Mapping the path to a fairer future through a ‘Live Challenge’

What is a Live Challenge?

A Live Challenge is a unique part of SOIF’s Strategic Foresight learning courses. It helps you apply what you learn about foresight and futures tools by working on a current real-world problem that an individual in an organisation brings to the group.

The real-world challenges we choose are, deliberately, tough problems. They are the kind of problems where applying foresight tools can make a real difference, often providing breakthrough insights.  This year participants on our flagship retreat and virtual training courses will work alongside SOIF facilitators, peers and global experts on the critical political and economic issue of ‘Just Transition’.

What is a Just Transition?

As a society we need to move quickly from our current fossil fuel-powered economies to a post-carbon economic model. Just Transition is a way of designing this shift to a greener economy to manage risks of inequalities and ensure equity for current and future generations. It also tries to deal with the challenge of moving away from legacy industries in a way that is fair to workers and communities that have relied on them. 

How will you explore Just Transition on a SOIF course?

We are setting a series of live challenges around the topic of Just Transition during this year. These will explore how different organisations, from governments to businesses to NGOs, face different strategic and policy challenges, including managing their legitimacy and their social permission to operate.

The courses will take you on a learning journey towards a global future economy in which humans can share critical finite resources and live with each other and within planetary boundaries. Learning strategic foresight can help to get there.

What will you learn?

On SOIF courses, you learn about foresight methods that help you take action today to steer you towards the future you want to see.

In the Live Challenge on Just Transition you will practise these skills as you:

  • Get clarity on the best scoping questions to ask which will help you tackle a big and challenging topic like Just Transition
  • Identify the drivers of change that will shape global futures
  • Create and explore possible future scenarios to understand how a Just Transition could be achieved, the risks involved, and how it might fail
  • Use techniques such as the ‘three horizons’ model to frame emerging opportunities and platforms of change that can help shape a fairer future
  • Learn how the art and science of foresight unlock fresh ideas—while meeting new friends and collaborators on the way

Our next virtual training course starts in May and our flagship retreat is in July. Enquire at learning@soif.org.uk and begin your foresight journey today.

“We are working for the future, but without thinking about it. One thing I learnt is how to be more systematic about scenario planning, about seeing different scenarios for the future and keeping them in mind while doing our work.”

Wisam Elhamoui 
Civil Society Activists, Advisor