What We Do
While Changeist is constantly experimenting with new approaches to what we do, our primary work falls into the four categories below. We’re happy to have a conversation about how our twenty-plus years of skills and experience can help you address a challenge, equip a team, inform an audience or uncover new insights.
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Research & Consulting
We are continuously scanning for weak signals, trends, and driving forces, so that we can deliver rich insights for the organisations we work with through our strategic advisory practice. We apply sensemaking tools, develop scenarios, imagine narratives and prototype new ways of experiencing possible futures for clients and partners. This includes designing new tools, platforms and approaches that help define preferable futures and make them tangible for decision-makers and stakeholders.
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Capacity Building
Using our How to Future methodology, we offer workshops, intensives, custom studio courses and immersions that put the tools of futures discovery and creation into the capable hands of organizations, teams and individuals. We've created learning experiences in dozens of countries, organizations and contexts worldwide. A number of our workshops and intensives are now available online for distributed teams, as single events or programmed learning.
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Public Engagement
We create content and design strategies to help people experience futures in immersive ways — using various media, materials, and objects to spark discussions about possible and desirable outcomes. We collaborate with businesses, cultural institutions, and public organizations to share what's coming and encourage public conversations about change.
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Content & Narrative Design
We create stories, incorporating both the real and the imaginary, to transport audiences to unexpected and diverse futures. This work includes topical research, creating original content, script consulting, developing programming, designing experiences, crafting journeys and collaborating with media companies, content creators, and independent producers.
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Strategic Simulations
This new capability draws from our skills and experience—from trends research to artifact development to narrative and game design to capacity building—to create custom immersive learning experiences that help organizations safely explore frontier risks, and build participants’ strategic agility to lead in contexts of deep uncertainty and surprise.
Public Projects
The Changeist team has worked across dozens of sectors, markets and cultures, ranging from media, technology, mobility, retail, finance, health care, security, and energy to education, governance, culture, humanitarian relief and human development. Each experience informs the whole of our knowledge and approach.
While many of our projects are internal or proprietary in nature, we are able to share the examples below. Contact us if you would like to know more.
The Future of Arts & Culture
Collaborative research
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A small global team of arts and culture leaders wanted to explore the key drivers of change over the next decade, particularly those accelerated by the pandemic to offer better understand of emergent scenarios.
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Changeist worked with a steering group, as well as the team behind Futurescaper and supporting organizations Arup and Therme Group to develop a way to tap the future insights of over 220 professionals from the museum, gallery, performance, funding, curation, creation and critical sectors around the world. The result was a dataset of 500+ factors of change, three scenarios, possible impacts, and key strategic questions these sectors should consider. More is available at futureofartsandculture.org.
Imagining Feminist Futures
Learning design
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The International Women’s Development Agency wanted a self-facilitating online toolkit to help its stakeholders anticipate and mitigate risks emerging from or amplified by COVID-19.
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Working with a distributed team of women futurists from North America, Europe, Southeast Asia and Australia, Changeist partner Susan Cox-Smith led development of a flexible online experience that has engaged over 200 practitioners, policymakers and activists worldwide. It has also formed the basis of a set of scenarios and illustrated stories to enable IWDA communities to imagine more positive futures.
Nesta Trends Library
Futures intelligence
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UK innovation foundation Nesta wanted a way to develop and maintain a dynamic library of trends and drivers that may impact its three key mission areas, supported by its Discovery Hub.
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Changeist designed and developed content for Nesta’s Trend Library, a tool initially created to provide an ongoing feed of new signals, trends and driving forces to research and foresight teams. The tool included a platform containing over a dozen drivers, 60+ trends and 200+ signals, which are now being fed and updated by Nesta’s own teams. Versions of it can also be opened for external use and collaboration, as seen here. Watch a video and read more about the initial uses of the Trends Library to date.
Future is Now
Experiential artifacts
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in 2018, the International Federation of Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) convened the General Assembly of the Red Cross Red Crescent (RCRC) Movement, bringing together members of all National Societies for a week of Statutory meetings in Antalya, Turkey. These Statutory Meetings gave the IFRC Innovation and Futures/Foresight team an opportunity to provide an insight into what the future needs of people in crisis might be.
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The team selected a handful of designers, futurists, and other experts to develop physical artefacts and media to bring future trends to life for the General Assembly attendees. Changeist created and produced scenarios and experiential artifacts for this project, including a speculative temporary passport kit for crisis-displaced people, a forensic reality collection kit for international investigators, and a future activist group made up of former scientists. These pieces made a successful impact on attendees at the RCRC, and several went on to travel in exhibition to Denmark, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland and the UK. Read more here.
Future Climate Challenges
Public engagement
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Global financial services leader ING wanted to develop a communications package to speak to global employee and partner networks on the coming risks and impacts of climate change.
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Changeist wrote and provided on-screen talent for a short video highlighting risks of climate change in the financial environment, proposals for actions that audiences can take to manage these risks and help clients make a positive impact. In addition, we participated in a roundtable panel supporting the launch of the video, which was streamed to ING teams globally.
Future Trends & Signals System
Futures intelligence
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As part of its 2022-2025 Strategic Plan, the Strategy & Futures Team within the Executive Office of UNDP commissioned the design and development of an organization-wide Future Trends and Signals System (FTSS), a platform for collection and sensemaking of signals and trends to enable greater anticipation and impact across UNDP’s work globally.
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Working in partnership with Smithery, Changeist co-designed and advised on content development, and provided training for, the FTSS, the initial by-product of which was the first Global Signals Spotlight in early 2023, a collection of emerging signals of change with the potential to impact the development landscape. Development of the FTSS continues, including shaping of new public outputs intended to support work of UNDP teams and partners globally, such as for the 2023 Human Development Report.