Making Futures Work

Chapter 12. Integrating Futures into Your Organization

Once you feel confident about being a practitioner, you may want to start thinking about how to begin integrating Futures Thinking more formally into your team or organization. In this chapter, I’ll discuss a few different points of entry. Whether you are an in-house employee (from the inside) or working for a consultancy or agency (from the outside), there are a few tactics and strategies that are similar to what we’ve already discussed in previous chapters about preparing your audience for the mindset (check out Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 for more on that). But since every organization is different, there will always be cultural and operational nuances that you’ll need to consider to make your campaign work. Because in the end it is a campaign and an initiative, and it will require dedication, commitment, and, above all, patience to integrate your vision. It can be a lonely journey at first, but with proper research, planning, and experimentation, it’s definitely possible to make futures work in any team or organization. It just may take longer in some cases than in others.

From the Inside

As mentioned in Chapter 3 with regard to understanding your culture and audience, it’s important that before trying to advocate for anything new, you are informed and mindful of the environment within which you are working. Even in the best-case scenarios, where you are hired into a team that is already practicing futures, you should still ...