School of International Futures

In response to comments on ‘Playing with Time’

By

Introduction

Thank you for your thoughtful responses to the preview of my book, Playing with Time. I’ve been humbled by your kind offers, insightful feedback, and probing questions. You come from very different backgrounds, countries and ages – so it has been really interesting to engage with the wide range of your comments.  As I work to incorporate these into the book—set to be shared with early readers in March—I wanted to take a moment to reflect more broadly on the themes that emerged.  This essay series continues the conversation, responding to each of your questions each week. Starting with the first one, and continuing onto the next.

1. Help me understand this broad issue as a non-expert – or indeed someone who has never come across the field of foresight.  What do terms like “futures” or “intergenerational fairness” or “future generations” mean – and why did you settle on “Future-Inspired Transformative Stewardship”?  How are they connected and why are they so relevant today?  

2. What can we learn from Wales?  The Wales Well-being of Future Generations Act offers a fascinating case study.  What are the broader insights from its implementation, and what lessons can we draw from this and other countries?

3. What is the Declaration on Future Generations (DFuture Generations), and what happened at the Summit of the Future (SOTF)?  What are important considerations for implementation? Where did SOIF prioritise its interventions? And in light of past global aspirational ambitions that have fallen short, what makes the DFuture Generations different? What do countries hope to achieve with this effort?

4. What is SOIF planning for 2025 and beyond?  Can you share the broad outlines of SOIF’s approach this year for activating long term governance adoption using the DFuture Generations? How does it connect with your other advisory work and the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP) programme?  And how does it all sit within SOIF’s broader mission and vision for field and movement building?

5. Who is the wider community engaging in this work?  What diverse questions do they bring, and what are they looking for? What unites them into a community as opposed to disparate groups?

6. What does this mean for me as an individual?  How can I implement these ideas in my organisation, community, or personal practice? What skills and capabilities do I need, and what changes should I prioritise?

7. What does this mean for the organisation I work in?  How can I take this forward – whether I am part of a purpose-driven business, a government ministry/agency, or a foundation? What are the steps I can take next?  How can SOIF support me, whether through trusted advice and operational guidance, community and solidarity, insights and technical innovations, capability building and assessment.

8. What’s the generational vision for this movement for change?  How do we collectively build the movement to drive a liberatory and transformed futures – what role do I, SOIF and others play in developing and implementing the strategy?

9. Answering specific questions:

  • What is the link between this agenda and live issues I am wrestling with – in particular democracy and governance, but also social justice, health, AI, etc.?
  • Can you share more about some practical tools and methods, from techniques like  3 Horizons (3H) to principles of futures thinking, network-weaving, and coalition-building?
  • What are some guiding principles to apply across our work?
  • What are signals and insights that you are picking up from across the global community?
  • How can I find out more about the roles of archetypes and the nature of craftsmanship in futures practices?

The essays above are far from a comprehensive approach to exploring the topic of foresight, wellbeing of future generations, and FITS – instead they respond to your curiosity and reactions to the ideas in the preview.  Those signals have helped me understand the perspectives and interests of a book audience – you and others – that is intentionally geographically and sectorally diverse. By the time the final essay is published, I will be ready to share the 150 page book draft to provide a much more structured resource. If you would like to look through the sections and provide feedback as valued members of the community, please add yourself to this list of over 40 early readers by contacting KathleenandAnnalisa@soif.org.uk.

Playing With Time: A foresight practice to help build hopeful futures by transforming today – the book sections

Preamble – Introducing the crew, planting the seeds and starting to juggle. Read this section to connect to the motivations for – and the peculiar challenges in – writing a book to introduce Future-Inspired Transformative Stewardship.

In the face of complex and urgent challenges. And opportunities – Reclaiming hope. Read this section to get an overview of the turbulent moment we are in and why we need to play with time when making decisions in order to transform the present and future.

Introducing the Foresight and Futures field – The mirror and the crystal ball – the latent potential of the foresight discipline. Read this section to understand the value of the foresight and futures field and how the practice of FITS builds on this work.

The Whirlpool and the Prism – A comprehensive overview of the practice for stewarding transformation through being inspired by the future. Read this (very long!) section to get a detailed practical introduction to the frameworks and tools of FITS.

The Journey ahead – Outlining elements of an agenda for further collaboration, with an invitation to continue travelling together. Read this section to explore where we can go next.

Resources – networks, toolkits, articles.  Read this section for a list of resources.

Essay 1

Help me understand this broad issue as a non-expert – or indeed someone who has never come across the field of foresight.  What do terms like “futures” or “intergenerational fairness” or “future generations” mean – and why did you settle on “Future-Inspired Transformative Stewardship”?  How are they connected and why are they so relevant today?

I could write a book only answering this point… But in order to keep this brief, I will share four things to provide some helpful clarity – illustrated by some of my favourite quotes.

1. “Foresight: the capacity to think systematically about the future to inform decision making today. It is a cognitive capacity that we need to develop as individuals, as organisations and as a society” – Maree Conway1

Thinking forward and back – imagining future possibilities and reflecting on what did happen in the past – is a deeply human practice. Across cultures, religions, art, and science, this approach has taken many forms. Wendy Schultz’s A Brief History of Futures and Richard Fisher’s The Long View are two resources that catalog the diversity of these traditions.2 The formal discipline of foresight provides a structured, systematic approach to what many people and societies already do intuitively.

As Maree Conway’s quote highlights, foresight helps us think differently about the times we live in. It helps us challenge our expectations and assumptions yet remain rigorous in our logic. Despite being established over 70 years ago, the field has remained marginal, with limited awareness of its tools and applications. As turbulent times have increased uncertainty, the practice has gained prominence as an important way to support decision-making in complex situations.

In practice, terms like futures studies, strategic foresight, and foresight are often used interchangeably – and you won’t go wrong if you do so too as a novice.  In my view, esoteric definitional questions – though fascinating and important to the field – consume scarce resources and confuse newcomers for little benefit.  So effectively, I try to duck these debates since what is important is a focus on what foresight/strategic foresight/future studies offers:

  • A framework for collectively and concretely exploring the unknown: It helps us acknowledge that the futures will be different from today, that future generations will have their own priorities, and that we think systematically about possible futures to guide action. Note, practitioners often use the term futureS in the plural to underline its plurality and unknowingness as per Jim Dator’s first law of the Future: ““The future” cannot be “predicted” because “the future” does not exist.”3
  • A holistic approach to incorporate diverse insights as evidence: Foresight incorporates historical analogies, indigenous knowledge, and collective lived experience alongside models to explore interconnected drivers of change. By connecting patterns of change, systems, and alternative multiple futures – not always in that order – it supports structured thinking through the implications of disruptive change in a multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder way.  This involves a level of plurality and inclusivity that goes way beyond typical processes of representation or voice.  It makes a claim around the analytical power and importance of periphery perspectives to provide valuable insights about alternative futures. And therefore provides a frame to bring in and value the contributions of youth, children, excluded and other voices hardly ever involved in decisions.
  • To ease the transition of the old to the new: At its best, the practice offers a collective and systematic process for facilitating transformation across incumbent and new stakeholders and systems. It promises a framework to support transition from old paradigms to new possibilities, outlining evidence-based pathways to radically different futures.
  • Providing hope and agency in uncertainty: Foresight’s key value proposition in this “polycrisis era” – where people can feel overwhelmed, insignificant and powerless – is a way to embrace complexity, rather than avoid or deny it, and to shape a turbulent world. It offers the potential to connect the liberatory power of the imaginary to action, so people can feel they both have a part to play in the futures and have the right to shape them. This is not just about hope and imagination – this is about shaping the system, bringing about new systems, as well as being ready to act as the system is changing or unlocks.
  • Supercharged when combined with other practices: When designed using deliberative processes, systems thinking, and planetary awareness, it can drive the participatory, long-term, holistic and ecologically-anchored governance the world needs.  In particular, the link with wellbeing economics provides a powerful narrative for connecting outcomes for a sustainable future with the practice of how to make decisions today to navigate to that vision.

“Foresight helps us think differently about the times we live in. It helps us challenge our expectations and assumptions yet remain rigorous in our logic.”

2. “The Future is a story we tell ourselves in the present” – Betty Sue Flowers

Foresight is not about the Future(s). Not really. Its most profound value lies in unlocking action by helping us reframe how we see the present. Pierre Wack called it “the gentle art of re-perceiving” – we see today not as an immutable reality but as a dynamic moment held within a wider frame of pasts and futures.  This has various profound implications:

  • The real impact and benefit of foresight is felt in the present, not the future. It enables fresh perspectives and coalitions for action. The effectiveness of foresight interventions is in action and results today – not in some distant future.  If we don’t start with understanding and challenging today’s perception of the future, the problem will have changed and moved on before our solution even comes into play. Whether designing a curriculum or understanding the impact of AI on mental health or outlining the requirements of a new hospital, we need to design solutions for multiple possible futures now. But we also benefit today by scaling new solutions to today’s challenges – for example in the care economy or around lifelong learning. The potential comes from connecting innovations from the margins where the future already “is” (paraphrasing William Gibson), to a decision-making centre which is often entirely unaware.
  • We need to demonstrate and articulate the value and impact of foresight to today’s issues.  This is critical for scaling the practice – and yet is the most common misunderstanding about the field that is consistently difficult to communicate.  Foresight can provide current leaders with new framings and approaches that can solve immediate issues for people today while laying foundations for long-term change. Without this understanding of the benefits of foresight today – of anticipation, agility and impact today – the field will remain marginal and a nice-to-have. Getting this right is a challenging communications task since it is so variable and contingent: it requires a contextual understanding and connection to people’s concerns and past. However, building a persuasive narrative is critical in order to explain why foresight is an important investment.  
  • This moment of the present is experienced very differently across the world: not all cultures view time as a simple unidirectional linear progression from past to present to future. Indigenous perspectives highlight the richness of diverse temporal frameworks. Time can be understood as cyclical, travelling in different directions, or indeed as kinship.4  There are contested histories and forgotten pasts. These remind us to approach foresight with humility and openness to varied cultural understandings of time as well as experience.5

“Futures work needs to be intentional about being a catalyst for a new system, not just stabilising the old system.”

3. “Are you the Judean People’s Front? – F off! We’re the People’s Front of Judea!” – Monty Python and “Midwifing the new and hospice caring the old” – John Vasconcelhos

As a well developed but quite niche field, foresight can contain a lot of vocabulary and terms that sound jargony: anticipation, future generations, imaginaries, long-termism, anticipatory democracy or governance, intergenerational fairness, time-based or temporal policymaking, 7th generation thinking, deep uncertainty, being a good ancestor, existential risk, living within planetary boundaries, and so on.6  These are very useful in different contexts – but fundamentally, there is no need to get hung up on the terms.

They are all different ways to highlight the same simple message: that we cannot focus solely on the present, we must also account for change over time. But they derive from different communities (technical, citizens, scientific, policymaking, cultural traditions) trying to engage with this issue of long-termism by using suitable metaphors, personification and frames. These different groups have their own perspectives, terminology and reasons for looking long-term – groups like the military, environmental campaigners, peacebuilders, engineers, complex systems scientists, moral philosophers, epigeneticists, actuaries, youth activists, archeologists. They may want to build infrastructure that will be there for 100 years, purchase kit that will only be ready to fight wars in 25 years, explore the sustainability of a pensions system or insurance book, highlight the consumption of irreplaceable biodiversity, and point out the inevitable consequences of current action on the next generation.  They have different approaches – and the disconnectedness between the different communities can lead to bewildering confusion for the newcomer.7

From these many perspectives, you can see there are many different reasons for looking at the present using a long term lens. And yet when done well, there are three indivisible benefits to the practice: collectively envisioning and shaping a desired future; preparing for the risks of possible undesirable futures; and building agility, anticipation and resilience in the here and now.

So what IS important is what you actually do rather than getting caught up in terms…hence my choice of the Monty Python and Vasconcelhos quotes to show two key messages.  The first, that an excessive focus on terms can be unhelpful and alienating. Moreover, it can feel elitist and inaccessible to others which is a particular problem for a practice that needs disseminating broadly.  And the second quote is intended to highlight that what does matter is the transformative offer at the heart of foresight practice.  Futures work needs to be intentional about being a catalyst for a new system, not just stabilising the old system. It is a practice that offers to help this transition point with empathy for both sides, addressing the difference in world views that otherwise lead to conflict and entrenchment. This centres the otherwise less visible skills of network weaving, emotional care and trust-building, challenging assumptions, integrating different points of view, and building coalitions for change as core to the practice. Given much of the discussions about terms and vocabulary actually draws attention AWAY from this aspect of the discipline to tools and analysis, this is a helpful reminder.

As part of the effort to broaden and democratise the foresight endeavour, it is helpful to focus on what people are doing, and how they are practicing in their own way, rather than being too dogmatic about labels or “the correct way of doing things”.  This is an important point to underline.  There is excellent work being done in the field as a more globally representative group of practitioners establish approaches and terms that make sense to their history, metaphors, language and lived experience.  But as importantly –  many people do not identify with the word “foresight” or indeed “foresight practitioners” – but they are doing practices globally (without using the terms) that are aligned.  We absolutely consider that these are part of the discussion and look forward to the exchanges and great potential to learn that comes from this broader perspective.8  

There are some interesting qualifications to this that I explore further in the book: some principles do matter, especially in a world of proliferating “futurists” online… and it is helpful to know what to look out for. Not to be exclusive about titles, but because it is worthwhile knowing who you want to spend time and energy collaborating with.  And also: framings do matter if they encourage wider perspectives.  For example, you can do foresight activity (e.g. exploring some future trends or scenarios about the future) without considering explicitly the impact on future generations (the people not yet born). Or you can build anticipatory governance (the institutions to help you consistently think and act for what’s coming up as well as the now) without engaging with intergenerational fairness (the distributional impacts across different generations). But in my view, in each of these cases, you will get reduced insights and little impact if you focus too narrowly.  What matters is not the terms, but that our practice and interventions are well-rounded, designed and implemented.  Only by meeting demand for better quality insights/decisions will we build long-term adoption. And a key skill we need to build is to work out what terms connect best with people’s concerns and context (see the next essay).

This is why I chose the term Future-Inspired Transformative Stewardship. The focus of the book isn’t about the practice or the field or even the tools – it’s about how you, the reader, apply these approaches with the people in the messy systems you care about, to unlock and transform the present.  I recognise that this term itself is going to put some people off, not least the people who are more interested in foresight only as an analytical discipline rather than as an approach that also enables the transformative change we need now. But I hope that to others, it helps shine a light on the powerful ingredients of change.

“The focus of the book isn’t about the practice or the field or even the tools – it’s about how you, the reader, apply these approaches with the people in the messy systems you care about, to unlock and transform the present.”

4. “Getting Parliament and government to be more strategic than they have been over the past 20 or 30 years is vital to restoring public confidence in our entire democratic system, particularly among younger generations who will inherit the consequences of what governments do now.” – Bernard Jenkin UK Member of Parliament9

Why is this topic so important and relevant now?  Bernard Jenkin, as UK Parliament Liaison Committee Chair, is one of many leaders – from presidents in Italy, Costa Rica, Portugal, Barbados, the EU, and Singapore, politicians in Kenya, Ireland, Uruguay and South Korea – increasingly concerned about the failure to incorporate long-term consequences and intergenerational perspectives into decision-making.  They increasingly recognise the governance problems and the high costs of failing to consider the long term—particularly given the demographic challenges and systemic context of the 2020s, as described in my original book preview “Playing with Time”. At the UN Summit, the President of Ghana President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, highlighted the stakes: “The future is not distant, it is here, and the choices we make here will determine the fate of generations to come.” 10

They are political leaders that have decided to take a stand to support long-term governance despite a political system that maximises influential voters’ interests, loud voices, and existing narratives.  The current system, engagement with the public, and the media are not prepared for the tough intergenerational trade-offs involved.  This puts leaders in a bind: urged to act on climate but not when the windfarms are in citizens’ back yard; asked to deal with social care but not when it means tax is affected; wanting to protect the global commons stewarded by indigenous communities, yet under pressure to extract minerals for growth and revenue for public services; pushed to build better future fit education but also to keep narrow exam based performance measures to judge schools; wishing to invest in infrastructure but facing economic penalties if they deprioritise paying back old loans; and encouraged to prevent ill health and invest in wellbeing but only being evaluated on waiting lists or acute services funding.  Individual politicians are working in a system that undervalues the long-term on multiple fronts, and even if they succeed, they will often be criticised nor will they reap the benefit in their lifetime.11

The question is whether we have come to a tipping point: where political leaders and citizens recognise that risk of catastrophe for the future outweighs the costs of changing the system in the present; are aware of their responsibilities as good ancestors; and also feel that change is possible.  After all, the burning platform today seems particularly painful and evident:

  • Delayed action on long-standing major policy challenges having a visible impact: Many issues that required intervention 5, 10, or 15 years ago are now reaching crisis point. Examples that resonate with citizens and picked up by their representatives in parliamentary discussions are as varied as: special educational needs, pesticides and bees, energy policy and pricing, debt, innovation in emerging technology, AFuture Generationshanistan security, housing, and flooding.  The consequences are being felt by people today.
  • Technocratic solutions are not enough to address growing disenfranchisement and political polarisation – especially among young people: While some policy solutions to address the major transitions ahead are well-funded and technically sound, they have been stymied by polarisation and politicisation of intergenerational divisions.  For instance, debates around the green transition, AI governance, pensions, social care, industrial policy, and education have generational trade-offs and long-term consequences that have overwhelmed current political processes… and moreover have been weaponised as wedge issues by far right groups.  Representative democratic processes and parties are struggling to respond honestly and authentically to the depth of concern of communities and citizens about their futures.
  • Failure to address critical emerging issues: Many urgent challenges, such as antibiotic resistance, environmental degradation, emerging technology regulation, and the evolving tax base of the state versus public sector costs (the business model of the state), are currently relegated to the “too difficult and too large” box. These require difficult but essential interlinked conversations now, as they will rapidly escalate into major crises.

I think there is reason to feel that we may indeed be in an inflection moment. The demand side is growing. Political stewards – leaders committed to the long-term interests of their communities rather than short-term political gains – are increasingly aware of the dilemma they face. A dynamic vicious cycle of inaction on critical issues of concern is fuelling public disillusionment, distrust, and institutional failure, with profound implications for the next elections. The failure to tackle these mounting near- and long-term issues will impact the wellbeing of most of us – but especially young people. It is creating nothing less than a generational crisis in governance. Evidence of this crisis include: growing difficulties in fostering intergenerational connections; disillusionment with leadership; doubts about the ability of current systems to achieve necessary behavioural and value-based changes; and a surge in far-right popularity, especially among younger voters. This rapid delegitimisation of representative democracy and its institutions is not a slow-moving trend—it is accelerating. For example, in Portugal, the far-right party jumped from having one parliamentary seat to 22% of the parliamentary seats in a single election cycle (from 2019-2024). And in June 2024 in Nairobi, protestors explicitly linked the motivation of their direct action to the importance of protecting the interests of future generations of Kenyan citizens in the face of a system that was ignoring them.

The supply of innovations and solutions are there. But while there are many promising innovations aimed at building intergenerational fairness, solidarity and addressing wellbeing for current and future generations together, the pressing question is: how to scale and connect these efforts to make meaningful change? Particularly – how do political leaders navigate their current party political affiliations to build cross-party coalitions and an intergenerational social contract to collectively address long-term sustainable concerns? And how do we build global alliances, given the influence of historic injustices on the present and when starting from such inequality both within and between countries? There is a parallel conversation taking place among business stewards – leaders committed to the long-term interests of their communities rather than short-term financial gains – who are exploring new forms of governance to support incentives for genuinely sustainable activity.  

Dr Nsah Mala, the Chair of Mbessa Kingdom Commission for Future Generations and Sustainability in Cameroon, lays out the dilemma: “We cannot reach the destination of sustainability for future generations without crossing on a solid bridge of youth. Africa is home to the world’s largest youthful population, but unemployment, gerontocratic practices, democratic backsliding, mounting debt crisis, land grabbing, insignificant investment in education and research, unfair trade, neocolonial militarization, climate change, economic and technological inequalities, and potential risks of AI constitute serious obstacles when it comes to harnessing Africa’s youthful dividends for present and future generations.”

These questions are profound. And the journey is a generational one. But it can start now, as the legacy of the Summit of the Future. Ultimately, this is going to be a messy, complex movement of many people working across many fronts, sectors, and countries pushing each in our small incremental way – until we hit a tipping point. What foresight practice tells us is that the solutions will not come from the paradigm and mindset of the old system. Radical change and reimagination is needed – but so is the weaving of coalitions, transition plans, anticipatory institutions and processes, and incentives for exploring implications on current and future generations. This is why foresight practice – or Future-Inspired Transformative Stewardship – is such a critical skill for leaders and change-makers today.

  1. Conway, M (2015) ‘Foresight: an introduction’, Thinking Futures: http://thinkingfutures.net/wp-content/uploads/TFGuideForesight1.pdf, p2 ↩︎
  2. Schultz, W. L. (2015). A Brief History of Futures. World Futures Review, 7(4), 324-331. Fisher, R. (2023) The Long View: Why We Need to Transform How the World Sees Time. Published by Headline ↩︎
  3. See Thomas Frey’s collection 12 Laws of the Future – Futurist Speaker ↩︎
  4. Kyle Powys Whyte (2021) Time as Kinship in The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, ↩︎
  5. Terry, Naomi, et al (2024) Inviting a decolonial praxis for future imaginaries of nature: Introducing the Entangled Time Tree, Environmental Science & Policy151(3):103615 ↩︎
  6. Let alone the tools – windtunnelling, backcasting, horizon scanning, anyone? ↩︎
  7. The book explores these issues and has a glossary and case-studies to explain the differences in more detail. ↩︎
  8. For more on language, identity, community, this report shares findings from building a global foresight directory https://foresight.directory/ by SOIF (2022) Mapping existing foresight and futures organisations (in the Global South) ↩︎
  9. https://committees.parliament.uk/work/7785/scrutiny-of-strategic-thinking-in-government/news/201770/urgent-reform-of-whitehall-culture-required-to-improve-strategic-decision-making-and-make-uk-fit-for-the-future-say-mps/ ↩︎
  10. https://press.un.org/en/2024/ga12627.doc.htm ↩︎
  11. From Sophie Howe ↩︎