Futures for Impact - 6 lessons from our webinar
In a world of daily crises, budget cuts, and constant uncertainty, thinking about the future can feel like a luxury.
Last week, we explored why dedicating time to imagining possible futures - even and especially during moments of crises and uncertainty – should be a central part of organisational planning and culture.
Firetail Chief Executive Andy Martin was joined by Ben Holt, former Head of Foresight at IFRC Solferino Academy and author of The Strategic Foresight Book, and Giulio Quaggiotto, Government Innovation Advisor, Research Fellow at MIT and UCL, and former Head of Strategic Innovation at UNDP.
Here‘s what we learned.
1. Thinking about the future is innately human.
Every day, we all anticipate, imagine, and prepare for different futures. We invest in things like learning, relationships and our health because we have an idea about what it will bring us in the long-term.
Futures and foresight methods simply give structure to a universal skill.
Organisations acknowledge this skill implicitly by having planning meetings and strategy documents – using the future tense to state what they ‘will do'.
“Making plans, setting out to achieve something or prevent something that might happen is deeply human. We all do it, all the time.” - Ben
This is worth remembering when making the case to do this work at your organisation.
2. Foresight work is essential if you want to shape the future.
“The future is something you make. It isn’t just something that happens to you. I think that often in turbulent times, we need to reclaim the idea that we have agency in these big, complex situations.” - Andy
Governments, corporations and militaries all use futures methodologies as part of their strategy planning.
Ben argues that unless we too as civil society create bold and compelling ideas for what we might view as a preferred future, we are “doomed to be passengers” in a world optimised for business and geopolitical incentives.
Articulating a preferred future through an inclusive and participative process can allow leaders of organisations to shape trajectories - rather than simply exist in a cycle of reacting to whatever is thrown at you.
3. Making space and time for futures and foresight work is often welcomed, even by the busiest people.
It might seem counterintuitive to dedicate time to thinking about what the future could look like in 10 or 50 years whilst your organisation is trying to distribute life-saving supplies at the outbreak of war.
Yet knowing what to do after the dust settles depends on this type of ‘day-after planning’.
“I was really nervous sharing that [work] with the people in the operational teams dealing with war in real time… But actually it was really positively received, and someone said to me that it raised really important, challenging questions that they weren’t thinking about because of the nature of the crisis.” - Ben
During Ben’s time at the IFRC, he saw how foresight work:
supports rapid sense‑making
helps stress‑test plans against cascading risks e.g. access routes closing, displacement patterns shifting, climate shocks compounding, or misinformation degrading trust
enables teams to rehearse decisions before events overtake them and identify “no‑regrets” moves that bolster resilience
4. To challenge the status quo, you need to challenge people’s reality.
Innovation requires imagination.
The biggest obstacle to change is often the belief that "it's impossible." Giulio faced this challenge head-on while working with the UAE's Ministry of Possibilities.
His team's solution was to reimagine the benchmarking process. Instead of looking for established best practices, they sought out "early signals that are not necessarily established but have some early signs of promise."
“You might not have all the evidence but at least they cannot tell you it’s impossible.” - Giulio
This approach led to a project exploring how generative AI can be used to create Synthetic Memories for people with dementia, and another one which re-imagined data centres as "data forests" - where government archives would be encoded into plant DNA.
The key is to question your own assumptions - and to get other people comfortable with being uncomfortable. What realities seem utterly implausible to you now? What, in your view, would ‘never happen in a million years’? What if the seeds of impossible ideas were already growing somewhere?
5. Translate what you learn into action.
“The real test in futures and foresight work isn’t just generating interesting ideas. It’s being able to connect those insights to the people who make the decisions.” - Andy
Rather than trying to predict the future or to produce interesting ideas, the aim of any Futures exercise is to transform how you operate today.
Whilst this type of work is a way of reclaiming agency, it isn’t about control in a traditional sense, but about building a new kind of organisational coherence.
6. Start with conversations.
“Futures work often creates a safe space to talk about difficult things, and things that people wouldn’t say in a planning conversation or a more immediate conversation” - Andy
Sometimes the biggest benefit of really engaged futures and foresight thinking might be the cultural change that comes from addressing the difficult unspoken questions.
You don’t need to get to dive straight into technical, elaborate multi-year foresight programmes to create that environment.
The first step is to be deliberate about who you want to hear from, and then simply begin by talking to people.
Ben suggested you might like to "ask stakeholders what change they’ve seen in their lifetime, and what stories they want to be told in years to come about the work they did."
Interested in turning futures thinking into a core discipline for your organisation?
Drop us a message at mail@firetail.co.uk to explore how we can help.
To join our next webinar on the future of sport and purpose, sign up here.