular foresight models used in futures work: The Futures Cone or, as some call it, the Cone of Possibilities, originally developed by Charles Taylor at the US Army War College.30 For our purposes we’ll examine a version adapted by futurist, Dr. Joseph Voros.31

The start of the cone on the left side represents the present, and everything to the right of that point represents all potential futures. The widest

scope of the cone captures what we might call “preposterous” futures, but keep in mind James Dator’s “law” that when doing futures work “any useful idea about the future should appear to be ridiculous,” meaning preposterous spaces are still mental places for valuable thinking and dreaming, especially as we envision far futures. From there we narrow our scope from the possible to the plausible all the way to the probable. And lastly and perhaps most importantly, we think, dream, and work toward shaping our preferable futures as well.

The Possible

Possible futures are “those futures that we think might happen, based on some future technology we do not yet possess.”32 Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby understand the possible as a space where we are “making links between today’s world and the suggested one.”33 In terms of Artificial Intelligence, we could imagine, for instance, a possible future where every student and every professional has a personalized bot that knows their preferences, schedules, personality, and could even serve as

Adapted from Voros, Joseph (2017). “The Futures Cone, Use and History.” The Voroscope. Retrieved on April 22, 2024 from https://thevoroscope. com/2017/02/24/the-futures-cone-use-and-history/.

a surrogate for certain meetings or classes when the human user cannot make it for some reason. We’re nowhere near this reality in any functional capacity, but it’s possible to think about this future, technological scenario.

The Plausible

Plausible futures are “those we think could happen based on our current understanding of how the world works (physical laws, social processes, etc.).”34 It is “the space of planning and foresight, the space of what could happen,” writes Dunne and Raby. They remind us though that “the space of plausible futures is not about prediction but exploring alternative economic and political futures.”35 It is in the realm of the plausible where we do our best scenarios-based planning work. Using AI as our example again, we can imagine a plausible future where Large Language Models get so good at language translation that they can translate as accurately as proficient humans can in real time. We’re not actually there yet, but the technological capacity to get there is plausible. This is rich territory for building scenarios around what a World Language program might look like in terms of its practice and programmatic offerings in the schools of both the near future and the present.

The Probable

Probable futures are “those we think are likely to happen, usually based on (in many cases, quantitative) current trends.”36 This is an area where forecasting work becomes more appropriate. Whereas the plausible is where foresight strategists and experts in futures thinking live, imagine, and scan for trends and signals, the realm of the probable is “where most designers

operate… [thinking about] what is likely to happen unless there is some extreme upheaval… Most design methods, processes, tools, etc… are oriented toward this space.”37 However, there is a case to be made that Design Thinking also intersects with plausible scenarios-based work for purposes of influencing the future toward the preferable, especially with some of its more recent developments around transition, ontological, and speculative design practices.38

The Preferable

Preferable futures are “those we think should or ought to happen,” which means we have to make explicit both an organization’s “Business Idea” or what van der Heijden describes as “the organization’s mental model of the forces behind its current and future success” and an organization’s collectively shared values which shapes its mission, and vision, especially in the context of a morethan-human world. When Pierre Wack engaged in scenarios-based planning at the Royal Dutch/Shell company in the 60s and 70s, he often encouraged his teams not to make normative judgments about one plausible scenario versus another, but that changed when this kind of futures work was applied to a radically different context, in this case postapartheid South Africa. “The scenario method,” writes Adam Kahane, “asks people to talk not about what they predict will happen or what they believe should happen but only what they think could happen.” That was the Pierre Wack way of going about conducting scenarios-based planning exercises, but “necessity is the mother of invention, and so it was the extraordinary needs of South Africa in 1991 that gave birth to the first transformative scenario planning project” – famously now known as The Mont Fleur Scenario exercise.39

It was obvious that there were scenarios and plausible paths that the country did not want to move towards. Nikolas Badminton speaks about it as “the associated converse class [of scenarios]the un-preferred futures – a shadow form of antinormative futures that we think should not happen nor ever be allowed to happen.”40 In the case of the Mont Fleur scenarios, business and political leaders of the country wanted to avoid what they called the Ostrich scenario where a post-apartheid settlement and agreement fails to get negotiated, thereby leaving the country with its proverbial head in the sand. They knew that implementing the agreement and transition had to be rapid and decisive as well to avoid a Lame Duck scenario. Lastly, the country’s leaders were anxious that a turn towards macroeconomic populism could risk crashing the economy, and careful consideration of how to avoid that Iccarus scenario needed to be explored so that the country could move toward a preferable state of affairs characterized by inclusive democratic principles in the context of national growth and positive economic development, a scenario they named “the Flight of the Flamingos.” With this kind of work, the importance of preferable futures became all the more apparent for foresight design and strategy work.

Schools and educational organizations, like postapartheid South Africa, are focused on so much more than maintaining a profitable bottom line, which was Pierre Wack’s priority at Royal Dutch/Shell. Schools are constantly engaging in questions related to how we might design learning experiences and inclusive workplaces that move us more and more toward preferable futures – futures where student health and wellness thrives, where our connection to nature is restored and healed, where the learners and practitioners can design collaboratively for a morethan-human-world that is regenerative and whole.

As reported by the World Economic Forum, “The future is not fixed. A multiplicity of different futures is conceivable over the next decade. Although this drives uncertainty in the short term, it also allows room for hope. Alongside global risks and the eradefining changes underway lie unique opportunities to rebuild trust, optimism and resilience in our institutions and societies.”41 Knowing this, how might we envision with hope and storytell scenarios that help us strategically position ourselves with “urgent optimism”42 now so that we’re “impact ready” and prepared to work collectively for a preferable future that is just and beautiful for all?

Adapted from Kahane, Adam (2012). Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future. Berrett-Koehler Publishers

THEMES

We are living in times of extreme turbulence and accelerated change. “The next decade will usher in a period of significant change, stretching our adaptive capacity to the limit.”43 Understanding the themes and trends in futures thinking helps leaders to contextualize all the actions and behaviors that are imperative to lead successfully and effectively in times of global shock. Of course, at the intersection of all of these trends are the people who shape the organization’s future through the decisions they make today.

Finding Agency in the Age of Complexity: Schools of Strategic Positioning

Demands for policy, like the one made by so many teachers concerned about AI in the classroom, are born out of a school of thought (or mental model) that operates from a certain assumption about how businesses and organizations should develop strategy when thinking about future challenges and predicaments. Kees van der Heijden writes, “Over the years, three schools of thought have arisen to interpret the way managers and entrepreneurs think about their daily business [and strategy]. These can be characterized as rationalist, evolutionary, and processual.”44

The Rationalist School: Reducing Uncertainty in the Age of Complexity

The call for policy in the face of something like AI’s unpredictable power and impact is the kind of call that is born out of a rationalist school of thought or mental model. It demands the precision of an oracle and the expertise of a confident forecaster.

The rationalist manager or planner treats “strategy as a process of searching for the maximum utility among a number of options,” which is predicated on assumptions like: the future is predictable to some degree; there is a single, best answer in most situations; or people will act rationally in future situations.45

In order for us to search, with confidence, for maximum utility when faced with future challenges, we have to have a pretty good notion of what the future will look like and be able to predict, with accuracy, various actors’ actions and reactions.

All of this implies the necessary assumption that “some people can be more expert than others in predicting what will happen, and the best we can do is ask them for their considered opinion of what might be in store for them.”46

This begs the question: Who are those experts? Where are these expert systems or Delphic oracles that can help us identify our optimum policy for a predicted future? Who has the forecast we need for this?

Just as COVID was complex and the arrival of AI has presented wicked challenges as well, the future will continue to increase in complexity. Forecasting works well when dealing with known risks in the immediate future, and therefore we should engage in that kind of work. But when faced with “structural change” or “structural uncertainty,” forecasting (and the “right answer

policies” that follow it) could lead to the “inability to see an emergent novel reality by being locked inside obsolete assumptions.” 47

The Evolutionary School: Embracing Uncertainty in the Age of Complexity

The Evolutionary Model might be best characterized by what activist and leader adrienne maree brown calls an “Emergent Strategy.”48 Van der Heijden articulates the evolutionary approach as one where “A winning strategy can only be articulated in retrospect… evolution refers to the phenomena of emergent properties in systems.” Strategy, as a result, becomes more of “a process of random experimentation and filtering out of the unsuccessful.”49

Although this approach takes seriously James Dator’s law that the future is, by definition, unpredictable, one has to question its opposite assumption when compared the Rationalist School: That “the best we can do is react as things come at us, and hope that serendipity makes us choose the mutations which will make us into the winning species on the competitive battlefield.”50

The evolutionist ultimately trades complexity for chaos; they rely more on hindsight than foresight, while all but giving up on the idea of rationalist forecasting. As we think about the human agency activated at the Mont Fleur scenarios exercise in South Africa, we can’t help but wonder if there’s another approach that recognizes human agency and our ability, not to predict the future, but to envision preferable ones that we can work towards making, not just a plausible vision, but a probable reality we can achieve collectively.

The Processual School: Finding Agency in the Age of Complexity

A processual, scenarios-based approach expands our foresight, as opposed to narrowing our forecast. “Scenarios are not seen as quasi-forecasts,” writes van der Heijden, “but as perception devices… Scenarios are a set of reasonably plausible, but structurally different futures. These are conceived through a process of causal, rather than probabilistic thinking… Scenarios are used as a means of thinking through strategy against a number of structurally quite different, but plausible future models of the world.”51 Because scenarios are multiple, equally plausible, and not necessarily good or bad, they help us develop a mental model and mode of “scenaric perception” such that we can “react flexibly to structural change” in a variety of contexts or lived realities.52

Unlike forecasting, scenario-planning is not prescriptive, nor does it reduce or eliminate irreducible uncertainties. Also, it welcomes diverse views, all for the purposes of determining a current position that

maintains “the scenaric stance,” mentioned in the introduction: “a state of constructively maintaining multiple states of possibility in mind at the same time – considering, processing, evaluating, and being ready.”53

WHAT WE NEED WITH EMERGING COMPLEXITIES LIKE AI AND HYBRID SCHEDULES DURING PANDEMICS IS NOT RIGID, EXPLICIT POLICY, BUT A ROBUST, AGILE, VALUESINFORMED POSITION THAT CAN RESPOND TO ANY OF THE MYRIAD FUTURES THAT AWAIT US NEAR AND FAR.

This is why Scott Smith says that foresight work or what he calls “futuring” is “about understanding the landscape of potential futures in such a way as to guide better decision making in the present” –a decision making that comes less from policy and more from teams who understand the present in terms of multiple, equally plausible futures.54 And the decisions that are eventually made are driven not by the idea that we can link the best policy to the most probable future but by the desire to position one’s organization in a way that, no matter which plausible future unfolds, the stakeholders are ready to play a part in strategically shaping the unpredictable future with the hopes of influencing that future toward preferable outcomes.

While forecasts are strictly “decision making devices,” according to van der Heijden, scenarios are tools that help us develop a more strategic, agile position. What we need with emerging complexities like AI and hybrid schedules during pandemics is not rigid, explicit policy, but a robust, agile, values-informed position that can respond to any of the myriad futures that await us near and far.

This means that instead of engaging in discussion and rhetoric about “the probable jobs of the future,” we as schools need to be positioning our people, practice, and programs such that we’re ready for “the plausible opportunities of the future” and ready to shape and influence those opportunities in order to live preferable lives that are just and sustainable.

As stated earlier, rationalist forecasting and evolutionary reflective practice, for that matter, do have their place, especially if we add the dimension of time. There are things right in front of us, that are probable, that need our care and attention, that therefore warrant some rationalist forecasting – like the use of Deepfakes among peer groups in school (if we were to stay with our recent AI scenario examples). There are also things that are a little more beyond the

trees, like the real-time, human-level language translators mentioned before, where it warrants our thinking through multiple, plausible scenarios to improve our practice and position in World Language instruction right now

Design Fiction: Embracing Creativity in the Age of Complexity

Speculative fiction writer, Bruce Sterling, identifies two challenges for making sense of the future:

1. New forms of advanced design and manufacturing lack historical precedent and are therefore bound to create substantial novelty.

2. The methods of mass production are no longer environmentally sustainable.

What this means according to the author is that “the challenge at hand is to creatively guide the tremendous vectors of the first reason, so as to finesse the horrific consequences of the second reason. Then we can enjoy some futurity.”55 One way for us to get creative in our work to “finesse the horrific consequences” for purposes of guiding ourselves to more preferable lived futures, Bruce Sterling believes, is using the recent trend or methodology known as Design Fiction in collaborative, interactive experiences.

Put simply, “Design fiction is a mix of science fiction, science fact, and design. It combines research, storytelling, and speculation with the material crafting of objects that don’t exist now, but plausibly could in some version of the near future.”56 At its essence, design fiction asks us to engage, in earnest, in the creative practice of futures-focused prototyping

by getting participants and workshop designers to create plausible artifacts - diegetic artifacts, as Bleeker and his team like to call it - that one might encounter in a near or distant future scenario.

It’s best to think of these potential artifacts in terms of what design practitioners call “archetypes”recognizable types of objects such as a travel brochure, a product catalog, or a magazine spread from the future. The practice often operates in a space that designers like to call “the future mundane, where the extraordinary becomes profoundly ordinary.”57 Think of it as “a form of future prototyping that investigates and produces insights about how people adopt, discard, and sometimes reappropriate or revive technology…”58

Take for example an envisioning exercise, Build Futures You Can Touch, from Experiments in Reflection by Leticia Britos Cavagnaro. Imagine yourself far off in the future doing a mundane, daily task; ask yourself where you are, what you’re doing, what you see, hear, and feel. Then, pick an object you see in this future to zoom in on. You can even sketch the object or write about its usage. Picturing the objects or artifacts of daily life from the future, “activates your ability to conceive possible futures.”59 However, the imagined artifact itself and whether or not it will come to be in the future is not the most important aspect of this exercise. “Rather, what questions about the present are sparked by the artifact you created?”60

Ultimately, practicing Design Fiction “should aspire to produce actionable provocations”61 while being “premised on the idea that we can constructively intervene in the process of transformation, and that any near future will likely be a mix of both utopia

and dystopia… Design fiction operates under the assumption that things can and will be different.”62 Much like we’d do if we were engaging in the work of scenario building, we first make an attempt to scan, collect, and make sense of faint signals and emerging trends. A signal, writes Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby, “is something you encounter that provides insight that can shed light on the future.”63 Weak signals, they write, are “the earliest, smallest signals of change, particularly where the overall pattern they point to isn’t yet readily evident… The idea of a weak signal is that it feels as if it points to a meaningful change in direction, a forking of possible developments, or a significant evolution of a pattern already observed.”64 Signals help us figure out what kind of artifact we want to fabricate.

It’s important to think creatively beyond the object or artifact you wish to design and fabricate by identifying the WHAT IF scenario or situation to explore with your diegetic prototypes and “get bizarrely specific,” suggests Bleeker and his colleagues. For instance, are we in a supermarket, a waiting room, or some other “mundane” scenario that seems both familiar and futuristically foreign? Once you’ve created the object(s) and experience for participants to engage in, keep in mind, “the ideal is for people to encounter it cold, and have to make sense of it for themselves.”65 Consider concluding the immersive experience by spending time debriefing, discussing, and sharing sentiments and analysis with your community of participants as a way to reflect on the overall experience.

A great example of this kind of creative thinking in the context of schools is Greg Toppo and Jim Tracy’s recent work, Running With Robots: The American High School’s Third Century, which through speculative fiction and scenario building

narrates a principal’s tour of a technologically innovative school in the year 2040. Although it uses storytelling, instead of prototyping and fabricating, both the book and the practice of Design Fiction have something in common; they help us think about “the stuff typically left out of predictive models and forecasts–the odd signals lurking on the periphery; the hacks, unexpected uses, and workarounds; the hybridizations and new rituals that invariably result; and the strange paths that ideas, products, and cultural practices often take.”66

Designers, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, define the practice of Design Fiction as more than just making “diegetic artifacts” from various plausible futures: it’s the creative act of exploring “speculative material culture” in general, of experiencing “fictional archeologies” and “imaginative anthropologies.”67 What’s most profound about both Design Fiction and Scenarios-Based Planning is how human they are as participatory activities: “Where the outputs of foresight work tend to take the form of spreadsheets, PowerPoints, white papers, or promotional videos visualizing a seamless future, a successful design fiction for us means that a large audience, inside or outside of an organization, can feel, touch, understand, and debate near-future scenarios.”68

Julian Bleeker and fellow authors also make three important suggestions for Design Fiction to maximize its potential and impact as a futures thinking tool:

1. Include a diversity of viewpoints, backgrounds, expertise, and skill sets: “People’s assumptions about the future are meant to be challenged… At its best,

design fiction is an exercise in counterhomogeneity and participatory futures.”69

2. Individuals should feel comfortable with thinking differently, outside the box, and even outside the typical norms. We need safe spaces for “preposterous” thinking.

3. You need people who can make things. This is a great opportunity for empowering folks from your Maker, Arts, and Design departments.

Like futures foresight methodologies and scenariosbased planning frameworks, “Design fiction is just one tool with which we can pre-visualize and render tangible future scenarios before taking action, using a process that is broadly collaborative and includes a variety of stakeholders or interests.”70

Organizational and Individual Benefits of Futuring

In her book, Imaginable, Jane McGonigal writes that one of the most important benefits of futures thinking “is to prepare our minds and stretch our collective imagination, so we are more flexible,

adaptable, agile, and resilient when the ‘unthinkable’ happens.”71 This is true both for organizations and for individuals.

Collectively, we aspire to steward our organizations forward in ways that are both agile and responsible. Creative, scenarios-based futures foresight and planning is a methodology that allows organizations “to experiment with extraordinary ideas that one day might become the norm.”72 Individually, “futures thinking strengthens key pathways in the brain to build realistic hope, creativity, and a more resilient response to stress.”73

It is clear from our research that futures thinking provides tangible benefits, both today and in the future, for both organizations and individuals. It’s important to keep in mind that “Futures thinking isn’t a superpower, and you don’t have to fix everything or save everyone. But futures thinking is an incredibly useful, practical tool to prepare your mind to adapt faster to new challenges, build hope and resilience, reduce anxiety and depression, and inspire you to take actions today that set yourself up for future happiness and success.”74

IMPLICATIONS

Our rapidly changing world has profound implications for every organization’s people, protection, practices and programs. Each organization will respond to global issues in ways that reflect their unique mission and vision. Our research points to the need for agility, adaptability, creativity, resilience, and empathy at both the organizational and individual levels. Leaders must operate from a place that balances organizational goals with individual benefit. The volatile outlook on the future, of course, implies questions related to protection, as leaders are asked to steward their organizations through challenging times. How might we take inventory of the implications so we can anticipate, envision, discover, and shape the futures ahead?

We introduced the 5 P’s framework for understanding more deeply the probable, plausible, and possible implications of new emerging trends and complexities that continue to surprise us every single day. The framework helps us understand more clearly the potential impacts on our organization’s people, protection, practices, and programming. How we understand these implications does less to carve out specific, prescriptive policies and more to help us determine a robust, strategic positioning, one that’s both ready for all possible opportunities and challenges and equipped to influence our futures toward preferable, values-informed scenarios that help us design for a better world.

Position

In order to engage in creative and critical strategic conversation (and to do so with a well-developed sense of “futures literacy”), leaders and their organizations need to demonstrate a new skill: a “willingness to open up mental models, face conceptual uncertainty, and arrive at a shared view of its meaning, i.e. become a learning organization.”75 To become a learning organization, the learning must have purpose, meaning it’s clearly connected to the values, mission, and “business idea” of the organization, an idea that can only be successful if there’s a clear, shared vision among all stakeholders of the school or organization.

How might we position our organizations strategically to anticipate, envision, discover and shape the future? How might we become learning organizations who can adapt to the changing world with agility, creativity, and agency?

Leaders need to create a culture where a “scenaric stance” becomes the norm across the institution

– a shared “state of constructively maintaining multiple states of possibility in mind at the same time.”76 This means that “the skill of observing the environment must become a group skill, such that the organization is able to act on it.”77 All of this is important because we believe in organizational agency and efficacy: we believe that “protopian” futures are preferable and plausible and are within our reach if we act collectively and in cooperation with and respect for our more-than-human world.

The elements of a learning organization that promote agility, creativity, and agency include some of the following essential mindsets and practices:

• Start with questions: Begin with curiosity; open up mental models. “Asking the right questions in context means getting beyond the binary options of yes and no…Examine any assumption you might have made in asking each question.”78

• Nurture diversity: Our research has consistently shown the power of soliciting multiple perspectives and experiences. “When you find yourself doing work for an audience other than yourself, consider this question: how are you making space for them to contribute and collaborate with you?”79 Nurturing belonging across a diverse group of participants builds trust, confidence, and agency for making a positive impact. In fact, “good ideas often come from bridging the gaps between people and groups with different areas of expertise.”80

• Look closely: Notice, engage, reflect on the world around you and explore the complexity of the systems you interact with

daily.81 Observe patterns, senses, analogies, tensions, contradictions, and surprises.82

• Practice radical empathy: An element of our human advantage over machines is practicing empathy and social awareness; uncertainty and change related to potential futures is messy and uncomfortable. Navigating the ambiguous work of futures thinking requires humility, grace, and radical empathy for others.

• Embrace ambiguity: “If you engage in ambiguity, in the realm of multiple right answers and unturned stones, you are rewarded by the exact thing you might have been afraid of - the unexpected.”83 While ambiguity allows creativity to flourish in positive cultures, ambiguity should not be used to manipulate by withholding information, providing misinformation, ignoring timelines, boundaries, fees, roles or responsibilities, or moving the finish line.84

• Make thinking visible: Physical or tangible prototypes help us flesh out our thinking and test our ideas. “A prototype is a tool that gives you a chance to investigate your ideas and explore what could, should, or would come next…it’s a modest tool for the lofty goal of testing the future…Prototyping helps lower the stakes for explore new questions by reducing risk-using fewer resources like time, money, and emotional commitmentespecially when anxiety about outcomes might keep you from starting.”85

• Be brave to try and try again: Positioning ourselves for futures work

requires resilience, growth mindset, courage, flexibility, adaptability, and receptiveness to change. This requires a willingness to evolve your thinking; “strong opinions held lightly” sums this up. “It’s an expression of humility and a willingness to learn” characterized by “letting our assumptions and beliefs go when they no longer serve us, especially if we get new information that makes us rethink our original position.”86

Integrating these mindsets and practices will help us lean into learning and position our organizations strategically to act and adapt to the changing world.

People

One thing that differentiates creative futures foresight work from more data-driven, rationalist approaches to analyzing a projected future is how deeply human the work is. As machines get better and better at data-driven, predictive forecasting, humans will be needed all the more to do deep sense-making, imagining, and storytelling around qualitative work like scenarios-building and speculative design. So, questions arise for organizational leaders like:

How might we foster the uniquely human skills of the future? How might we nurture diversity which reveals multiple perspectives and opportunities? How might we empower all our people to anticipate, envision, discover, and shape the future in positive ways?

As van der Heijden claims in his book, complexity can be turned into opportunity if a diverse group of people share a common vision and knowledge:

“ORGANIZATIONS ARE COGNITIVE SYSTEMS. THEY HAVE WAYS OF SEEING AND INTERPRETING THE WORLD AROUND THEM, AND THEY HAVE VALUES THAT THEY PURSUE. THE KNOWLEDGE ON WHICH THIS IS BASED IS EMBEDDED IN THE PEOPLE IN THE ORGANIZATION.”

“Organizations are cognitive systems. They have ways of seeing and interpreting the world around them, and they have values that they pursue. The knowledge on which this is based is embedded in the people in the organization…”87 Therefore, one of the most important implications for people is nurturing a “flexible, open mind…and imagining the future is most mind-opening when we do it with others.”88

How are we ensuring systemically that, not just leaders, but also diverse teams of people are developing the competencies necessary to develop an effective “futures literacy”? What are the competencies, skills, and attributes that empower our teams to have agency in helping shape futures that honor and enact our values as communities and organizations?

There are several sources, studies, and experts offering competency frameworks attempting to answer these questions. Boston Consulting Group, for instance, offers four major domains for what they call “skill sets of the future”: Existential Capabilities, Mindsets, and Habits; Bionic Skills; Creativity; and Human-to-Human, Team-Focused, and Community-Focused Skills.89 reDesign’s Future9 Competencies offers another useful framework, while professional futurists, like Nikolas Badminton, give comprehensive portraits of the skills and attributes needed to develop an effective “futures consciousness.”90 What we’ve done at MV Ventures is taken all these researched-informed visions and synthesized them with our previously published Integral Competencies in the Age of Collective Intelligence to present a picture of the competent futures thinker.

— SCENARIOS: THE ART OF STRATEGIC CONVERSATION BY KEES VAN DER HEIJDEN

As we think about implications for people, it’s important to remember that diversity trumps expertise every single day when engaging in futures foresight work, especially in the context of making sense of complex, wicked problems and challenges. Cognitive diversity, writes James

Bridle, is the theory “that the best solutions to knotty, complex problems are best found by starting from the greatest number of different viewpoints and experiences – that is, from as wide a selection of people as possible.”91 As you think about exploring futures work such as scenarios-

based planning, remember that more people than just the executive leadership team need to engage, share their perspective, and contribute to the learning organization’s growth and development as we envision, design, and enact preferable futures together.

Protection

As a stormy future feels more and more likely, organizations will be faced with inevitable problems to be solved and challenges to be navigated. Ensuring our organizations’ sustainability will continue to be a top concern for leaders of schools, nonprofits, and businesses.

How might we embrace creative possibilities and exciting, new opportunities to meet the needs of this new generation while also stewarding our organizations forward responsibly? How might we protect our organizations and ensure financial sustainability even in an uncertain future?

First, we must ensure that there is a clear, shared mission and vision for the organization that is inimitable by the competing schools or organizations down the road. “In overcrowded industries,” writes Kim and Mauborgne, “differentiating brands becomes harder in both economic upturns and downturns.” 92 Therefore, a new approach to strategy is needed in order to position our organizations for success, one that’s ready for multiple futures, both positive and challenging. The best strategies consider buyer utility or compelling reasons to hire the organization,93 which is important to keep at the forefront of one’s strategy, especially when challenges like the recent pandemic threaten or put at risk so many of the traditions or conventional

approaches we’ve relied on when doing school in the past. What are the “compelling reasons” someone hires your school as opposed to the competitor next door?

As teams engage in futures foresight work, many of the practitioners in the field recommend designing and facilitating collaborative workshops for performing a SWOT analysis that explores an organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses as well as the opportunities and threats emerging from the outside environment. In other words, implications about protection necessitate both internal and external scans for signals, trends, and drivers that could impact the organization and that could reveal opportunities to influence probable and plausible futures towards more preferable ones.

Organizations that are grounded in understanding their unique strengths and weaknesses are better prepared to leverage opportunities and mitigate threats. Yet, threats and risk will exist in all ranges of probable, plausible, possible, and even preferable futures, so “balancing purposeful vision with flexibility requires an intensely dynamic approach.”94 It’s an approach that understands that leaders are continually engaging in all four levels of futuring - anticipating, envisioning, discovering, and shaping - while also acting and adapting to steward their organizations into the future. As Small and Schmutte make clear, “Acting is taking purposeful initiative in the face of the unknown. Adapting is flexing to changing conditions.”95 Acting in the face of uncertainty to shape the positive future we want to see requires understanding current strengths and weaknesses and making decisions with courage based on the information you have. Adapting to changing circumstances requires

flexibility, humility, and understanding of the opportunities that could exist. Both acting and adapting require looking closely both internally and externally to balance tensions and move forward with trust.

Practice

Knowing how accelerated complexity and change can be in our current, volatile environment, we need ongoing prototyping when it comes to anticipating, envisioning, discovering, or shaping the potential futures of our world. We need frequent iterations, created through embracing a diversity of perspectives and beliefs.

How might we create and implement agile systems that allow leaders to act in the face of uncertainty and adapt to rapidly changing circumstances? How might we systematically leverage diversity of thought and experience to anticipate, envision, discover, and shape the future in positive ways? How might we allocate time, money, and resources to make learning opportunities available and accessible to a diverse team of professionals?

Andrea Small and Kelly Schmutte offer five practices in their book, Navigating Ambiguity, that allow organizations to act and adapt with agility:96

• Balance your perspective: Look inside yourself to understand your own values, commitments, responses, and challenges as well as understanding your team and your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, values, and vision. Cultivate curiosity by close looking and empathetic listening in conversations with diverse stakeholders as well as external viewpoints.

• Balance your pace: Finding the right pace for transformation is challenging for even seasoned leaders. Balancing urgency with support requires leaders to essentialize, prioritize, and work to clear obstacles while practicing radical empathy and patience. The process will require investing time and energy in nurturing the culture, imagining a range of scenarios, ideas, and prototypes, and soliciting feedback along the way.

• Balance your attention: The human brain is not actually capable of multitasking, rather, it shifts focus between tasks. “Being able to shift our attention in the face of uncertainty, to focus and unfocus, is a powerful secret of unleashing creative potential.”97 This requires us to essentialize, to be present and actively engaged in the moments that matter most, to monitor energy among the team, and also to guard downtime, margin, and play as valuable for creativity and positive culture-building.

• Balance your process: Futures thinking can feel uncomfortable and ambiguous. So, balancing predictable tools, protocols, paths, and process maps with opportunities for more unstructured imagination. “Creative work calls for constant listening and calibrating…We ask ourselves routinely ‘What does our project need right now?’”98

• Balance your scale: An essential part of futures literacy is adjusting the altitude of plans to consider both the big picture vision and the details, the range of potential futures on both the

global landscape and the organizational level. Consider how decisions big and small will impact people, after all, our organizations are made up of humans. Design constraints can enhance creative thinking while too much constraint can inhibit creativity.

Pierre Wack, one of the original architects of scenarios-based planning, emphasized the need for outside partnership when engaging in this practice. He called them “remarkable people” – “those experts who are not in regular contact with the client organization, such that an original contribution can be expected.”99 And it’s less about bringing in outsiders because they’re experts and more about how outside points of view can “provide insight, prevent groupthink, help with information gathering and processing, increase the friction and interaction,…and expand the rationality of the group.”100 Transformation needs, not necessarily an expert, but a diverse collection of guides both inside and outside of the organization.

Of course, fostering a culture of learning capable of agile decision-making to act and adapt to change demands time, money, and resources. Faculty, administrators, and school staff alike can research, observe, experiment, and explore probable, plausible, possible, and preferable futures – perhaps even preposterous ones. However, this demands that leaders prioritize futures thinking as an essential practice.

Programs

As learning organizations, futures thinking can demand a lot from us intellectually and emotionally. Difficult questions beckon our collective, creative thinking:

What programming will future-focused leaders need to develop to meet the moment in the years ahead? What procedures do we use for thinking about the future? What systems and tools make us successful in anticipating, envisioning, discovering, and shaping or adapting to the coming future? And what is the future we want to bring into the world?

And how are we bringing this important futures foresight work to our students as well? At The Mount Vernon School, junior and senior high school students in the Innovation Diploma program participate in a nine week “Futures of….” course where they explore, research, and design future scenarios and immersive experiences in different industry sectors. This year they explored the future of air transportation and designed a series of interactive experiences for outside visitors during an evening of learning exhibitions at the end of their nine week experience. Currently, ninth grade students at The Mount Vernon School are taking a Global Inequalities class, and their projectbased experience is to pick a region to research for purposes of identifying a complex, “wicked” problem for which they will use a scenarios based approach to propose solutions for reducing inequality in the context of multiple, plausible futures. Kids will surprise you when it comes to exercising their imaginative capacity – a capacity that adults seem to struggle with more and more as our mental models become less pliable. We need our students’ fresh, spongelike perspectives to be a part of our strategic conversations as well.

NEXT STEPS

How might schools begin to adopt and implement futures literacy in order to anticipate, envision, discover, and shape the futures ahead? The answer will be unique depending upon the mission, vision, values, context and setting of each school. However, the research suggests certain steps for getting started at any organization. Leaders will benefit from applying this future-ready framework as they work to promote agility, creativity, resilience, and even “urgent optimism”101 within their organizations.

Assess Future-readiness

Our research in the psychology of change and change management and work in school transformation has revealed that at any time people are in different stages of readiness for change. The stages of change are:

• Precontemplation: In this phase, there is not yet acknowledgement that change is needed.

• Contemplation: In this phase of change, there is acknowledgement of a problem but not yet understanding of what is needed to fix the problem or lack of confidence to initiate change.

• Preparation: In this phase, there is motivation to change and research, discovery, and planning begins.

• Action: This is the phase where change is actively happening; this requires determination and willpower. While this is usually the most visible phase of change, it is also usually the shortest phase of change.

• Maintenance: This is the phase of sustaining change and reflecting on progress.102

In order to steward our organization into the future, leaders must acknowledge the stages of change and work to assess both organizational and individual readiness for change. It is helpful to ask:

• When you think about the future, do you think things will mostly stay the same or change drastically?

• When you think about the future, both for the world and for your individual life,

do you feel mostly optimistic or mostly worried?

• When you think about the future, how much control or agency for change do you feel you have?103

These questions point towards James Dator’s four Future trajectories: (1) a Continuation Future that maintains the status quo; (2) a Limits and Discipline Future that adapts to internal and external limits; (3) a Decline and Collapse Future where systems fail and we must act and adapt; (4) and a Transformation Future where new technologies, businesses, or behaviors change the game.104 The questions also prompt us to recall Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby’s Four Levels of Futuring of anticipating, envisioning, discovering, and shaping the future.105

Accurately assessing both our individual and organizational future-readiness allows leaders to appropriately determine their next steps.

Implementing Scenariosbased Futures Foresight Planning

STEP ONE: Pull together a diverse, guiding team, one that represents a wide range of perspectives, positions, and lived experiences because “adaptive challenges are too complex for any one person to figure out, and too open-ended for analysis alone.” To expand an organization’s “scenaric stance” and scope of foresight requires “leaps of insight that usually only come from combining ideas from different places in new ways… Anywhere people are generating new ideas at a standout clip, you’ll find a rich ecosystem of diverse perspectives coming together.”106

Once you’ve assembled your diverse team, consider kicking off your work by creating a Team Charter or establishing norms for collaboration. Having agreed upon expectations guides the challenging work to come by establishing a foundation of trust. It’s helpful to discuss:

• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the team as well as its individuals?

• What types of accountability measures are needed?

• What will we do when we disagree?

• What does success look like for the team? And how will we celebrate success?

STEP TWO: Form the change vision, name your shared values as a team and connect those to the mission and the “business idea” of your school or organization. It’s helpful to engage in visible thinking exercises and collaborative dialogues around questions such as the following:

• Why can’t the school and/or organization down the street emulate your model tomorrow? What if they could?

• What is your value proposition? How is your school and/or organization unique in that regard?

• What organizational competencies make your organization and/or school competitive and effective? How are they being sustained and nurtured?

STEP THREE: Narrow the focus of your futures foresight project. Get specific about what you want to build scenarios around. “If you were working on a history project,” writes Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby, “you wouldn’t just take on ‘the past’ and hope to find an interesting focus

area once engaged – this would be madness. Likewise, a direct framing approach is needed when thinking about the future.”107 They suggest you ask, what is it about? Who is it for? How big or small, far or near, is this future?

Using a time agreed upon expectations guide like the MV Ventures Range Finder, can be helpful as well in terms of framing the time horizon of intended futures work: Are you looking one to two years right in front of you? Four to six years beyond the trees? Or seven to ten beyond the mountains? Or even further into the far future?

STEP FOUR: Define the purpose. Once you identify and narrow your area of focus, it’s important that everyone explicitly understands the purpose of the overall project. Use the Four Levels of Futuring (see p. 9) to guide this work.

• Anticipate: Are you engaging in futures thinking to predict probable, plausible, or possible futures? Is the purpose to gain greater clarity and vision when it comes to anticipating probable and possible futures?

• Envision: Are you engaging in foresight and scenarios-building in order to make

sense of probable and plausible futures?

• Discover: Are you probing possibilities to uncover previously unforeseen obstacles, surprises, and opportunities?

• Shape: Are you engaging in futures work to shape preferable futures and therefore to inspire and empower transformation? Are you testing current strategies and/or decisions against a plausible set of future scenarios?

• Learn: Are you engaging in futures work for purposes of organizational, adaptive learning and individual personal development?

Scott Smith’s and Madeline Ashby’s “three dimensions of futures” can be useful as well:

• Consider length – Useful timescales & horizon phases: “in setting the length of a future, remember to leave enough room for meaningful change.”108

• Consider width – Spread: “how wide to stretch the exploratory frame”109 such as the Futures Cone.

• Consider depth – Useful detail: “The narrower the natural scope of the topic, the deeper you can often afford to dive, in terms of either evidence of supporting trends or narrative details about particular future scenarios… breadth and depth create trade-offs that should be considered and weighed.”110

STEP FIVE: “Not being blindsided by the future requires only that you be willing …to pay attention,” or as Jane McGonigal puts it, “to pay imagination… You just have to look… where those

giant neon blinking arrows are pointing - and then not look away.”111 To do this, begin to scan for signals by observing the external environment, both near and afar. Nikolas Badminton defines signal scanning as “distinct pieces of information, statistics, stories, activities/events that indicate an impending change or emerging issue. Signals are the most useful when they are weak – i.e. in early stages but show incredible promise.”112 There are many places to scan for signals: new products or services, current events and headlines, randomly selected magazines, advertisements, scientific studies; even observed collective behaviors and sentiments can signal something. The important thing is to look in places beyond your industry sector and to do so collaboratively to ensure that there’s a diversity of perspectives. We encourage teams to record their scanned signals together using common documents or spreadsheets and to cluster them as compelling patterns emerge.

STEP SIX: An equally important method for internal organizational scanning is taking the time to interview team members and stakeholders to identify and cluster weak signals from inside the organization. We recommend, when conducting these one-on-one surveys, using the Seven Questions about the Future:113

1. The Oracle. If you could visit with someone who really could foretell the future, are there any questions that you might like to ask?

2. Good World. What is your perception of an optimistic, but realistic world future, and its implications for your company?

3. Bad World. What is your perception of a pessimistic, but not catastrophic future, and its implications for your company?

4. Corporate Culture. Where would your perception of the culture your company will need to develop in the future differ from what now exists?

5. Looking Back. What have we not done well, where we had the information to do better, and what can we learn from this?

6. Critical Choices. What are the critical decisions which the company is preparing to take, or should prepare to take, over the next 5-10 years?

7. Personal Vision. If you could personally choose the vision for your company, is there anything further that you would wish to contribute?

Once you have scanned for signals both externally and internally, clustering them and labeling the patterns lays the groundwork for sense-making.

STEP SEVEN: By sense-making, we begin to identify and describe trends and possible drivers. As Badminton writes, “[it’s] from signals we identify trends: general directions in which our world is developing or changing.”114 Significant trends that are likely to have a transformative effect on society are described as “macro-trends” or “future forces… anything with the potential to change the world can be a future force.”115 Each year, the World Economic Forum publishes its Global Risks Report which ranks future forces in terms of anticipated risks. In 2024, the forces identified by the World Economic Forum as having the most likely impact over the short and long term are pictured on page 43 and the full report details potential impact of these future forces.116

To continue your futures foresight practice, select several trends and drivers that feel meaningful to you and continue looking for signs, as well as causal connections, that point to the novel events happening now. Of course, not all future forces are threats; identify some that point towards positive change as well - mRNA vaccines, inexpensive wind and solar energy, and efforts to combat social isolation are just a few to consider.117

Always remember the importance of engaging in this kind of work as teams. We determine trends

and future forces through collaborative sensemaking, what Smith and Ashby define as “moving from noise to insight, taking what’s collected in the sensing stage, evaluating and selecting criteria for sorting, and exploring different forms of mapping and organizing to yield structure and surface patterns and themes.”118 That means:

1. Identifying what the trend or driver impacts the most, which is where the 5 P’s framework becomes useful (For instance, is it mostly impacting people, protection, our practice, or our programmatic offerings?)

2. Determining where this trend becomes most impactful on the horizon of our timeline (Using the Range Finder, for example, is it right in front of us, beyond the trees, or over the mountains?)

3. Evaluating the likelihood of this trend’s trajectory to understand whether strategy warrants forecasting and policy or whether it warrants foresight and scenarios-based planning (one could reference the Futures Cone, for instance, to determine: is it probable, plausible, or possible?)

STEP EIGHT: Begin to build scenarios, work that’s already beginning to happen using activities suggested in Step Seven. “Signals and trends give us the reference points,” writes Nikolas Badminton; “scenarios explore how people will be affected. Building multiple scenarios with many, varied groups of people from differing backgrounds and demographics is so important.”119

Reflect and write down the following:

1. A catchy headline for your scenario that captures its essence and feel as a lived reality.

2. A section that lists the signals, trends, drivers, or events that have led to this reality.

3. A list of the challenges and opportunities this headline presents to your organization, its “business idea,” and its people.

4. A short, but appropriately detailed, narrative of the scenario, involving personas/users and any relevant forces of influence like those represented by the STEEP framework (Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental, and Political forces)

It’s also important to keep in mind what makes a scenario effective: (1) it must be plausible; (2) internally consistent; (3) containing both uncertainties and predetermined elements; and (4) only needs to be as detailed as need be: sometimes low-res scenarios is all we need to engage in productive strategic futures thinking.

STEP NINE: Once scenarios are built, consider mapping them in ways that take into account the dimensions of likelihood (the Futures Cone’s categories of probable to possible) as well as where each scenario falls on a projected horizon (the Range Finder). Your map should also make

explicit which of the 5 P’s are potentially impacted the most, specifically the latter categories of people, protection, practice, and programs. As you map these things, it’s important to keep in mind that accuracy is less essential than creating engaging scenarios-based storylines. Strategic mapping and storytelling are the “social practices of sensemaking,” and they have the power to move us toward collective action even if the map’s fidelity is low.

And remember, “you’re looking for a map that allows for different paths to a preferable future.”120 Once stories and scenarios are shared, narrated, and imagined collectively, the team can begin to examine present conditions, behaviors, and systems to evaluate “options against multiple futures… scenarios being used as test conditions for the assessment of the value of options,” or what many scenarios experts call “wind-tunneling.”121 It’s also an opportunity to identify more preferable outcomes in order to engage in the strategic practice of “backcasting” or what Bob Johansen calls “looking back from the future” to determine what needs to happen to get there. 122

Imagining and understanding a range of potential futures prepares an organization for rapid change. Reflection, feedback, and iteration allow organizations to learn quickly and improve our futures foresight practice.

CONCLUSION

How do leaders embrace creative possibilities and exciting, new opportunities to meet the needs of this new generation while also stewarding their organizations forward responsibly?

Leaders today are faced with a range of difficult decisions about how to best steward their organizations into the future. In a complex world where experts can no longer forecast with confidence what the future may be, we need insights, systems, and tools to create diverse teams of futures thinkers who can lead from where they are. Imagining and understanding potential futures allows us to respond with resiliency in the face of transformative events. “Futures literacy” grounded in scenarios-based foresight enables organizations to make better decisions, more confidently, today and to adapt quickly to rapidly changing conditions.

The insights, tools, and frameworks presented in this report are designed to help leaders and their team members anticipate and envision the probable, plausible, and possible futures, and to discover and shape preferable futures. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.123 These tools can empower organizations to seize opportunities for transformation while avoiding the risks of collapse or getting stuck in the same old status quo.

The future does not exist; is not yet written. But, there are signs of the future all around us if we know where to look. “The next decade is likely to be the most significant opportunity most of us have in our lifetimes to really transform the way society worksand we all have a part to play in creating that positive long-term change.”124 With curiosity, creativity, and a commitment to empowering diverse teams, together, we can design a better world.

PLAYLIST

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2. Bleeker, Julian, Nick Foster, Fabien Girardin, and Nicolas Nova (2022). The Manual for Design Fiction. The Near Future Laboratory, p. 56..

3. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). Facing Out Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design, and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth. Bloomsbury, p. 30.

4. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby (2020). How To Future: Leading and Sense-Making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 30.

5. Ibid., p. 104.

6. Ibid., p. 4

7. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). Facing Out Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design, and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth. Bloomsbury, p. 245.

8. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. John Wiley and Sons, p. 33.

9. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). p. 46.

10. Mitchell, Melanie (2020). Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. Picador, p. 238.

11. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). p. 247.

12. On several occasions, we refer to designing for a morethan-human world, a concept that comes from David Abram (1997). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. Vintage. | For more work around expanding design beyond a human-centered framework, see Ron Wakkary (2021). Things We Could Design For More Than Human-Centered Worlds. The MIT Press.

13. Adapted from Scott Smith and Madeline Ashby (2020). How To Future: Learning and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 23-25.

14. Bell, Wendell (2009). Foundations of Future Studies: History, Purpose, Knowledge – Human Science for a New Era, Volume 1. Transaction Publishers, p. 11.

15. Stein, Zachary (2022). Education in a Time Between Worlds: Essays on the Future of Schools. Bright Alliance, p. 17.

16. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby (2020). How To Future: Learning and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 104.

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18. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. John Wiley and Sons, p.33.

19. Ibid., p. 102-103.

20. Ibid., p. 129-130.

21. Ibid., p. 90.

22. Wack, Pierre (1985). “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead.” Harvard Business Review. Retrieved on April 10, 2024 from https://hbr.org/1985/09/scenarios-uncharted-waters-ahead.

23. Chermack, Thomas J. (2011). Scenario Planning in Organizations: How to Create, Use, and Assess Scenarios. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, p.18-19. | Also see Schwartz, Peter (1996).

The Art of the Long View. Crown Currency and Ogilvy, James (2002). Creating Better Futures: Scenario Planning as a Tool For a Better Tomorrow. Oxford University Press.

24. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. John Wiley and Sons, p. 16.

25. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby (2020). How To Future: Learning and Sense-Making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 130.

26. Ibid., p.133.

27. Ibid., p. 134.

28. Smith, Scott (2017). “Lossy Futures: Choosing Your Resolution Level When Communicating Futures.” Medium. Retrieved on April 23, 2024 from https://medium.com/phase-change/ lossy-futures-285e310bbf21.

29. Bell, Wendell (2009). Foundations of Future Studies: History, Purpose, Knowledge – Human Science for a New Era, Volume 1. Transaction Publishers, p. 49-50

30. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design, and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth, p. 32.

31. Voros, Joseph (2017). “The Futures Cone, Use and History.” The Voroscope. Retrieved on April 22, 2024 from https://thevoroscope.com/2017/02/24/the-futures-cone-use-and-history/.

32. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). p. 33.

33. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming, The MIT Press, p. 4.

34. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). p. 32.

35. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby (2013). p. 4.

36. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). p. 33.

37.Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby (2013). p. 3.

38. See GK VanPatter (2020). Rethinking Design Thinking: Making Sense of the Future That Has Already Arrived. Humantific & NextDesign Leadership Network. and see Escobar Arturo (2018). Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Duke University Press.

39. Kahane, Adam (2012). Transformative Scenario Planning: Working Together to Change the Future. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, p. 4-5.

40. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design, and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth, p.33

41. World Economic Forum (2024). The Global Risks Report. p. 4; accessed from www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_Global_Risks_Report_2024.pdf

42. McGonigal, Jane (2022). Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything-even things that seem impossible today. Spiegel & Grau. p. 145

43. World Economic Forum (2024). The Global Risks Report. p. 37; accessed from www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_Global_Risks_Report_2024.pdf

44. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. John Wiley and Sons, p. 23-24.

45. Ibid., p. 24-25.

46. Ibid., p. 25.

47. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). p. 31.

48. See adrienne maree brown (2017). Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. AK Press.

49. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). p. 24.

50. Ibid., p. 35.

51. Ibid., p.29.

52. Ibid., p. 31.

53. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby. How To Future: Leading and Sense-Making In an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 4.

54. Ibid., p. 104.

55. Sterling, Bruce (2005). Shaping Things. The MIT Press. | Quoted in Bleeker, Julian, Nick Foster, Fabien Girardin, and Nicolas Nova (2022). The Manual for Design Fiction. The Near Future Laboratory.

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59. Britos Cavagnaro (2023). Experiments in Reflection: How to See the Present, Reconsider the Past, and Shape the Future. Ten Speed Press. Stanford University, p. 98-99.

60. Ibid., p. 101.

61. Bleeker, Julian, Nick Foster, Fabien Girardin, and Nicolas Nova (2022). The Manual for Design Fiction. The Near Future Laboratory., p. 36.

62. Ibid., p. 27.

63. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby (2020). How To Future: Leading and Sense-Making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 69.

64. Ibid., p. 71.

65. Bleeker, Julian, et al. (2022), p. 129.

66. Ibid., p. 17.

67. Dunne, Anthony and Fiona Raby (2012). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. The MIT Press, p. 151.

68. Bleeker, Julian, et al. (2022), p. 40.

69. Ibid., p. 139.

70. Ibid., p. 57.

71. McGonigal, Jane (2022). Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything-even things that seem impossible today. Spiegel & Grau. p. xvii

72. The Mount Vernon School (2022). The Impact-Ready Project, p 6

73. McGonigal, Jane (2022). p. xxi.

74. Ibid., p. xxviii-xxix.

75. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. John Wiley and Sons, p. 115.

76. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby. How To Future: Leading and Sense-Making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 4.

77. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). p. 117.

78. Witthoft, Scott (2022). This is a Prototype? The Curious Craft of Exploring New Ideas. Ten Speed Press. p.96

79. Ibid., p. 90.

80. Ertel, Chris and Lisa Kay Solomon (2014). Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change. p.60-61

81. Agency by Design, Framework for Maker-centered Learning accessed from http://www.agencybydesign.org/explore-the-framework

82. Witthoft, Scott (2022). p. 103-104.

83. Small, Andrea and Kelly Schmutte. Navigating Ambiguity: Creating Opportunity in a World of Unknowns (2022). Ten Speed Press. p.43

84. Ibid., p. 48-49.

85. Witthoft, Scott (2022). p. ix.

86. McGonigal, Jane (2022). Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything-even things that seem impossible today. Spiegel & Grau. p.18

87. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. John Wiley and Sons, p. 114.

88. McGonigal, Jane (2022). p. 19-20.

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91. Bridle, James (2022). Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines, The Search for a Planetary Intelligence. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, p.246.

92. Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne (2015). Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Harvard Business Review Press. p.8.

93. Kim, W. Chan and Renee Mauborgne (2015).

94. Small, Andrea and Kelly Schmutte. Navigating Ambiguity: Creating Opportunity in a World of Unknowns (2022). Ten Speed Press. p.54

95. Ibid., p. 54-55.

96. Ibid., p. 65-121.

97. Ibid., p. 92.

98. Ibid., p. 110.

99. Wack, Pierre (1984). Scenarios: The Gentle Art of Re-Perceiving. Unpublished Manuscript, Harvard Business School, p. 67.

100. Chermack, Thomas J. (2012) Scenario Planning in Organizations: How to Create, Use, and Assess Scenarios. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, p.46.

101. McGonigal, Jane. (2022). Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything-even things that seem impossible today. Spiegel and Grau. p. xxxii

102. Raihan, Nahrain and Mark Cogburn. Stages of Change Theory (2023). accessed from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ books/NBK556005/

103. McGonigal, Jane. (2022). Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything-even things that seem impossible today. Spiegel and Grau. p.xxix-xxx

104. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). Facing Out Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design, and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth. Bloomsbury, p. 30.

105. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby (2020). How To Future: Learning and Sense-making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 23-25.

106. Ertel, Chris and Lisa Kay Solomon (2014). Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic Conversations that Accelerate Change. Simon and Schuster. P. 58-59

107. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby. How To Future: Learning and Sense-Making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 43.

108. Ibid., p. 44.

109. Ibid., p. 45.

110. Ibid., p. 46.

111. McGonigal, Jane (2022). Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything-even things that seem impossible today. Spiegel and Grau. p.136.

112. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design, and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth, Bloomsbury, p. 39.

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114. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). p. 40.

115. McGonigal, Jane (2022). Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything-even things that seem impossible today. Spiegel and Grau. p.130.

116. World Economic Forum (2024). The Global Risks Report. p. 8; accessed from www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_The_ Global_Risks_Report_2024.pdf.

117. McGonigal, Jane (2022). p.146-147.

118. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby (2020). How To Future: Learning and Sense-Making in an Age of Hyperchange. Kogan Page, p. 32.

119. Badminton, Nikolas (2023). Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design, and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth, Bloomsbury, p. 40.

120. Smith, Scott and Madeline Ashby (2020). p. 114.

121. Van der Heijden, Kees (1997). Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation. John Wiley and Sons, p. 234.

122. Johansen, Bob (2017). The New Leadership Literacies: Thriving in a Future of Extreme Disruption and Distributed Everything. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

123. Dator’s Laws

124. McGonigal, Jane (2022). Imaginable: How to see the future coming and feel ready for anything-even things that seem impossible today. Spiegel and Grau. p.xxii