Learn About Futurism with Foresight Specialist Sabrina Sullivan
Season 3 Episode 6
Why are people inside the same organization planning for completely different futures?
In this episode of How We Future, Lisa talks with foresight expert Sabrina Sullivan about what futures work looks like beyond buzzwords and trend decks. Drawing on her experience working with global organizations, like Ford Motor Company and Deloitte, Sabrina explains how shared future scenarios help teams surface assumptions, align decisions, and move forward even in uncertain times.
The conversation explores the Foresight Spectrum—a framework that names the many roles foresight practitioners actually play, from explorers and translators to facilitators and connectors. Sabrina emphasizes outcomes: building future literacy, enabling better conversations, and helping turn insight into action.
Lisa and Sabrina also dive into the human side of futures work: trust, emotional readiness, and why this work can feel uncomfortable by design. They discuss tools like scenario rehearsal, playful facilitation, and the Leaders for Humanity card deck, all designed to help people practice navigating uncertainty before they’re forced to react to it.
The episode closes with Sabrina’s work bringing futures thinking to younger learners and a powerful reminder that asking “What problems do I care about?” may be more important than asking “What job do I want?”
In this conversation, you’ll learn:
The different roles futurists actually play day to day
Why uncertainty can be a source of agency rather than anxiety
How practicing the future through play and reflection changes how we lead
This episode is a thoughtful look at how we can rehearse what’s ahead, build common language for complexity, and create futures that are more intentional, inclusive, and human.
Links from the episode:
Sabrina’s Website (by+by)
Uncertain by Maggie Jackson
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Sabrina Sullivan: How do we build a standard view of what 2035 or the future could look like and use those scenarios to facilitate conversations across any part of the organization? It’s often fragmented, so people have very different views of the future. If we create this overarching look of how goods, people, and data might move in that future, it creates the world that then we can start to dive into.
Lisa Kay Solomon: I’m Lisa Kay Solomon, and this is How We Future, where I talk to some of my favorite changemakers about shaping tomorrow starting today.
This season on How We Future, we’re exploring the classes we wish we’d taken earlier, classes on navigating uncertainty, on making sense of complexity, and on learning how to stay curious and adaptable in a world that refuses to stand still. Today’s guest is Sabrina Sullivan, and if there were a course called How to Think Like a Futurist at Any Age, she’d be teaching it. Sabrina has spent years helping organizations look beyond short-term plans to understand what’s emerging, what’s at stake, and how to make better decisions in the face of uncertainty.
As a foresight practitioner who’s worked for companies like the Ford Motor Company and others, Sabrina walks us through what futures work actually looks like in practice. Sabrina is also doing remarkable work bringing futures thinking to younger learners, helping kids build comfort with ambiguity and imagination. You’ll learn about the Maybe Monster and why it’s important to teach children not just to ask, “What do I want to be,” but “What problems do I care about solving?” So consider this episode a class on sitting with uncertainty without freezing, practicing the future before we react to it, and reminding ourselves that the future is something we help create together.
Sabrina Sullivan, I am so excited to have you on How We Future. I’m really appreciative of the work you’re doing to clarify this body of work called corporate foresight, strategic foresight, and specifically want to talk about the foresight spectrum work that you’ve been doing where you have been trying to capture from a global group of folks doing this work, like what is this work, and what do we call it? So maybe we could start there with your work around the foresight spectrum.
Sabrina: Yeah, I’m really lucky to know people like yourselves and others, and in a lot of those conversations, folks were always going, “This is what I do, but people don’t know what it is.” People don’t know, even my parents, when they say, “You’re a futurist,” they must say different things when they go to the gym with different folks, but that was the mapping of “how do we understand?” Even the origin was around career navigation. If you’re going to go into this, how do you navigate into it? How do you navigate through it? Because in a lot of cases, some people feel like it’s their life, but it hasn’t always been their title as they went, and so we just said, why don’t we ask the world?
So we asked almost 100 people across the world, using the channels that we love, to say, “Who wants to fill out a survey?” Over 30 countries, to ask less about their titles and what work do they really do as a foresight practitioner? To understand those things that are distinctly foresight in their roles. But what we started to get to was, how do we ground this at outcomes? So instead of us saying, we do scenarios, we do scanning– these sort of things, the methods we have– how are we driving value? What sort of outcomes are we getting to? Because time and again, when I have to justify my work, it needs to be in a language that is around outcomes and value and the impact that we’re having. So we were starting and trying to divulge into those things.
And what we got to from people just saying, “Here’s what I like to call myself,” everything from a time truth translator to a horizons gardener to, “I am the futurist in residence,” all of these different things, into eight distinct roles that people will play distinctly foresight. Then to really drive it from an outcome standpoint, a lot of things emerged from, they’re not distinctly foresight, but these are the enablers that make it stick.
And being the nerd that I am, we categorized it into different elements, but it started to really create something exciting because when we called it the spectrum, it’s this color wheel of complementary colors, different blends, and everyone being different based off of the context in which they’re working.
Lisa: It’s amazing. I love that you are capturing it visually in a way that people can find themselves in. It’s very welcoming. I just want to get very specific about some of the roles, as you said, some of the ways they were showing up to create value. Roles like an explorer or a strategist or a communicator or a facilitator. Talk a little bit about some of these themes of roles regardless of what their actual title was. What were they doing day-to-day?
Sabrina: Yeah, we trimmed it up into three categories or buckets. The first one being insight and meaning. If you’re working on scanning the horizon, there’s this element of explorer, but then you have to somewhat communicate those things and translate it into something. It’s being able to tie that weird and wonderful early signal in the fringe that we found into it and making it somewhat relevant for someone to care about in the organization.
But then there’s this element of how are people driving capability and experience? So when you’ve got that intelligence, how are people facilitating it or designing artifacts or experiences to be able to understand that? And also build the future’s literacy so people have an openness or a capacity to be able to learn that.
And then the third one was around application and influence. So how are we then taking these insights, we’ve experienced it, we’ve had a breakthrough, around what the future could look like, how we exist in the future. And then how do we drive actions on this? Who might we need to talk to? So we talk about connectors in that world and the developers that are starting to really build processes around it. So how does it become something real and embedded in the organization?
We found those categories, but people always had a dominant role that they played, and then these secondary ones. It was usually a mix of three or four depending on what they did. And so you could map it of like, “I am really an explorer and a communicator and a translator,” because they’re being asked for that front-end intelligence on that side. Whereas other people are saying, “You know what, I’ve got a team around myself. They’re doing a lot of the work, but I need to be the person that’s connecting it to the policymakers, the business decision makers, to make sure that this lands in a way that is tangible as a decision or an action.”
Lisa: My gosh, Sabrina, just as you shared that, I could see like three different classes that we need.
Sabrina: Totally.
Lisa: I think it’s important to say these are foundationally human craft-based skills, so to speak, the soft skills that are the hard skills. There’s nothing in those three categories, insight and meeting, capability and experience, application and influence, that can be just outsourced to a gen AI. It requires contextual knowledge. Where are you? How do you understand the values that are at play? Empathy. How can you get others along, knowing that they’re either overwhelmed by it or excited about it? Design capabilities, like what’s needed right now? Do I need an artifact? Do I need a deck? Do I need a conversation? All of those are nuanced, and you don’t just get them overnight.
And I think one of the gifts you’re giving the community is this language, this broader language, to just name it, so that folks doing this work don’t feel so, just, lonely in some ways or lost, like, “What is this thing that I’m doing? I know that I’m doing this thing, but it’s--” Because it’s not something that’s readily recognized, a lawyer, an accountant, a trainer of sorts, it really is cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and can be very hard to name.
Sabrina: We started with foresight practitioners. We wanted to do something for the field, our collaborators, our partners, a lot of those lonely foresighters that might be that one person working in an organization or trying to scream from outside an organization into it. What we found is maybe this language can also be a language that we can work with leaders to better explain and be able to use when they’re asking for things that might be tied to the future in some way.
No full answers, but that’s really the dream and what we’re trying to connect is, how do we do this for foresight practitioners that then it serves as a bridge for foresighters to be able to speak with leaders and leaders be able to use this to know what to ask for and also to somewhat speak that language? So it is like a meta-translator role of what this could look like.
Lisa: It is. It’s also, to that point, an inclusive, I wouldn’t say diagnostic, but a sort of opener of like, “What’s missing here?” Like, “Wow, we really have this part nailed, but I’m not getting the traction I need. Maybe I need a translator. Maybe I need a different kind of communicator. Maybe I need to build a capacity so that others can get it.”
And increasingly, when I get asked to do futures work, I really am trying to zero in on like, Do you want and are you looking for new ideas about how the future might unfold? Or are you looking for your own capabilities, your own skill development in order to be able to do that on an ongoing basis? And I think that’s certainly a core differentiator.
I want to get concrete for folks that are listening that may be newer to foresight because you spent a lot of years actually working in a foresight capacity for Ford Motor Company. And I think that’s a very like, we know what Ford Motor Company is, that’s a car company. I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about like, what did the futures function, what did that serve within Ford, and specifically, what were some of the things that you were working on, just to make it super concrete for folks.
Sabrina: There’s a number of ongoing rung things that are an ask from maybe an advanced product development team around a particular horizon that they’re looking at, a particular topic like “fill in future of blank.” One of the big core pieces while I was there was how do we build a standard view of what 2035 or the future could look like and use those scenarios to facilitate conversations across any part of the organization and use that as a bit of a standard because one of the things that becomes a challenge in any organization, whether it was Ford or some of the other organizations that I’ve worked in and with, is that it’s often fragmented, so people have very different views of the future.
So if we create this overarching look of how goods, people, and data might move in that future, it creates the world that then we can start to dive into. And so we could be working with incubator teams around what are some of those interesting startups or ecosystems that we might have to start looking at because they could be strong players in the future. It could be a team that is already working on a strategy, it has a strategy, and we’re going to work with them to stress test it against these four plausible futures to say, “Did we miss anything or is there a no regret move or a scaffolding that we have to build into it?”
Then there might be some that are like, “We want to explore this from a sense of saying, okay we’ve got a different angle on a consumer, but we’re looking for opportunities or white space areas to be able to delve into a little bit further.” So it’s that element of everything from white space opportunities or innovations to risks to it. And anyone who goes through scenarios is, we would have to make sure that we ground it in like we’ve been doing this for many years and constantly updating it, and that no one future that we will present to you will come true, but elements of all of them will. So that’s why we’re going to spend time going through all of them, and they’re not going to feel comfortable, and you don’t get to pick just one that is going to be what you’re going to base it off of.
So there’s many different elements, but it’s being able to work with those that we’re interested in. And this is from the leadership level down to even some specific skill teams that could apply to it. And folks had very different levels of receptiveness or understanding because this is, as I said, hard work. It doesn’t happen in a half hour, and it’s challenging assumptions and exposing assumptions across the team that even that I feel is valuable because people go, “That’s not how I thought the future was going to pan out.” We go, “Okay, well, we need to make sure that this is clear because in the execution of this strategy, that’s where things can fall apart if we haven’t surfaced those assumptions.”
Lisa: You and I have talked a little bit about this because our work straddles both futures and design. Sometimes I say, unlike when you learn design for the first time or some of the design thinking boot camps or experiences, at the end of 90 minutes, two hours, a day, you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I’m so much more creative than I thought. Look at this,” because you’ve taught them some things, and there’s this euphoria, and you’re excited to bring it back. Still hard work.
Futures is a little different. Futures, you get to the other side, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, this is questioning everything.” It can be overwhelming. There’s a different emotional. So I really appreciate how you kept saying it doesn’t happen in a half hour. It’s pre-work. It’s hard.
And when done well, what I like to say is that futures and design can have outsized leverage for the reasons that you were talking about. One, it could help you identify, as you said, the white space, areas we need to explore, people we need to build relationships with. And on the flip side, it could help you be more resilient by identifying the no-regret moves, what’s robust among all of them, how do we keep this as an ongoing learning capacity? Versus like, “We did the scenarios, here they are, next.” So I appreciate just the both breadth of how you described that work and depth.
One thing that I want to come back to, which you talk about in both the Spectrum work and this work that often goes unsaid is the importance of building trusted relationships. You have to get invited into the room, or else it doesn’t matter how good your scenarios are.
Sabrina: Yes, you need to be trusted. You need to understand their problem. Even at the front end, sometimes we would spend a lot of time framing up, “Why is this relevant?” Because a scenario was not always the tool or the method to be able to help them in that moment. It’s not something that you do at the end when you’re just looking to tack on a slide. There’s a lot in terms of that fit. To go back to that human element, sometimes I find myself doing less of the horizon scanning and I’m doing more therapy and human conditioning, let’s call it that, to be able to allow people to be open to it or create those spaces where people are welcoming and welcomed to be able to step in the future.
I even think back to when we were coming up with these 2035 scenarios. I wasn’t actually with Ford, I was with Deloitte on the other side. There was one person that just put up their hand and said, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing. I so rarely get to step away from what I’m doing and think about the future, but I see the value.” I find that exceptional. Me being the person that wants to take it a step further, I go, “Well, how are we building the practices and rituals so that this doesn’t seem like an exceptional one-off experience?” It doesn’t have to be a giant scenario workshop, but that you’re thinking about it on a day-to-day basis in some way.
Lisa: Yeah, and you’re amazing at thinking about it, not only in how you frame it, but also in the materials that you create. I want to just applaud and get excited about a new set of materials. So for those of you that are listening and not watching, I’m holding up this beautiful card deck that Sabrina helped create called Leaders for Humanity. There’s some blue cards and some yellow cards. You want to describe this game for our friends listening?
Sabrina: Yes. I’m going to give a shout out. If people play games like Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples, it’s not always widespread. We’ve used this around the globe. I explain it as the blue cards are a prompt. It’s a fill in the blank or a question about a future scenario. It’s simplified to maybe a single trend or a convergence of trends that a leader may have to face in the future. I’m not talking a futurist, I’m talking about anyone. Then the yellow cards are a range of different behaviors, actions, decisions that you might take to be able to navigate the future. In foresight speak, these range from current practices that we see amongst leaders to probable, plausible, and possible, maybe a bit more eccentric futures.
What we’re encouraging people to do is, easily and somewhat in a humorous way, practice those futures and understand how it might be quite difficult to answer immediately how you might behave in that weird and wonderful future. Very plausible. The scenarios are nothing but plausible. Then how are we using the cards to challenge our ways of thinking to recognize where we might have been a little more comfortable in seeking that one right answer when the whole premise for this was how do we reimagine leadership when everything becomes a little bit more uncertain and there isn’t necessarily that one playbook for how we approach the future or how we make decisions and how we create really human futures for ourselves?
Lisa: It’s such an important point. We’re trained to go off of best practices and case studies and see what’s worked before. There are no best practices from the future. That, of course, doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it. I think these cards allow you to rehearse the future or have these conversations when you’re not in a crisis mode. I just want to read a couple because I think they’re so fabulous.
On the blue card, “AI is now responsible for organizational governance. How do you champion the human voice in decision-making?” Oh my gosh, that’s a big one. Here’s another one, slightly different, “How would you lead in a world where people are constantly migrating due to climate change?” Again, we know this is on the horizon. We don’t exactly know when, but reality is people are going to have to move to be in safer places. How do you think through that?
Then on the yellow side, oh, I like this, “Establish a dynamic strategy room where strategic plans are continually updated with global events.” Don’t we all still think about the futures room? I often talk about creating a futures wall. Like, “Hey, everybody--” Post an article or something or do it digitally. This is another great one. “Establish a board of directors made up of individuals from every generation.” Why aren’t we doing that? That’s so easy to do.
Sabrina: It’s an idea. The fun thing has been when we play this, people go and say exactly that, like, “Why aren’t we doing that?” or “What might be that lo-fi prototype?” Because in dynamic strategy rooms, I’ve been in companies where we have strategy rooms and they could be pinned up PowerPoint slides. It could be something more-- Dynamic is a completely different approach to doing that versus more of a static and go and experience or encourage people, but are people going into it? How do you create that really is that dynamic room that you can manage and anticipate and navigate that future?
Lisa: I love these because once you see them, you can’t unsee them. I want to go create a dynamic room immediately. You also had another card in here about rewarding people for questioning status quo. How might that go wrong? Instead of tucking it away, encouraging it. Building off of that card about intergenerational representation, I know one of your pet projects has been helping our younger citizens and leaders and students and learners get more comfortable with concepts of ambiguity and uncertainty. I would love for you to tell us about the Maybe Monster.
Sabrina: Yes. I love working with adults, but sometimes, I think like, “Well, could I make my life easier in the future if I start seeding some things with younger folks?” I have an 8-year-old and a 10-year-old. I call them my interns. I’ve called them my interns since COVID hit because they were always around. Whether they were trying to do my hair in the background or whatever. What I have continued to find as I work with them is that I need to do better to make sure that I’m translating my work.
What really precipitated that was also a connection of someone that we both know, Maggie Jackson, in her book Uncertain. Bringing together this research and case studies and scholarly research around the uncertainty and the power of uncertainty and how we use this, and she calls it wisdom in motion. There are a few principles within there that I said, these are ones that we could start to translate and find tangible ways with young folks.
I wrote the Maybe Monster around some key principles of uncertainty that came through that book, but also that I see adults and people that I’m working with struggle a lot. There’s this element of perfection. When we don’t find something that we’re looking for, we give up, but we forget about how sometimes searching for one thing can allow us to find other things. There’s that part of the journey. Another piece is around how we collaborate and how many ideas can also lead to new bricolage opportunities.
For us in the design space or in innovation, we know that that’s a principle, but when we think of it in the Maybe Monster book around having an opportunity to build a mural and an individual child going like, “I don’t know what the right answer, I don’t know what people expect of this. Can someone just tell me what to do?” that’s another principle. Then the two other ones are really around how we might have to take pause before having answers. I think that’ll be really interesting as we look to the future with machine and human collaboration.
The last piece around thinking about how do we start to understand that we can collect uncertainties, and that’s really where the power and potential comes as we go in the future. It’s just the start of it, but it’s a key piece that was incredibly well received by not only students that I’ve been working with in my daughter’s classroom, they were like, “I want more. Here’s the next anthology that I want to talk about this piece,” but also it gave a way for us to start to talk with more complex learners as well that may struggle with more abstract thinking and that we can put it in more concrete terms for their own life around how they navigate uncertainty, particularly if there’s emotional needs that we have to manage, and they’re rooted in not having an answer and not having something right away in that sense.
Lisa: Even just that notion that uncertainty is the source of power, not anxiety. How do we lean into it? What a beautiful thing to seed early. I love that you’re bringing it into classrooms and you’re getting them to respond and you’re getting them to play with these ideas and make them better. Is it out? When can we get the Maybe Monster?
Sabrina: It’s not out yet, but the thing that I’m most excited about is I always think of what could go with it. The Maybe Monster was not lightly chosen. When I think of monsters, I think of how we treat maybe or an uncertainty as something that’s often fear-based, it’s scary, whereas the monster is something that people are calling in to help build out a mantra or remind ourselves that it is not so scary. As we’re building that out, the slow process is us imagining how we visualize this.
Where we’re at right now, to be seen when it comes to full publishing, is do we ever actually depict the monster on any page? Because for each child, that monster is going to look completely different and might even show up very differently based off of the context. The only thing that we’re working on right now is that you may just only see the tail, which is a light-up question mark.
Lisa: I love that so much. Carissa Carter, who’s a colleague of mine, has an exercise, she teaches at the D School, she’s our academic director, called Map Your Monsters. It comes from some research she did around early map makers, very early map makers that would go into these rough seas and they didn’t quite know how to describe all the turbulence, what was happening. They would literally on these old maps put a monster there. She’s doing it as Map Your Monsters as a way of inviting people to lean into what is giving them fear and uncertainty because, of course, once we name it, then we can work around it as opposed to sitting in the paralysis and their fear.
I love that instinct, that we don’t want to give them what the monster should look like. This is up to them, nor do we want to presuppose. Then you’re also reminding me, Sabrina, last week I had a chance to speak at an innovative learning conference for educators, teaching our younger learners and leaders, K-12. It was so nice. This is a conference I’ve been speaking at for a long time, and there was an educator there. She said, “I still remember when you came in years ago and you taught us about the power of reframe through Monsters, Inc.”
In that experience, what I talked about was, of course, designers are great at reframing questions. The whole premise of Monsters, Inc. is that you need to scare more to get the energy. The punchline at the very end was like, well, what if laughter gives you 100 times more energy? What if we’re going after the wrong thing? Anyway, just another application of monsters to the rescue.
Sabrina: It’s all connected because I’m always like-- too much information. My last name’s Sullivan. When I was playing sports in high school, I was referred to as Sully, so a lot of people would get me Sully. For me, I also struggle illustrating because I want to draw Sully because Sully’s so connected to who I was. I love the power of the reframe. If you weren’t going to bring up Monsters, Inc., I was definitely going to bring up Monsters, Inc.
Lisa: Heck, yes. All right. Speaking of empowering our young folks and the Maybe Monster, you did something really extraordinary recently. I want to make sure that we all hear about it. Tell us about the Futures Passport pilot that you just did with your daughter’s class.
Sabrina: What we wanted to do is have a way that this grade three class could, through an hour, hour and a half of daily activities, start to better understand or explore the future, grounding in how we view the future. That was day one. Day two was a mini what-if lab so that we could start to be more expansive. The most imaginative people can always use some more prompts, what if? Then we started to ground in the Maybe Monster. It’s like, okay, but this sometimes feels uncomfortable.
Then we went, if you’re looking at the future, how do we stop asking about what jobs you want to do, but what problems do you care about now and that you might care about in the future? To frame it up to create a job of the future. Whether we call it a job-- we use job because it was simpler for people that-- Anyone in the field of future work goes, “Is it a job? Are we calling it that? Are we calling it a gig? Are we calling it a side project or a side quest?” Whatever. Then for the rest of the week, they started to noodle on what this problem that they wanted to explore and then what jobs might be experienced. They physically started to build also a tool that they had.
What was also really powerful in this is I couldn’t leave the parents out of it either. The students also had an opportunity to have their parents fill out a survey about what they thought their child might think about. Do they think about the future? What kind of future would they love to explore together? It was a nod to those museums of the future that have people, families, communities able to explore what is possible in the future.
Then they also went and did an interview at home to say, “Hey, how did you think about the future? What kind of jobs did you think about? What do you deal with today or use today that you thought was unimaginable?” Smartphones, iPhones. They were a big thing in all of these pieces, but it allowed both of them to also open up a conversation about what the future could hold in their own household. Whether it was a guardian, a parent, or friends, the community members around them.
Lisa: I just love that you thought to bring in the parents. It reminds me of the brilliance of Sesame Street in the early Wayback Machine, the idea of educational television that was for kids and their guardians or parents or adults to sit with together, to learn together. That conversation opening up versus learning in silos or the parent is the one that knows and the kid is the one that comes back who is questioning. How could we both question? How could we both model learning? That is so brilliant. Congratulations on that. Then there was a hiring fair. Tell me about that. How did that go?
Sabrina: Just to go on like yours, how do we create that conversation? The Future’s Passport was chosen because each day they essentially got a visa. Who knows whether these parents still like me because on the day of what if, some kid said, “My parents don’t want me asking what if questions because I ask too many.” I said, “Now you have your passport and I’ve given you a visa to do all of these things and explore the world.” This hiring fair was they had an opportunity to set up this hiring fair and exhibit and start to recruit other helpers that may care about these problems, can start to frame up these different jobs, and also show their prototype.
What we started with yesterday were the kindergartners and then it’s expanded to the grade fours and then they have parent conferences where the adults get to do this. This ranged from everything from one was a magic milkshake maker. I started to ask her, and I wish we had sound bites because they just describe it even better than I can possibly do it. The problem that she found was that there might be a lot of medicines, which she felt herself basically based off of some of the ailments that she faced, and there needed to be a better way to administer it. She actually wanted to create new and different ways to be able to offer medicines that kids would enjoy. It embodied it in this, “I’m the magic milkshake maker and I have this milkshake device that I am going to use as one of the tools.”
There were people that were very concerned about space debris. They said, “It’s very cool. I’m thinking about satellites, but we’re going to have to manage this space debris.” Another person goes, “I love a trash truck.” It’s like those kids that love a dump truck that comes through, but they’re concerned about ocean cleanup. They were not only being a cleanup person themselves, but we started to really hone in. You’re not just doing cleanup, you’re part of a team. He’s like, “No, I am literally the underwater ocean cleanup truck operator because I want to be operating heavy equipment in some way in the spaces that I want to address problems.”
It was this huge range. They weren’t problems that were any different than us as adults are grasping. I always think there’s no reason not to have these conversations with kids because they are needing it because the amount of conversation we had about AIs or robots taking over the world, I was going, okay, we got to reframe this. What’s good about this future? What’s tricky about this future? How might we make sure that this future is kind and fair? Even at that level, you had 8 to 10-year-olds still deeply engaging in valuable conversations about these potential futures.
Lisa: That’s incredible. Already just layering in a sense of agency that they can shape the future, purpose, meaning all the things that we know helps create thriving young people that then grow up to be citizens and leaders in our community. What I often say is we can’t expect people to be masters at the things they haven’t practiced. If we are systemically taking that away from them, where they’re developing their executive functioning, where they’re learning to work with others, they’re learning to get comfortable exploring the unknown, giving it form, sharing with others, getting that feedback, it’s just incredible.
I want every educator to be listening to this to figure out how they can incorporate a Futures Passport, questions about what if. It very much echoes some of the work that I do at Stanford around inventing the future where we say like, “Hey, what is the job description of the future when you’re working on a new 3D printer?” We’re all going to maybe be in a place where we have access to medicine that we can print. Who’s going to be able to design that machine?
Sabrina: Who’s doing that?
Lisa: Clearly, your students are going to be doing that. That’s incredible.
Sabrina: The things that I am excited about, worried about from these sort of experiences are, one, it does, like the amazing educators. I see firsthand what complexity they’re dealing with in the classroom. One, I build strong empathy. What we design coming into this week does not mean that was exactly what we did every single day because it was a different context and we added new things or we had to tweak new things or take a different approach. I have to give a shout out to the educators that are open and willing and seeing this as a clear need to build up some level of hope and allow these students to not just have to live by a rubric because that’s what they’re struggling with, it’s like, “I can’t answer every question.”
There are organizations that are doing this amazing work that I can take inspiration from, like Teach the Future and how they’re building out these longer forms. For this, this gives this element of how there’s a short, practical, creative way that people can start to experience it that you can then build on. That’s what I’m hoping to be able to bring to the table.
Lisa: I love it. Again, going back to what we were talking about earlier within organizations. I hope that organizational leaders see that this is capable too, that yes, their KPIs are calling, their OKRs, their business plans, but this is the work.
I’ve been thinking about it too. It’s not even just emerging strategy. I’ve been thinking about it more like optimistic offense. How do we get ahead of it in that way? I just think, Sabrina, the work you are doing with leaders across all generations is so profound. As someone that has been trying to advance the field, trying to do it with others, trying to give a language for it and accessible tools, I just want to thank you because I know you are doing this and bringing others along, and particularly the work you’re doing with our young people is just so profound.
I hope everybody gets a copy of the Maybe Monster when it comes out. We will provide links in the show notes to the Foresight Spectrum and all of the fantastic work that you’re doing. Just thank you so much for being part of How We Future, for who you are, and how you show up in the world.
Sabrina: I’m excited for the team sport that can come out of all of this work.
Lisa: As we wrap up this episode, I keep thinking about how valuable it would be if we had more classes on futures thinking, classes to help us remember that agency, imagination, and empathy are skills we can build over time. Here’s a small way to practice Sabrina’s outlook this week. Take 10 minutes and ask yourself, what’s something that feels uncertain right now? What’s one possibility, even a small one, that could exist inside that uncertainty? Once you name the uncertainty, it becomes something you can work with instead of something that works against you.
If you liked this episode, I’d encourage you to listen to our conversation with Jeff Rogers, where we explore connected ideas of how futures facilitation through play can help us navigate change when the path forward isn’t clear. If you’re enjoying this season, please take a moment to follow How We Future, leave a comment or review, and share the episode with someone that might need this class too. You can also go deeper by subscribing to the How We Future sub stack, where we extend these conversations with reflections, tools, and prompts you can try between episodes. As always, thank you for being a part of the How We Future community.
I’m Lisa Kay Solomon. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week.