Task Type: Contextualisation/What might be

This toolbox is a guide for shaping the future and developing organisational operations. It guides users through how to build an organisation’s future capability to ready it to deal with new phenomena. It guides users through all the steps of building a vision and for viewing, interpreting or shaping futures. It contains three phases: Trends and Signals, Interpretation and choices, and Shaping futures. Each tool includes step-by-step guidance and downloadable resources.

Features: Examples or Cases, Guiding framework

This resource is a generative tool for creating new metaphors to help understand the world in new ways, reframe problems, generate new ideas, and imagine different futures. New Metaphors has been developed by the Imaginaries Lab, a design research studio based at Carnegie Mellon University, and working internationally. New Metaphors is a set of 150 cards and a number of simple, fun workshop formats which enable idea generation and new ways of thinking about issues creatively, from specific…

Features: Video guidance

Uncertain Times is a set of tools for navigating uncertainty, harnessing curiosity, and maintaining mental wellbeing on a day-to-day basis. The kit is targeted towards individuals to guide personal reflection and consists of three parts: a set of cards, a workbook, and a weekly planner. The resource is inspired by Dancing at the Edge, by Graham Leicester and Maureen o’Hara and explores the behaviours and competencies required to deal with challenges that the 21st Century is throwing at…

Our Futures is a game for discovering new ways of engaging the public in thinking about alternative futures. The basic premise of Our Futures is that participants are randomly offered a series of constraints by drawing cards and rolling a dice, which serve as a primer for imagining a participatory futures activity. The game is played either with a group of individuals competing against each other or in teams in 30-75 minutes. The game has three different gameplay models of varying scope and…

Features: Examples or Cases, Facilitators guide, Tips&Tricks, Video guidance

The handbook follows a co-design logic in terms of process, principles and practical tools to support practitioners in the design and implementation of system mapping processes by highlighting the knowledge management component. This resource provides rationale and guidance on the challenge-led system mapping approach, including facilitation guidance for running mapping workshops. This resource helps mapping practitioners: • visualise the diversity of innovation projects as a manageable set of…

Features: Examples or Cases, Facilitators guide, Guiding framework, Tips&Tricks

This resource contains a method library and playbook for commonly used strategic foresight tools, organised by a guiding framework of five planning phases (perspective, opportunity, solution, team, and vision). While it does contain the tools themselves, the resource also contains extensive guidance on each method, including overall guidance, examples, instructions, insights, tips, and tool templates. It also contains overall guiding principles, underlying theories, and considerations for using…

Features: Examples or Cases, Guiding framework, Interactive diagnostic, Techniques, Tips&Tricks

This resource is a modular set of tools (10 methods in 3 phases) that can be run in various ways, from a general tool to discover and ideate futures into a premeditated, repeated and ever-focusing exercise to build a vision on one or more lines of work. The resource can also be used to bring transparency and alignment to any organization through repeated exercises. It consists of three types of tools: Worldbuilding, Predictive Analysis and the Optimal Futures. The authors also suggest a process…

Features: Guiding framework, Tips&Tricks

This resource is an imagination game that challenges players to collaboratively and competitively describe objects from a range of alternative futures. The object of the game is to come up with the most entertaining and thought-provoking descriptions of hypothetical objects from different near-, medium-, and long-term futures. The card deck can be downloaded and printed and contains cards, instructions, playsheets, and blank cards that you can customize with your own content. The website also…

The goal of this resource is to elicit conversation, encourage risk evaluation as a team, and catalyze proactive mitigation strategy planning around algorithm use in the public sector. It includes assessments and worksheets for assessing algorithm risk and managing algorithm risk. The publishers assume users have an understanding of their data and a basic understanding of algorithms.

This canvas is a strategic design tool for developing descriptive models of transformative futures. It asks users to name the logics stabilizing the dominant regime — and then imagine how such logics might stabilize an alternative in terms of narratives, goals, core values, governance & practices, and physical inputs. Requires email address in exchange for download.