Facilitating Futures Playbook
Want to explore Futures Thinking but don’t know where to start?
Need help mapping present states and matching them to potential action?
Want to help groups navigate uncertainty?
Navigate the present, prepare for the future
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Explore 15 methods and workshop tools for guiding a group through a meaningful futures conversation, from mapping the present to embodying the future and taking action.
This booklet is for facilitators, conveners, and anyone responsible for bringing people together and guiding meaningful conversations about futures.
Who is this Facilitating Futures playbook for?
Futures thinking can help us step back from urgency, look wider and deeper, and ask not just what might happen, but what matters most.
This booklet is for facilitators, conveners, and anyone responsible for bringing people together and guiding meaningful conversations.
Whether you’re running strategy sessions, creative workshops, community gatherings, or innovation sprints, there’s something here for you.
You don’t need to be a futurist or foresight expert. You just need a willingness to hold space for uncertainty and a belief that people can think differently together.
Engaging with the future can stir up both hope and collapse.
That’s part of the work. It’s why we need to keep asking not only what could happen, but who is this future good for? These methods won’t give you simple answers. But they will help you and your participants find new perspectives, and maybe even new responsibilities.
What's inside the Facilitating Futures playbook?
In this playbook, you’ll find 15 methods to support facilitating futures. This selection is designed to help you guide a group through a meaningful futures conversation, whether you’re working in strategy, innovation, education, or community development.
These aren’t the only tools out there, but they’re a good starting point: we picked them for variety and accessibility. They are all tools that facilitators can put to use in practice, even if they might not have their wished-for 4-days retreat to fully go through every step.
We’ve organized the methods to follow a flow that mirrors how many futures-focused workshops unfold in practice.
- You’ll start by helping the group open up, shifting into a more creative, expansive mindset.
- Then you’ll move into mapping the present, to ground the conversation in what’s actually happening now.
- From there, you’ll explore the future, working with scenarios, signals, and trends.
- As the conversation deepens, it’s time for envisioning and embodying: trying on new perspectives, stepping into the possibilities, imagining what different futures might feel like.
- Finally, we bring it back to the here and now with action planning: because the real power of futures work lies not in prediction, but in preparation.
Each method here comes with clear instructions and, just as importantly, insights from facilitators who’ve used these tools in real settings.
You’ll find their reflections and stories woven throughout the booklet, offering glimpses into how this work plays out in different cultures and contexts.
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