Collaborative Foresight at Media Evolution

We see a growing need to look further into the horizon. We see a need to make time and space to reflect, discuss and find ways to work with the new and think longer term. We see a need to do this together with others, build on each others’ perspectives, in community. This is why we have developed a new approach to strategic foresight we call Collaborative Foresight.

Collaborative Foresight is an inclusive, community-based, open-source and evolving way to work with the future. It draws on and contributes to the fields of strategic foresight, futures thinking, futures studies, speculative design and participatory design. Given our ability to tap into a 180-strong member companies—representing a wide variety of industries, scale and sectors—our approach is unique in how it relies on organisational knowledge-sharing to power collective futures-making. In Collaborative Foresight, we create space and time to move through knowledge-sharing into collective imagination, and then translation of emergent futures into strategies for action.

We’re building a Collaborative Foresight portfolio of projects that rely on collective sense-making and exploring new futures methods and tools to help individuals and companies become agents for positive change. It builds on Media Evolution’s work in community learning, and we make the products, policies, services, and strategies that we co-create openly available. Our work is equal parts futures literacy, open-source “executive education,” and emergent strategy development to address today’s challenges and uncover tomorrow’s opportunities.

“...teams with future-minded leadership are 18 percent higher in innovation, 18 percent higher in performance, and >15 percent more resilient.” - Better Up research report

Collaborative Foresight Cycles

In our Collaborative Foresight cycles, we bring our member organisations, partners and the wider community together for a four-month exploration into the future of specific topics relevant for the community. In the course of a cycle, we imagine a spectrum of tomorrows and examine the ethical implications of what we’ve collectively imagined. Then from the vantage point of our co-created futures, we unpack the relationships, skills, tools and strategies needed to move towards desirable futures.

So far, we’ve explored AI in green transitions, emerging technologies and creative sectors, design and data ethics and rethinking what it means to create “smart” cities, and how digital work might change with assistive intelligence technologies.

The future is plural! By bringing together this broad scope of experience-, employment-, and education-based expertise to bear on a range of topics and industries, each cycle results in new knowledge, relationships, tools, and potential collaborations.

There are different ways to participate in a Collaborative Foresight cycle: Community collaborator: Join our public workshops to contribute to compact explorations of social gathering around the topic at focus, as viewed through the lens of the future. As a community collaborator, you’ll gain new perspectives on the urgencies of the present and help scan for signals and trends.

Core contributor: Dive deeply into the topic in focus as a member of a core group of changemakers. Each cycle, we ask 15-20 members of our community to share their time and perspective in a total of four full-day workshops on the topic, guided by our Collaborative Foresight facilitators. You’ll learn some new tools, gain skills and a supportive network to bring futures-thinking and strategic foresight into your work.

How we Share: We share the insights and ideas from each Collaborative Foresight cycle in a final seminar and a final book. We summarize the futures we’ve co-created in community, offer up reflections and insights from core contributors, and invite the community to continue to discourse in our next cycles at our annual gathering, The Conference.