Articles

March 2026 • The Intentional Evolution Experiment “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.” — Mahatma Gandhi The Year of Intentional Evolution continues with a question that moves from our bodies into the systems that shape how we live together: What if the future of prosperity begins the moment we admit something simple? “Enough already.” If January invited us to become conscious of how change unfolds, and February brought that awareness into embodiment, March…

What does it mean to be truly human in a time of planetary strain, technological acceleration, and unraveling cultural narratives? A Conversation with Samantha Sweetwater | Founder, Author, and Gaian Futurist In this episode of Creating Foresight Fueled Action, Frank Spencer sits down with Samantha Sweetwater for a conversation that stretches well beyond traditional futures thinking. Together, they explore co-evolution, wholeness, consciousness, and the possibility that what we call “civilization” may still be unfinished. This is not a discussion about…

Don’t we do this already? Despite the maturity of our discipline and the many documented success stories, foresight practitioners still face basic questions about the nature of our field (no, we do not carry around crystal balls to predict the future, and no, this isn’t trend hunting or market research).  The confusion may not be all surprising; however. Futurists ARE unique in their craft, exploring a range of possible futures to help navigate uncertainty in the present. Many of you are…

What if futures work didn’t begin with data, trends, or models—but with the body? Much of strategic foresight has been shaped by rational analysis: signals, patterns, scenarios, and frameworks designed to help us make sense of complexity. These tools matter. But they are incomplete on their own. In this Creating Foresight-Fueled Action (CFFA) conversation, Frank Spencer is joined by Julienne DeVita and Lourdes Rodriguez to explore an emerging and deeply human approach to futures practice: embodied foresight. Rather than asking…

February 2026 • The Intentional Evolution Experiment “Cyborgs are not simply machines; they are creatures of social reality as well as of fiction.”— Donna J. Haraway, A Cyborg Manifesto The Year of Intentional Evolution continues with a question that is both intimate and planetary: What does it mean to evolve consciously when evolution is happening inside our bodies? If January invited us to become aware of how we change, February brings that inquiry closer to home – to our nervous…

January 2026 • The Intentional Evolution Experiment “We are moving from unconscious evolution through natural selection to conscious evolution by choice.” — Barbara Marx Hubbard Every January begins with an impulse to change. But what if the real work isn’t in changing at all? What if it is instead in becoming conscious of how we already are? We live in an age of acceleration (faster information, faster innovation, faster exhaustion). Yet amid all this movement, something deeper is stirring: a quiet call…

Trend cards aren’t just nice extras for a workshop. They are tools for collective sense-making, tools that challenge assumptions, democratize foresight, and expand the boundaries of what’s possible. Drawing from a worldview grounded in participatory and transformational futures, this post shows how these cards can shift conversations — and catalyze action — across teams, organizations, and communities.

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…

If you’ve learned about foresight (or the field of futures studies) recently, you’re likely wondering how to start socializing it to the broader organization. You recognize that there’s disruption and opportunity just on the horizon and you want to capitalize on that information without interrupting the flow of everyday business. Sadly, the future is not on everyone’s radar (except if you’re talking risk, or certainty). You’ll need creative ways to inspire the team to consider the pull of the future…

Futures Wheels are simple. In the center of the tool is the issue to be explored, surrounded by a series of concentric circles that increase in time further away from the subject. The exercise begins with identifying immediate consequences that result from the initial issue. Each ring that follows is further out in time and includes consequences of the ones before, like ripples from a pebble in a lake.