WHEN INSIGHT ISN'T ENOUGH

You understand what's not working. You've analyzed the problem six ways. You can name the patterns, identify the constraints, articulate exactly what needs to change.

But understanding doesn't build futures. Analysis doesn't create new possibilities. You need different tools—practices for making the unthinkable thinkable, then buildable.

That's what Futuring Sprints are for.

WHAT HAPPENS

Each quarterly sprint is a focused, intensive workshop ( over four sessions) designed to help you develop the imaginative infrastructure for navigating transitions and designing viable futures.

We work with four core practices:

Counter-Defuturing Practices
Tony Fry argues that contemporary culture systematically eliminates our capacity to imagine and build meaningful futures. You'll learn to recognize defuturing forces and develop practices for reclaiming your temporal agency.

Signal Scanning

Borrowed from futures studies and popularized by practitioners like Jane McGonigal and the Institute for the Future, signal scanning trains you to read the present differently. Weak signals, the peripheral, the emergent, the easy-to-dismiss, often contain more information about where things are heading than dominant trends do. You'll develop a practice of noticing what's just arriving, and learn to ask what futures those signals are pointing toward.

Scenario Planning
Based on Pierre Wack's work at Royal Dutch Shell, scenario planning helps you build multiple plausible futures instead of betting everything on one prediction. You'll learn to identify driving forces, explore uncertainties, and construct coherent scenarios that expand your strategic options.

Experimenting and Prototyping

A future you can only imagine is still a future you don't yet inhabit. Drawing on design thinking and narrative practice, this phase moves you from scenario to action, not through grand plans, but through small, real experiments that test your assumptions and generate lived evidence. You'll build low-stakes prototypes of the futures you're composing and learn what happens when you actually step into them.

THE STRUCTURE

Session 1: Landing and Defuturing Foundations (2.5 hours) We start by making the present strange. What stories are you living within? What temporal structures organize your days? What forces, structural, cultural, institutional, are actively closing off your futures before you can even imagine them? Drawing on Tony Fry's defuturing framework, we'll map the forces foreclosing your possibilities and begin the work of seeing them clearly. You can't move through what you can't see.

Between Sessions: Studio Work (1.5–2 hours) You'll go deeper on one defuturing force, tracing how it became normalized, who benefits from it, and what futures it eliminates. Then you'll scan for weak signals: small gestures toward different futures already emerging at the edges of your field. These signals won't be obvious. That's the point. You'll post your findings into the shared coalitional space and respond to others — not to agree, but to ask what their signals might mean for your futures work.

Session 2: Coalitional Defuturing and Futures Composition (2 hours) We take the defuturing analysis coalitional, examining how our different foreclosures interconnect, contradict, and illuminate each other. Then we shift from analysis to composition. You'll be introduced to the four-dimension scenario framework: the temporal, relational, material, and value structures of a possible future. This isn't career planning. These are architecturally different worlds, different rhythms, different relationships, different definitions of what matters. You'll sketch your first scenario before the session ends.

Between Sessions: Studio Work (1.5–2 hours) You'll draft three futures scenarios using the four-dimension framework. Each one should be materially specific, substantially different from the others, and accountable to your real constraints, while actively refusing at least one major defuturing force. One of them should feel slightly too risky or unrealistic. That's the one to pay attention to.

Session 3: Futures Composition Deep Dive (2 hours) You'll bring your scenarios into the room and test them, not to determine which one is correct, but to make them inhabitable. Three tests structure the work: the constraint test (what real limits does this future have to account for?), the embodiment test (can you feel yourself in it?), and the refusal test (what defuturing force does this actually break?). Small group scenario testing, guided by these questions, sharpens your futures from interesting ideas into genuine possibilities you could begin moving toward.

Between Sessions: Studio Work (1.5 hours) You'll revise your strongest two or three scenarios based on what the testing surfaced, making them more materially specific, accounting for constraints, deepening the refusal. Then you'll shift to prototype ideation: for each scenario, you'll brainstorm small, low-risk experiments that could begin to teach you what that future actually requires. The criterion isn't whether it will work. It's whether it will teach you something.

Session 4: Experimental Prototyping and Integration (1.5 hours) A future you can only imagine is one you don't yet inhabit. In this final session, we design the experiments that move you from composition to practice, concrete, bounded, low-commitment actions that test your assumptions and generate real evidence about the worlds you're building toward. You'll also build coalitional accountability structures with the group: ways of staying in contact, checking in on experiments, and continuing the work beyond the container. The sprint ends. The practice doesn't.

WHO THIS IS FOR

• People facing major transitions (career shifts, relationship changes, relocations, identity evolutions)

• Leaders navigating organizational uncertainty who need to think beyond quarterly planning

• Creatives and entrepreneurs building new projects or practices

• Anyone stuck in a story that no longer serves who's ready to do compositional work

• Therapists and coaches who want to bring futuring practices into their clinical work

You should come ready to work. These sprints require intellectual engagement, tolerance for ambiguity, and willingness to sit with discomfort. If you want reassurance or quick answers, this isn't for you.

UPCOMING SPRINTS

Q1 2026
For people navigating professional identity shifts
February 15-16 (Saturdays), 10am-1pm PT

Q2 2026
For individuals and couples designing new relational possibilities
June 21 to July 19 (Sundays), 9am-11am PT

Q3 2026
For leaders and teams building adaptive organizational cultures
TBD (Sundays), 9am-11am PT

Q4 2026
For people redesigning the basic structures of daily living
TBD (Sundays), 9am-11am PT

INVESTMENT

$699 per sprint (includes both sessions, between-session practices, and 30-day access to recordings)

Studio Members receive $200 off each sprint.

[Register for Upcoming Sprint]