A practical introduction for facilitators working in civic and community spaces. It builds the skills to guide structured futures conversations using drivers of change, key uncertainties, scenario building, and backcasting. The course supports you to hold participatory, grounded discussions that help groups explore alternative futures and translate insights into practical, collective action.
SIF™ Alignment: Awareness (Sense)
This module helps you build the foundational facilitation skills required before any scenario building process begins. You will learn to guide groups through understanding their civic system, its drivers, tensions, power patterns, and lived realities. Mapping the system is the essential first step in SIF™, and it enables informed, grounded exploration of alternative futures.
In this module, you will guide groups from understanding today’s system to imagining tomorrow’s possibilities. You’ll learn how to define a strong focal issue, identify key uncertainties, build a scenario grid, and help participants develop rich scenario narratives. This is where creative foresight begins, and where new civic futures start to take shape.
In this module, you help groups interpret their scenarios, explore what is possible, plausible, probable, and preferred, and understand the implications for civic actors and systems. You’ll guide participants to backcast from a 10-year horizon, identify milestones and strategic shifts, and design adaptive actions, experiments, signposts, and triggers that strengthen readiness and resilience across multiple futures.