For Creatives Seeking Emergent and Regenerative Future Foresight
Thought this week
I am soothed and intrigued by the experience of the longest possible view. I am profoundly drawn to questions of scale. We human beings have a very unique situation which is that we are finite creatures in an infinite universe.
Kathryn Schulz author of Lost & Found
Revolve Evolve
After years of teaching future foresight to professionals across industries, from industry leaders to university students, I kept seeing the same heartbreaking pattern: visionary insights gathering digital dust (something I covered at length in my Hypercycle work and report), and passionate professionals, humans feeling powerless to create the change they could clearly envision and advise. These weren't failures of intelligence or creativity - they were failures of implementation. And I realised our entire foresight and creative industry has been missing a crucial bridge.
As always, I hope you're well today. I missed sending my last dispatch as I've been neck deep in Biomimicry certification + client work, but I'm so happy to be back with you as I’ve been nurturing this today’s dispatch for quite some time. I am going to walk you through why I believe our foresight industry has hit a wall - and what I'm building to break through it.
First, I'll share the recurring pattern I've observed teaching foresight to creative industry professionals: visionary insights that never translate into systemic intervention. Then I'll reveal the three critical gaps keeping us stuck in trend-reporting (or chasing) rather than true systemic intervention. Finally, I'll explain why I've invested in six months in Biomimicry certification training and how I'm developing a step-by-step regenerative journey that bridges the gap between foresight and implementation, building on top of over a decade of developing this work.
As always thank you for being here,
P.S. There’s an invitation to be a part of this transformation. Keep reading for an exclusive opportunity to help shape this work with me.
Future Wild: When Nature Guides Strategic Whole System Transformation
Think in Natural Systems Not Trends
For years I've said the problem is we 'think in trends not systems.' Don't get me wrong, I am in love with the creative and future foresight field and its people, that's why I get gung-ho about it. But why are we limited in our understanding and internalising of whole systems thinking? There are several educational, organisational, behavioural, cultural and systemic causes for this. And the fact we have denied nature as our guide for strategic whole system transformation.
The problem I've identified: Why current foresight fails at systems change implementation
I have witnessed the same problem everywhere and over time: great insights on systems change, poor implementation. Great ideas, limited action. From all of the empathy interviews I have carried out this year during the Scoping phase of my Biomimicry training, sadly the most recurring theme is that many of our dear foresight practitioners and stakeholders in the creative and cultural production industry feel powerless to change the system.
And I say sad because we really want change, we are such creative, empathic and hopeful people who are insanely passionate about positive innovation and collectively contributing to meaningful change. And we are powerful. Foresight and the creative industry play a key role in innovation and cultural change.
I've seen this in my consulting work, in hundreds of conversations with peers, facilitating the Trend Atelier community events and online forums, teaching our mastercourse Forecast Like a Futurist and hosting live sessions with students for years, mentoring and lecturing at leading international universities and speaking at many summits, conferences and tradeshows, including touring my latest keynote “Future Wild - When Nature becomes the futurist.”
Just recently, a director at a fashion foresight agency told me they make amazing reports and work with amazing clients. But have no say on implementation. They can only hope. We all know what needs to change, but nobody knows how to, without disrupting established workflows, client expectations, and the traditional innovation, design and foresight organisational model that keeps us trapped in the current delivery cycle.
There is a big movement amongst creative industry players and foresight practitioners to examine our system and motivations, particularly as we face the dual crises of overconsumption and climate change. Our role as future thinkers extends beyond forecasting to responsible systemic intervention. What's difficult for us to tackle is that we work within a system that is not working. It's a system more focused on unlimited growth incompatible with our planetary boundaries.
We want to intervene in this system. But to do this we also have to understand what's stopping it from changing. Where is the resistance? What is it that is stopping us from putting the change through? What we need is visionary thinking, reconnecting with our oneness and the strategic pragmatism to understand complex mechanisms at a granular level, like scientists. Our work is considered a soft science so I feel this is not too much of a reach.
Over the years here are the key obstacles I've assessed that get in the way of going from insights to systemic intervention, from working within the system and with many collaborators and peers.
To be clear, this isn't a sad story about lack of leadership and pioneering, quite the contrary. There's exciting work happening at the intersection of nature and futures thinking that aims to transform how we approach foresight. It's a movement that has grown massively over the years.
The first major gap is our lack of strategic systemic intervention skills. While foresight promises systems thinking, we often lack the skills to become conscious systems thinkers and doers. Yet this mastery is often missing from our toolbox.
Foresight is considered a type of systems thinking since it examines the relationships between drivers, trends, events, and signals of change... it's helpful to have some mastery of systems thinking concepts and tools and see how they apply to foresight work.
Applying evaluation thinking and practice to foresight - IFTF
The second challenge is that we have a surplus of ideas and intuition - our creative superpower that can also become a crutch. We overly rely on creative thinking and curiosity without building strategic implementation skills. While ideas are crucial, they're not enough for systemic intervention. We tend to think system change happens first and foremost with beliefs, over finding practical leverage points. We focus on mental models when we need to understand where and how to intervene pragmatically and systemically.
Finally, most of us are paid for trend work that prioritises novelty over regeneration, and the hard foresight work that does focus on regenerative principles and innovations often falls flat, because we don't know how to help stakeholders actually intervene in systems and create long-term change.
This involves developing, along with our creativity, consciousness and visionary thinking, the strategic capabilities around organisational change and understanding of how systemic transformation can be engineered. There is a whole host of ways that we can educate ourselves better in how and where to intervene in the system.
What is key is to:
- Take the time to learn... Like I said back in the summer of 2022 "Think in systems not Trends"
- Acquire and develop the tools to change the infrastructure of our system and its total architecture.
To this end, we realized it’s the best possible time to get down to the core of what strategy is and can be under volatile conditions. To examine how best to maintain – and increase – personal agency. To review how to stay confident in navigating an uncertain, constantly shifting environment. To think through how to get access to the right tools, and the right approach for using them.
Nemesis
What I'm Building: The Missing Bridge
What's missing isn't another framework - it's a bridge and journey from insight to implementation.
That's why I'm combining my skills as a futurist and regenerative futures architect, 10+ years of educator experience with certified biomimicry training to create something different: a learning system that doesn't just teach you what nature does, but HOW to be at one with nature and systematically integrate nature's proven strategies into your foresight work and systemic change practice.
I'm building an infrastructure for transformation and implementation. And I've been putting my money where my mouth is with a big resource and time investment in my biomimicry educator certification over the last 6 months (with my graduation in July!). This strategic evolution (not pivot) brings to an even deeper level what I've been forecasting for over a decade, with my first forecast on bio design going as far back as 2013 when I hosted sold out Macro Trend seminars at the British Library.
Biomimicry is not a concept. It's a practice endorsed by thousands of biologists, innovators, gaining incredible tractions in the number of startups that are saying this is the future. Microsoft recently named Kaitlin Chuzi as their Director of Integrated Technology & Biomimicry. And Asteria just won the AI FOR IMPACT Award at the recent Change Now Summit in Paris.
From a training perspective, I started this journey years ago with my 1st course in biomimicry and took the plunge last year to dedicate myself to my full certification. As I wrote in January 2025 in this year's launch piece ‘The 6 habits of Systems Thinkers’, although I hadn't explicitly stated this years ago in the HUNT-IDENTIFY-GATHER future foresight framework taught in the Trend Atelier's flagship master course Forecast Like a Futurist, it was already inspired by how trends may mimic biology using models such as TREND ECOSYSTEMS and TREND MOLECULES.
What's becoming clear in my biomimicry journey is that this field transcends problem-solving through nature's solutions. It's intimately woven with culture and social sciences, acting as a hidden pattern. I've never been more energised about working with the intricate systems that shape our world. Everything exists within a web of interdependencies, where each element relies on others for survival and function. Understanding these connections reveals the constant feedback loops between elements, allowing us to observe and thoughtfully intervene in system dynamics.
What I am building isn't about adding nature metaphors to your existing process. It's about fundamentally shifting how we approach foresight - using 3.8 billion years of R&D to solve the implementation problem that has plagued our industries and future foresight from fully thriving as a systems change catalyst.
This is about more than humans reconnecting with nature, although this part is indeed essential. It's about being one with nature and understanding how nature goes from ideas to action. Given the emergency of the climate crisis, ideas around authoring preferable futures have been a crucial step. But after working with professionals and leaders across industries, and teaching at leading universities and the Trend Atelier, I've learned something important: People don't need another framework, they want continuity of care in the form of a complete journey that transforms how they think and work.
The result? Professionals who don't just understand regenerative futures - they know how to architect them. They don't just identify trends - they know how to intervene in systems. They don't just create forecasts - they create change. Humans that don’t feel fragmented by othering nature and their true nature, they feel whole again.
User Testing Invitation
I'm so committed that I'm user-testing with professionals before launch. I'm in the Evaluating phase of my training and it's also a key requirement at this stage of my training in order for me to graduate.
As part of my solution development, I am scheduling user testing calls.
I'm looking for 5 user testers who are currently professionals and interested in regenerative futures and biomimicry and available for a session with me where I walk them through 'the thing'.
Are you available for a 60-minute video call with me either week of the 16th of June or early in the week of the 23rd?
And are you ready to be part of this transformation?
