Foresight Workshop: Four Scenarios for 2040
WMH Project designed and facilitated a strategic foresight workshop that projected participants into 2040 through four possible worlds. The format blends anticipation narratives, insight from a foresight expert and a collaborative solutions generator. The goal: turn uncertainty about the future into an actionable roadmap.
Why project leaders into 2040?
Foresight becomes tangible when it tells stories rather than lists figures. The format opens with a "teleportation" experience: participants leave today's date to land on the same day in 2040. This mental shift frees thinking from present-day constraints and makes strategic decisions bolder.
What are the four worlds explored?
The workshop puts four contrasting futures in perspective. "Less is more": technological frugality and an ecological logic of slowing down. "Digital gilded cage": alienating technology and the concentration of digital giants. "The Sandbox": liberating technology and a territory turned innovation laboratory. "Human proximity service": local retrenchment, short supply chains and fragmentation. Each world rests on two crossed trend axes.
How does an expert strengthen the exercise's credibility?
A foresight specialist grounds each scenario in real signals: degrowth debates, techno-critical movements, national technological exceptions, the return of manual work or the city-state hypothesis. This methodological backing avoids the science-fiction trap and turns imagination into an analytical tool.
How do you move from scenarios to action?
The second part is a five-phase solutions generator: timed ideation, creation of a to-do list, search for internal alliances, building a reverse timeline and collective feedback. Groups work against the clock, which forces prioritisation and produces immediately usable deliverables.
What is the benefit for the organisation?
By the end, participants share a common reading of possible futures and a first aligned action plan. Foresight stops being a theoretical exercise and becomes a lever for collective mobilisation and decision-making.
Designed and orchestrated by WMH Project — We Make It Happen.
FAQ
What is a foresight workshop?
It is a format that projects participants into several contrasting distant futures, here 2040, to inform present-day strategic decisions and prepare the organisation for different scenarios.
Why explore four worlds rather than a single future?
Considering several futures built on opposing trend axes avoids bias and makes strategy resilient to uncertainty, whatever scenario eventually unfolds.
How does the workshop lead to decisions?
A five-phase solutions generator turns scenarios into an action list, internal alliances and a reverse timeline, producing directly usable deliverables.