Browse Foresight Tools

Find a selection of tools, games and workshop templates, ready to be used for your own foresight projects.

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Weaving Futures

A step-by-step guide with different activities to enhance a participatory approach when inviting citizens to co-create their futures. Includes a workshop agenda, participant templates, and facilitator guides.

Weaving Futures

A set of tools to co-design a desired future

What is it?

A step-by-step guide with different activities to enhance a participatory approach when inviting citizens to co-create their futures. Includes a workshop agenda, participant templates, and facilitator guides.

Use it to

  • Create a safe space for communities to share their thoughts
  • Co-create desired and common futures with diverse actors
  • Reflect on the impact of individual challenges in a collective environment
  • Foster citizens’ participation in policy decision making

Acknowledgments

Youth leaders from Leticia, Puerto Nariño and Quibdó + UNFPA Colombia + NDP Colombia + UN Global Pulse

Data Ecosystem Map

Eco-system mapping is a method to understand how the parts of a system are connected as part of a larger whole. This toolkit contains a facilitator guide, a participant handout and a template to facilitate your workshop.

Data Ecosystem Map

A workshop to explore the present and future of data ecosystems

What is it?

A workshop format to help you identify the main data assets, the data flows and the key risks and opportunities within the ecosystem.

Use it to

  • Get a systems overview before you dig deeper
  • Get a shared understanding of the main issues in the current and futures ecosystem
  • As a building block for your vision building exercise for your preferred data sharing ecosystem
  • Visualise complex relations in a tangible way
UNGP - Foresight Initiative

Vision Building

A toolkit to facilitate workshops to build an aspirational future state and identify the steps needed to reach that future. Includes a facilitation guide, participant handout and workshop canvas.
UNGP - Foresight Initiative

Vision Building

A toolkit to build a shared vision with a multi-stakeholder group

What is it?

This toolkit enables you to facilitate workshops to build an aspirational future state (from a country to a team level) and identify the steps needed to reach that future. The toolkit contains a facilitation guide, a participant handout and a workshop canvas.

Use it to

  • Align stakeholders on a shared vision of the future
  • Start building a roadmap of future actions

Acknowledgments

Adaptation of The 5 Bold Steps Vision® Canvas created by David Sibbet, of the Grove International.

3 Alternative Futures

A way of thinking systematically about the disruptive potential of possible futures using consistent stories around three archetypes: Continuity, Collapse & Chaos, and Transformation.

3 Alternative Futures

A tool to envision diverse futures scenarios

What is it?

This workshop allows participants to think systematically about the disruptive potential of possible futures using consistent stories around three archetypes: Continuity, Collapse & Chaos, and Transformation.
This toolkit contains scenarios templates, examples, and a workshop agenda.

Use it to

  • Unpack current assumptions, critical pain points, and uncertainties
  • Expand imagination with provoking future possibilities
  • Highlight plausible outcomes and key trends that lead to better decision-making

 

This toolkit is particularly suited for young futurists (between ages 14-18). It is customised for the initiative “Future Forward” and is part of set of lessons to become a future-conscious global citizen. 

Acknowledgments

Adaptation of Jim Dator (2009)

Where Do You Stand?

A stand-up game to involve people in a futures discussion. It invites participants to position themselves on two axes: one about a bleak or bright future and another about our sense of agency in the future.

Where Do You Stand?

A self-reflection game to kick-start the foresight process

What is it?

A stand-up game that involves participants in a futures discussion by asking them to position themselves in the future. It invites participants to physically stand on two axes: one about a bleak or bright future and another about our sense of agency in the future.

Use it to

  • Get participants in the right mindset at the start of a foresight workshop
  • Enhance participants’ self-awareness of their relationship with the future

Acknowledgments

Originally inspired by the book “The Image of the Future” (1961) by Fred Polak

The Bus Within Us

A tool used to enhance the inclusion of different perspectives in your dialogues about the future. Participants imagine and reflect on their future feelings and thoughts.

The Bus Within Us

A game for holding spaces for complexity within us

What is it?

A tool used to enhance the inclusion of different perspectives in your dialogues about the future. Through the bus metaphor, participants imagine a conversation between different passengers and reflect on their words, feelings and thoughts

Use it to

  • Enhance awareness of different perspectives in a conversation
  • Learn and observe people in a conversation without judgement
  • Move beyond current experiences and assumption

Acknowledgments

An exercise from the collective work ‘Gesturing towards Decolonial Futures’

Foresight Experiments Scoping

This template provides a set of guiding questions to outline your project and define methods, tools and processes that best suit your challenge and build a common understanding of your experiment’s goals.

Foresight Experiments Scoping

A thinking tool to shape a foresight process

What is it?

This template provides a set of guiding questions to outline your project and define methods, tools and processes that best suit your challenge to build a common understanding of your experiment’s goals.

Use it to

  • Frame and scope foresight experiments
  • Align expectations among actors
  • Develop a hypothesis on how foresight can add value
  • Support solving an existing or emerging challenge

Acknowledgments

UNGP

UNGP - Foresight Initiative

Horizon Scanning

This horizon scan manual is designed to help you set up your own horizon scanning practices. It outlines a simple five-step process, provides templates for inspiration and gives you hands-on tips and tricks.
UNGP - Foresight Initiative

Horizon Scanning

A step-by-step guide

What is it?

This horizon scan manual is designed to help you set up your own horizon scanning practices. It outlines a simple five-step process, provides templates for inspiration and gives you hands-on tips and tricks.

Use it to

  • Learn how to identify a driver of change
  • Create an overview of emerging phenomena
  • Include a group of stakeholders in a futures dialogue

Acknowledgments

Adaptation of “Horizon Scanning: Opportunities Technology Will Bring by 2005” by William Gates

Horizon Scanning Validation

An online template to facilitate discussions in your horizon scanning process. It can be used to validate the initial scanning results with stakeholders, teasing out potential implications.

Horizon Scanning Validation

A workshop to facilitate discussions

What is it?

This online template is developed to facilitate discussions during your horizon scanning process. It can be used to validate the initial scanning results (drivers) with a relevant group of stakeholders, teasing out potential implications.

Use it to

  • Engage a broader group of stakeholders
  • Gather information on the implications of drivers
  • Identify potential blind spots

Acknowledgments

UNGP

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