An Invited Talk: Futures Thinking & Strategic Foresight

July 14, 2020 Sean Leahy

It was a lot of fun to join the panel of invited speakers on July 14, 2020 for the first Learning Futures Leadership Studio, hosted by Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and Arizona State University.

Learning Futures Leadership Studio Speakers

Learning Futures Leadership Studios
For full program details and information.

The events of the past few months have demonstrated that we live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Whether the global shutdown of schooling due to COVID-19 and the sudden move to remote learning, or the more recent protests against systemic, recurring inequities in our society, it is clear that we as educators need to do a better job. This summer, Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College hosts Learning Futures Leadership Studio, a series of four online action-oriented studio sessions that are designed to engage teams of education leaders in creating pathways for leading systems in a time of change. You will be immersed in provocative questions and ideas through interactive studio experiences. With your colleagues and others, you will reflect on these ideas and experiences. And you will develop action steps to pursue in your own context. This is a BYOC (Bring Your Own Challenges) experience intended to allow you, in a team, to explore new angles and perspectives on the issues that you face today and expect to face in the future.

https://learningfutures.education.asu.edu/

As the first studio to kick off the event, I focused on a topic that is not only contemporary, but one that I feel is critical to the collective needs of our society, Futures Thinking and Strategic Foresight.

Official tagline of my studio:

It is clear today that there will be no return to “normal” or to a pre-COVID-19 world. As a result, leaders must be prepared to forge ahead – with courage and efficacy – in a policy and bureaucratic context where there may or may not be clear guidance or feasible policy mandates. In this context, leaders cannot simply wait for guidance; rather, they must design and lead for the futures of learning.

In this session, we will introduce leaders to practical and creative tools of scenario planning and strategic foresight for leaders to explore new ways to think about strategically planning for uncertainty. Participants will learn how to forecast future trends and develop strategic plans to identify possible, plausible, and preferable futures.
(https://learningfutures.education.asu.edu)

In other words, the main objective of this studio is to demonstrate the need for organizational leaders (especially those in the educational system), to actively engage in futures thinking and strategic foresight. To create an organizational culture that allows for this type of thinking, planning, and strategy. I covered a handful of foresight methodological tools developed and open sourced (via Creative Commons) by the Future Today Institute.

The aim of this talk was to start an ember of futures thinking in educational systems leadership, with the hope that this will be the first of many subsequent explorations into the realm of strategic foresight.