Beyond the Few and Powerful
This episode of Creating Foresight-Fueled Action, titled “Beyond the Few and Powerful: You Can Build the Future Too!”, features influential futures thinker and collaborator at Radar, Keely Adler.
The conversation is the final installment of the series, “Foresight Needs an Intervention”, addressing the bifurcation occurring in the field of foresight. Keely and Frank explore radical alternatives to the traditional, top-down structure of futures work, contrasting “Keynote Futuring,” characterized as colonization and reinforcing existing power structures, with the human-scaled, participatory approach of “Front Porch Futuring“.
The core message is that “the future belongs to those who think about it”, because the future is the sum of countless choices made by millions of people. Front Porch Futuring is described as an intentional, playful gesture that creates cracks in the fabric and small acts of agency, moving past the notion of futures as merely a corporate literacy or skill. Instead, it is framed as an orientation, mindset, and heart set, urging practitioners to view themselves as “pollinators” of possibility within their organizations.
“The future is not immutable; it is something each one of us can imagine and influence.”
Key take-aways from this discussion include:
- Understanding the Bifurcation: Learn about the crossroads facing foresight and the movement toward more relational and embodied approaches.
- The Power of Play and Possibility: Explore why Keely prefers terms like “possibility studies” over traditional foresight language, and how she applies radical imagination with clients.
- A Critique of “Keynote Futuring”: Discover why the traditional model of delivering future predictions is often seen as colonization and reinforces existing power structures.
- Agency Through “Front Porch Futuring”: Learn about this alternative approach that focuses on small, human-scaled acts of agency, creating openings for possibilities that are uncontrollable and unpredictable.
- The “Pollinator” Mindset: Understand the importance of being a “pollinator,” dropping seeds of change and new ways of operating that can grow even if the immediate goal is not achieved.
About Keely: Cultural strategist by trade and time-traveling futurist at heart, Keely Adler considers herself a pollinator of possibility. As VP of Cultural Futurism at Dentsu Creative and Partner and Head of Practice at RADAR, she bridges the gap between yearning for better worlds and actually creating them—whether that’s through worldbuilding with global brands or facilitating the global collaboration and collective imagination of a few hundred internet friends. Together with RADAR, she’s published a Field Guide to the Future, invited the public into thoroughly researched and vividly imagined futures, and put equal rigor into building a Miro playground & planning a trip to the UN Summit of the Future. She believes the future belongs to those who think about it, that the most interesting strategic work happens just outside the system, and that better futures will always be built in multiplayer mode.
