Suzanne Whitby

This fun activity allows participants to follow instructions on a MURAL whiteboard to perform a variety of activities and eventually share their name and location. You can use this as a short ice-breaker or energiser (remove some of the activities) or as either pre-work or an opening activity to make sure that everyone knows how to use MURAL before an online session begins.

A MURAL template is included for you to use and modify as you wish (at the bottom of this method).

Developed by futurist Sohail Inayatullah, CLA is a cornerstone of critical futures thinking. It’s designed to support more inclusive, layered conversations by opening up not just what might happen, but why we imagine it that way.

The Futures Wheel is a structured tool that helps groups explore the ripple effects of change. Starting from one event or trend, participants map out first-order consequences, and then expand outward into second- and third-order impacts. It encourages systems thinking and helps uncover both obvious and unexpected outcomes.

This method helps groups assess the potential impacts of future changes, both positive and negative, and reflect on how resilient they are to different types of disruption. It supports balanced, practical conversations that go beyond excitement or fear, focusing instead on preparation and adaptability.

This creative method invites participants to bring a possible future to life by designing or imagining a tangible object from that world. In the same way that we have historical artefacts from the past, this exercise is all about creating a tangible “artefact from the future.” It’s a way to make abstract scenarios feel real, prompting empathy, engagement, and grounded conversation.

Artefacts from the future can be run in a 2D or 3D approach.

When adopting the 3D approach, this method shifts participants into a making mindset. This engages their analytical thinking as well as intuition, improvisation, and embodied creativity. This helps surface insights that might not emerge through discussion or writing alone.

Radical Dreaming invites participants to imagine bold, transformative futures without the usual constraints of feasibility or current limitations. It’s a space to envision what’s truly possible, before practicalities narrow the field. This method centres imagination as a critical part of futures thinking.

Scenario Planning is a structured approach to imagining multiple, plausible futures. Rather than predicting one outcome, it helps groups explore a range of possibilities shaped by uncertainty and change. It’s a powerful tool for preparing strategy, stimulating creative thinking, and stress-testing assumptions

Horizon scanning is a structured method for identifying early signs of change, like emerging issues, trends, and weak signals that could shape the future. It helps participants look beyond the immediate and obvious, scanning across multiple domains to detect what might be coming next.

The Futures Triangle is a mapping tool that helps participants explore the forces shaping the future. It looks at three key elements: the pull of the future, the push of the present, and the weight of the past. Together, these form a dynamic picture of the landscape of change.

This activity invites participants to look for weak signals, which are early signs of change that may shape the future. It helps build awareness of emerging trends, stimulates curiosity and encourages participants to notice what’s happening at the edges of the present.

Named after futurist Fred Polak, this reflective exercise asks participants to consider how they see the future, whether it’s bright or bleak, and how those images shape the present. It helps surface underlying assumptions and emotional responses to change.

A creative warm-up and visioning exercise that invites participants to imagine a future world or situation and describe what it feels like to be there. This approach helps surface early assumptions, hopes, and curiosities, while gently introducing the idea that the future can be imagined and shaped.