Critical Uncertainties
Fast scenario planning: the group picks its two most critical and most uncertain factors, crosses them into four plausible futures, and small groups develop a strategy for opera…
Thinking T4
Long-Term Orientation and Visioning
Imagining long-term goals and staying committed to them in ways that support broader societal and ecological well-being.
Tools for this skill (23)
Daily-to-long-term connection practices
To maintain a thread between daily work and longer-term goals. Integrate brief long-term references into regular team meetings: • Occasionally ask: 'How does this relate to wher…
Envisioning a Sustainable Future
A guided visualisation, adapted from Donella Meadows' visioning work, for imagining a sustainable world concretely enough to act from: prepare in a quiet place with paper and pe…
Establishing a Clear Vision
A talk-and-discussion that starts from the claim that everyone already holds visions of their life, including negative ones, and acts on them daily — the handbook's example is a…
Future Folktales
Over a multi-session arc, participants craft folktales told FROM a regenerative future — drawing on future visions to build narratives of being, not just technology — and tell t…
Future generations perspective
To develop capacity to consider how decisions affect those who come after. When facing significant decisions with lasting consequences, explicitly introduce future stakeholders'…
Future Impact Question
Long-term thinking is essential for sustainability. This practice helps teams consider impacts beyond immediate results, strengthening alignment with Agenda 2030 and future gene…
Future~Present
Small groups gather at an imagined campfire 15–30 years ahead: "elders" recount to "youths" how the work fully succeeded, describing that world as if present, then all look "bac…
Imagining the Future
A guided exercise that first loosens the imagination into an expanded state and then invites a concrete envisioning of a desired future — held long enough to notice details, fee…
Into The Magic Shop
Partners name specific goals, then close their eyes and meditate on the future in which they are already achieved — viewed from several angles, with the facilitator asking what…
Letter from the Future
Each person writes a letter to themselves AS a human living one or two centuries from now — offering counsel, gratitude, and encouragement to the person working at this hinge of…
Long-term scenario exploration
To develop capacity to think about alternative futures. Periodically spend time exploring alternative future scenarios: 1. Identify key uncertainties that affect your work—marke…
Multi-horizon tracking
To make visible the team's progress and impact across multiple time horizons. Create a simple tracking tool that includes indicators across at least three time horizons: Operati…
Regular long-term reflection sessions
To step back from immediate work and consider longer time horizons. Dedicate 60-90 minutes to a session focused on longer-term perspective, addressing questions at multiple scal…
Results Chain
Plans an initiative as a chain from activities through outputs and outcomes to impact, and uses it to track progress rather than to predict. The guide explicitly ties it back to…
Seventh Generation
A ritual dialogue across two hundred years: in a double circle, the inner ring speaks as people of the seventh generation hence, asking the outer ring — people of today — what i…
SMART Goals for a Vision
Participants lie on the floor or sit, picture the vision they chose, and look at what has to change to get there from the present. The gap is then written as SMART goals — speci…
The Future Pull
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Long-term Orientation and Visioning (VCoL collection): When facing a decision, pause and bring to mind a longer-term vision. Ask: "Does…
The Legacy Lens
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Long-term Orientation and Visioning (VCoL collection): When making a decision, ask: "How will this be viewed by those who inherit it? Wh…
The Seven Generation Question
A seconds-scale daily micro-practice for Long-term Orientation and Visioning (VCoL collection): When considering a significant decision, pause and ask: "How would this choice lo…
Three Horizons
A shared map of change over time drawn as three intersecting curves: Horizon 1, the dominant system losing fit; Horizon 3, the future pattern wanting to emerge; Horizon 2, the t…
Vision Creation
Translates passion, values and intended action into one coherent personal vision — the guide insists it be clear and detailed enough that someone else could picture it. Comes af…
Vision Webs
Participants map the visions they hold across the different areas of their life onto a web — writing or drawing, listing several per area where they have them — then share and d…
Also develops it (15)
Critical Thinking Deep Dive
Sustainability challenges often come with strong opinions and pressure to act fast. Critical thinking helps teams slow down, examine assumptions, and make more responsible decis…
Ecocycle Planning
The group maps its full portfolio of activities onto the ecocycle — birth, maturity, creative destruction, renewal — and looks for what is stuck in rigidity traps (kept alive to…
Future Search
A structured 2.5–3 day planning conference that gets "the whole system in the room" — 40–80 stakeholders across interests review their common past, map present trends, own their…
Guided Journaling (Theory U)
Writing through a scripted sequence of questions that walk the U: from current challenges and frustrations, through looking at your journey and self from outside, to the deeper…
Know Your Theory of Change
Build a personal theory of change for your climate-coaching work: name your purpose and desired future, choose the political context you aim to work in with its stakeholders and…
Mapping the Maze
Using the Transition Model Canvas, groups map a socio-technical transition — zero-emission mobility, circular textiles — across actors, dynamics, and intervention points, learni…
Meet Yourself at 90
A guided values visualization from the ACT tradition: after settling into body and breath, participants imagine themselves at their 90th birthday, visited by someone who matters…
Operational Strategies
Looks at what makes a team's success last — the support systems, agreements and structures behind it — rather than at the initiative itself. The guide's closing activity, and th…
Panarchy
Groups map how their challenge lives at multiple embedded system levels — individual, team, organization, sector, society — and where change at one level enables or blocks chang…
Purpose-To-Practice (P2P)
A design session for anything meant to last: the group works through five elements in order — Purpose (why the work matters to those affected), Principles (must-dos and must-not…
Strategy Knotworking (SKW)
A whole strategy process as one composed arc (~6 hours, or split over days): the group works through six questions — purpose, honest baseline, shifting context, competing challe…
Systems Thinking Practice
Sustainability challenges are inherently systemic—environmental, social, and economic factors are deeply interconnected. Systems thinking helps teams understand these connection…
Tree of Life
Participants label a drawn tree as their own life: ROOTS for history and formative experience, TRUNK for life as it is now, FRUITS for what they have accomplished, BUDS for hope…
What If…
Each person shares an imagined future as a question — 'what if I loved myself just as I am?' — then takes time to feel how it would be if it were already true, and says so, befo…
What's My Plan of Action
The closing worksheet of the training, which turns everything before it into something dated. Participants write why they want the work at all, restate or redraw their vision, t…