The 60-Minute Futures Workshop: Rapidly Co-Create Actionable Scenarios

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Ah, that feeling. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? We’ve all found ourselves overwhelmed by the flood of trend reports, sifting through countless slide decks that predict the next “big disruption,” emerging from strategic offsites filled with buzzwords but surprisingly lacking in actual breakthroughs. As someone tasked with trying to make sense of and navigate the future, I know the pressure is immense. You often feel caught in a fundamentally reactive cycle: constantly playing catch-up, struggling to tease out the truly meaningful signals from the deafening background noise. The sense of overwhelm is palpable.

We constantly hear about the seismic shifts that are coming our way, especially those driven by new computational capabilities, or “AI.” Yet, these conversations so often remain frustratingly abstract, somehow disconnected from the messy reality of doing anything about them. You sit through another keynote, absorbing fascinating possibilities, only to leave with little more than a kind of intellectual fatigue. Where, precisely, is the bridge from this vague awareness to tangible, usable action? How do you translate these grand future possibilities into something your team can actually wrestle with, especially when confronting complex, domain-specific challenges like how academic testing needs to evolve in a world suddenly awash with powerful new digital tools?

The truth is that many traditional foresight methods fall short in today’s volatile environment. The bottleneck isn’t a lack of information; it’s a deficit of usable perspective. We spend too much time passively consuming projections rather than actively shaping our understanding of plausible futures to inform smarter decisions today.

So, what if you could slice through that frustrating layer of abstraction? What if, in roughly the span of a single hour, you could guide your team to co-create multiple, concrete future scenarios tailored specifically to your challenges, sparking immediate, focused strategic conversations right then and there?

Recently, I had the chance to facilitate exactly this kind of session. My task was to help a German distance learning university grapple with the thorny future of academic testing, particularly given the rapid ascent of new digital tools. Rather than relying on the traditional lecture format, which is often considered the least impactful, we made a conscious decision to abandon it. We embarked on a rapid, intensely interactive journey using a structured process, aided by a clever assist from a generative text tool, to build tangible future worlds together, live, in the room. The result wasn’t about achieving some mythical “perfect foresight.” It was about generating something far more valuable: a set of provocative “what ifs” that immediately unlocked a deeper quality of dialogue and sharpened strategic clarity. Underscoring the value of this interactive approach, the symposium organizer shared:

“At our symposium ‘Testing Despite and With AI: Subject-Specific Perspectives’ at the FernUniversität in Hagen, Johannes Kleske explored the future of testing and its design in the present together with over 100 participants in an interactive session. Target-group-oriented, stimulating, humorous—we warmly thank you for the input!”

– Claudia de Witt & Caroline Berger-Konen, FernUniversität Hagen

This article unpacks that approach. Consider it a practical method, grounded in experience, for making future exploration less daunting, significantly more engaging, and, crucially, dramatically more actionable, especially when time feels like your most fiercely constrained resource. Let’s move beyond merely talking about the future and start actively building pathways toward it.

Making Futures Tangible, Together

The typical approach we often take to exploring the future frequently casts us, the participants, as mere spectators. We commission the reports, devour the analyst briefings, attend the conferences, and listen intently as experts paint compelling, sometimes alarming, visions of tomorrow. We become dutiful repositories of informed possibilities. Yet, let’s be honest, how often does this passive consumption translate directly and confidently into action back in the trenches?

More often than not, I suspect, it leads to those all-too-familiar frustrations:

• Information Overload: Drowning in data points, lacking a clear framework to connect any of it meaningfully to your specific operational reality.
• Generic Insights: Receiving broad, sweeping visions or forecasts that feel strangely disconnected from the unique complexities, constraints, and indeed the culture of your own organization.
• Lack of Ownership: The team might hear the possibilities, nod along, but they don’t feel truly invested in the implications because they had no hand in shaping them.
• The Persistent Knowing-Doing Gap: Understanding a trend and intellectually acknowledging its potential impact is significantly different from actually knowing how to respond effectively within your specific strategic and operational context.

Think back to that university symposium I mentioned. The original plan involved me delivering a talk. It would likely have been informative, maybe even offered a few useful insights. But delivered right after lunch to a room full of deep experts in teaching and learning? The potential for glazed eyes and polite, non-committal nods felt significant, as the standard approach risked being just another drop in their already overflowing information ocean.

The Power of Collaborative Futures Thinking

By deliberately shifting to an interactive, co-creative format, the entire dynamic changed. Instead of listening passively, these academic experts, people who live and breathe pedagogy and assessment daily, became active participants sketching out possible futures for their own field. They weren’t just being told about potential scenarios influenced by tech and societal shifts; they were actively involved in selecting the driving forces and then immediately reacting to the tangible, albeit imperfect, worlds that emerged from that process.

The transformation in the room’s energy was palpable. In under an hour:

• We collaboratively identified and prioritized the most critical, uncertain factors they believed would shape their future.
• Leveraging a large language model, explicitly framed as a rapid drafting partner, we generated four distinct, plausible scenarios for the future of academic testing circa 2028, live on screen.
• These weren’t just abstract bullet points; they were vivid “mini-worlds” complete with narrative descriptions, illustrative character quotes, and key features, immediately available for everyone to read, react to, and discuss.
• Small group discussions ignited almost instantly, grounded in these concrete possibilities. The scenarios acted as powerful “straw men,” forcing participants to articulate their visceral reactions, surface unspoken assumptions, and begin clarifying their own preferred trajectory. What felt right about this future? What felt deeply alarming? What specific opportunities or threats did this particular future surface for us?
• Crucially, the session didn’t just end with “interesting ideas.” It demonstrably shifted the nature of the subsequent conversations, providing a shared set of tangible reference points for their ongoing strategic dialogue.

This brings us, I believe, to the core “aha!” moment here:

Imperfect, rapidly co-created scenarios, born directly from the team’s own input and interaction, are often far more valuable for sparking immediate strategic dialogue and clarifying direction now than waiting months for a theoretically flawless, but ultimately detached and unrelatable, forecast. Foresight, after all, is fundamentally about preparing for multiple possibilities, not placing all your bets on a single imagined outcome.

And here’s the second insight, closely related: Those powerful generative tools everyone is talking and worrying about? They aren’t just a topic driving future change; used thoughtfully, they can be incredibly useful tools for exploring that change collaboratively and efficiently. They become potential force multipliers for strategic thinking, handling the often laborious heavy lifting of initial drafting, allowing us humans to focus our limited cognitive energy on interpretation, critique, strategic implication, and meaning-making.

Let’s call this approach Rapid Experiential Futures. For me, it feels like an antidote to passive forecasting and those sprawling, frequently overwhelming foresight projects that risk collapsing under their own weight. Its power lies in being:

• Time-Bound: Designed explicitly for focused, high-impact sessions (think 60-90 minutes).
• Co-Creative: Directly involving the relevant team in shaping, reacting to, and making sense of future possibilities together.
• Tool-Assisted: Intelligently leveraging generative platforms for rapid scenario drafting, freeing up precious human time and attention.
• Experiential: Emphasizing active interaction with potential futures, making them feel more immediate, real, and relatable.
• Action-Oriented: Structured intentionally to flow directly into strategic conversation, identifying potential implications and pathways forward now.

Rapid Experiential Futures is a practical way to start flexing that collective “future muscle” as a team, helping overcome the initial awkwardness or intellectual challenge many feel when asked to think structurally, creatively, and deliberately about what might lie ahead.

Structuring Your Hour of Collaborative Foresight

Getting teams truly comfortable with structured, deliberate future thinking requires practice. As I often frame it, you need to “warm up the futures muscle.” It can feel unfamiliar, even challenging, initially, especially when done under pressure. The beauty of the Rapid Experiential Futures approach is that it provides a practical, low-friction framework to begin building that capability, turning abstract foresight into a tangible, shared team exercise. It’s based on one of the major scenario frameworks from the foresight methodologies: creating a 2×2 scenario matrix. Here’s a 5-step playbook, distilled directly from that university session experience:

1. Step 1: Nail the Question & Scope (10 mins)

• Focus Your Future Lens
• What it Solves: Cuts through the typical overwhelming noise by forcing clarity on exactly what future you need insight on, right now. This addresses common “Prioritization Paralysis” and stops you from trying to boil the entire ocean.
• The Idea: You simply can’t map the whole world in an hour. But you can create a useful, focused sketch of the most critical territory directly ahead. Think of it like setting precise coordinates for your expedition before you start walking.
• In Practice: For the German distance learning university, the focus wasn’t “the entire future of AI’s impact on education.” It was sharply defined: “The future of Academic Testing in the Age of new digital tools,” specifically targeting a concrete 3-year timeframe (looking towards 2028). This clarity came from distilling their core strategic questions beforehand.
• Your Action: Before any session, work with key stakeholders to collaboratively frame a precise, time-bound question that gets to the heart of the matter.

2. Step 2: Surface Critical Uncertainties (15 mins)

• Identify the Future’s Hinges
• What it Solves: Moves the conversation beyond the obvious, predictable trends to pinpoint the real impactful uncertainties. These are the factors whose outcomes will fundamentally reshape your operating environment, helping you avoid the “Superficiality Trap” and filter critical signals from noise.
• The Idea: The future doesn’t just unfold linearly; it pivots and branches based on how key underlying uncertainties resolve. Your task here is identifying those crucial pivot points or “hinges.” Simple frameworks (like simplified STEEP/PESTEL categories – Social, Tech, Economic, Political, etc.) can be useful thought starters, but don’t get bogged down worshiping the categories.
• In Practice: I had distilled factors potentially influencing the future of AI-era testing (tech evolution, policy shifts, student adoption rates, emerging ethical norms, etc.) and pre-identified about ten based on their background materials, which we rapidly refined down to seven key candidates. Each factor consisted of a brief description and two possible directions. Then, crucially, we used a simple polling tool (e.g., Mentimeter) to have the entire group vote quickly on the top two factors they collectively felt were both highly important and highly uncertain. This step ensures the subsequent scenarios are built directly upon the forces the team itself deems most critical, fostering immediate buy-in and relevance.
• Your Action: Brainstorm potential driving forces, then use a quick, democratic voting mechanism to let the team prioritize the top two most critical uncertainties.

How can we transform two factors, each with two outcomes, into four scenarios?

3. Step 3: Co-Pilot with a Drafting Assistant for Rapid Scenarios (10 mins)

• Generate Your Starting Points—Instantly
• What it Solves: Powerfully overcomes the dreaded “blank page” paralysis and the lack of time/resources that typically plague efforts to develop rich, engaging scenarios from scratch. It delivers tangible, provocative drafts in mere minutes.
• The Idea: Think of large language models (LLMs) here not as the final strategic thinkers, but as incredibly fast, capable drafting assistants. They provide the initial “scaffolding” or “raw clay” based on your precise instructions (the prompt). This feature frees your team’s valuable cognitive bandwidth to immediately start shaping, critiquing, reacting, and extracting strategic value. Leveraging platform features that allow deep context injection (like Anthropic Claude’s capability to process large documents or custom instructions) is key here.
• In Practice: Before the session, I meticulously prepared a detailed prompt structure. This defined the desired scenario format: a short narrative core, illustrative quotes capturing the “vibe,” key defining features, and potential characteristic moments or conflicts. I loaded this pre-tested prompt into the LLM beforehand. Then, live on stage, I simply inserted the two specific top-voted uncertainty factors from Step 2 into the pre-built prompt structure. Within moments, the tool generated four distinct, reasonably formatted scenarios exploring different combinations of those factors.
• Your Action: Prepare your desired scenario structure and core prompt ahead of time. Critically, test it to ensure it generates useful, provocative output. Then, simply insert the top factors chosen by the group during the session for near-instant results.

Here’s a simplified version of the prompt structure I used:

You are supporting me in conducting an interactive session on the topic “Between the AI revolution and the educational mandate: exploring the future of testing for the present” as part of the symposium “Testing despite and with AI: subject-specific perspectives” at the FernUniversität Hagen.

The participants have just used Mentimeter to select two key factors that, in their opinion, have the greatest uncertainty and the greatest influence on the future of the examination system. You can find a detailed description of the key factors in the project documents.

Based on these two factors and their two respective characteristics, four distinct future scenarios for the year 2028 are to be developed. These will then serve as the basis for group work. The scenarios should be created according to the following format:

#### 1. Title, time marker and visual metaphor
A concise, memorable title that characterizes the scenario, supplemented by the specific year (2028) and a central metaphor or visual image that serves as an anchor.

#### 2. Characteristics and introductory paragraph
Explicit naming of the two key factors that define this scenario, followed by a short introductory paragraph summarizing the basic characteristic of the scenario (starting with “In this future...”).

#### 3. Signals from the future (3-5 specific examples)
Short, illustrative examples that make the scenario tangible in everyday university life. These “signals” should be specific, vivid and directly related to the reality of the exam.

#### 4. Key quotes (1-2)
Short, pointed statements by fictitious persons (teachers, students, university management) that represent typical attitudes or experiences in this scenario.

#### 5. Key implications (3-4 bullet points)
Short, concise presentation of the most important consequences for examination practice in this scenario.

#### 6. Targeted discussion question
A provocative or open question that leads directly into the group work and encourages further reflection.

The participants have selected the following factors:
[FACTOR 1 WITH 2 OUTCOMES]
[FACTOR 2 WITH 2 OUTCOMES]

4. Step 4: Structure the Scenario Interaction (5 mins Prep + 15 mins Discussion)

• Make the Futures Interactive, Not Static
• What it Solves: Prevents the freshly generated scenarios from becoming just another “interesting document” destined to languish in a digital filing cabinet. It actively counters the Knowing-Doing Gap by channeling collective energy into focused, productive exploration.
• The Idea: Scenarios aren’t endpoints; they are fundamentally conversation objects. You need to give people clear, simple instructions or questions for how to “play” with them effectively to get the most value, much like handing out game pieces. The structure facilitates meaning-making.
• In Practice: We quickly shared the four AI-generated scenarios via a link to a shared document (Google Docs proved simple and effective) that was accessible to everyone. We notionally divided the room into four quadrants, assigning one scenario per quadrant. Participants then broke into smaller groups within their quadrant for focused discussion. My key learning here, reflected afterward, is to provide even more explicit structure for these short, intense discussions next time. Simple, sharp, guiding questions work best: “Reading this scenario, what resonates most strongly—positively or negatively? What feels most challenging or repellent to us? What specific opportunities or threats jump out for our work? Crucially: How does this future feel?”
• Your Action: Ensure easy, instant access to the scenarios. Divide groups logically. Provide just 2-3 sharp, provocative guiding questions to structure their interaction with their assigned scenario.

5. Step 5: Facilitate Reaction, Reflection & First Steps (10 mins)

• Harvest Insights, Identify Directions
• What it Solves: Purposefully translates the exploratory exercise into tangible takeaways, shared understanding, and potential starting points for concrete action. This moves deliberately beyond abstract talk into immediate strategic relevance.
• The Idea: The objective here isn’t immediate consensus on which future is most likely or “correct.” Instead, it’s to use the contrasting visions as lenses to sharpen the group’s collective focus on implications, values, and preferred futures. Each scenario helps bring different facets of your current strategy and desired direction into clearer view.
• In Practice: We used a simple microphone pass-around for quick snapshot feedback from each discussion group. Hearing the diversity of reactions—the points of strong resonance, the areas of sharp resistance, the unexpected “aha!” moments sparked by interacting with these tangible “straw man” futures—was incredibly valuable data. It immediately surfaced key areas of alignment and potential divergence within the group. Critically, it helped participants begin articulating, often implicitly at first, what a desirable future would look like, precisely because they were reacting to the specific scenarios presented. This scenario sets the stage perfectly for the essential next strategic conversation: “Given these possibilities we’ve explored, what kind of future do we actually want to aim for, and what’s the very next concrete step we need to take to start moving in that direction?”
• Your Action: Use a quick, inclusive method (like round-robin sharing or digital sticky notes) to capture key reactions and emergent themes. Explicitly ask, “What does interacting with these scenarios make us realize about our preferred future?” Capture emerging insights and potential next actions clearly.

Navigating Potential Roadblocks

While powerful, this rapid approach isn’t without potential challenges. Anticipating them can help ensure a smoother session:

• Skepticism about AI: Some participants might doubt the quality or relevance of AI-generated content. Mitigate such reservations by framing the AI clearly as a “fast drafting assistant,” not the final word. Emphasize that its output is just a starting point for their critical human analysis and discussion. Preparing and testing your prompt structure beforehand also builds confidence in the generated output.
• Resistance to Futures Thinking: Not everyone is comfortable speculating about the future; some may find it abstract or irrelevant to immediate tasks. Address such resistance by tightly linking the workshop question (Step 1) to a tangible, current strategic challenge. Highlighting the co-creative aspect (they choose the key uncertainties) also increases relevance and ownership.
• Time Constraints: The 60-minute structure is intentionally tight. Prepare meticulously beforehand (especially the prompt and logistics), keep instructions clear and concise, and be disciplined in facilitating transitions between steps. Remind participants that the goal is provocation and direction setting, not exhaustive analysis within the hour.

Maintaining Momentum: Beyond the Hour

The energy and insights generated in a Rapid Experiential Futures workshop are valuable, but their true impact lies in what happens next. Don’t let the conversation end when the hour is up. Here are some ways to maintain momentum:

• Capture & Circulate: Immediately document key insights, reactions, identified opportunities/threats, and especially any emergent sense of a preferred future or potential next steps. Share this summary quickly with all participants.
• Assign Ownership: Designate clear owners or a small working group responsible for synthesizing the findings further and proposing concrete follow-up actions or experiments based on the workshop discussion.
• Schedule Follow-Through: Book a follow-up meeting (even a short one) specifically to review proposed actions and commit to the next concrete steps. Integrate the scenario considerations into ongoing strategic planning processes.

This Rapid Experiential Futures approach isn’t magic, nor is it a replacement for deeper, longer-term strategic work. But it is a distinctly pragmatic, hands-on way to inject focused energy, collaborative insight, and a bias for action into your strategic process. It respects the intense time constraints leaders and teams operate under while directly addressing the profound need to move beyond passive trend consumption toward more active, engaged future-shaping. It might feel like an experiment the first time you try it (I certainly framed it that way for the university group), but the potential to quickly unlock new perspectives, surface hidden assumptions, and begin aligning your team on the path forward is, in my experience, significant and well worth the hour invested.