Practical Guide For Facilitating A Futures Workshop

By Ville Lauttamäki

Finland Futures Research Centre, Turku School of Economics, University of Turku

This practical guide introduces a generic structure for conducting a futures workshop, specifically designed to be utilized in short, practically-oriented foresight projects.

Duration:
A half-day or full-day workshop

Focus:
To bring together people from various backgrounds who all share an interest in a common issue or a problem

Activity:
Group

Keywords:
Scenario planning, Creative thinking, Participatory methods

About the workshop

Futures workshop is one of the best-known and most used participatory methods in the field of futures studies. It is a convenient way of producing, collecting and communicating views and ideas on potential future developments.

Learning objectives

Seeking answers to practical questions (e.g., future of an industry)
Devising action plans for achieving desired future at a one-day workshop

Usage suggestions

Futures workshop is primarily used in brief, practically oriented foresight projects to bring together people from diverse backgrounds who share an interest in addressing a common issue or problem. Futures workshop is a good tool for tackling complex problems where many, often seemingly contradicting views, must be fitted together. In addition to collecting and producing information futures workshop acts as an instrument of social learning which is especially beneficial if the people taking part in the workshop are also responsible in bringing about the desired change.

Materials list and physical space

The structure of the workshop and the number of participants determine what kinds of space arrangements are necessary. Typically, almost any kind of room(s) where there is a possibility to organise tables freely to form table groups of 4 to 8 persons, will do.

Futures workshops do not really require anything special, large sheets of paper and pens (in various colours) will do. One can also use post-it notes instead of writing all the ideas directly at the paper. If this is the case, one should reserve plenty of post-it notes.

There are possibilities to use modern ICT, especially in the final exercise where stories or timelines describing various possible future paths are written a laptop connected to a data projector. This helps everyone to get involved in editing the text is useful, but if data projectors for each group are not available, traditional methods will do just fine.

Pre-work required by students

Pre-work & Post-work required by participants

Pre-work required by facilitators & students

The day should start by the facilitator giving a brief overview on the subject and goals of the day and the employed method.
The duration of facilitators opening speech on the goals and progress of the workshop should not be too long; 10–15 minutes should be enough.
Along with practical arrangements, the facilitator should encourage the participants to be creative.
After that, the participants should be divided in groups.
It is a good idea to try to mix people so that each group would have a selection of different kind of people in them (various backgrounds, skills, knowledge, age, gender, etc.).
Size of each group should not exceed seven or eight people.
These small groups should be seated in circle around the table to be able to interact and write to the paper in the middle of the group.
There should be no hierarchies in groups’ discussion.

Post-work required by facilitators & students

When reporting on a workshop exercise, materials produced by participants can sometimes be unclear, leaving room for interpretation. This may stem from issues like illegible handwriting or vague ideas.
To clarify ambiguous points and accurately capture participants’ intentions, it’s useful to conduct a brief survey shortly after the workshop. Various tools, like Webropol (licensed) or free options such as Google Drive and SurveyMonkey, can help with this.
Effective workshop reports should be concise, focusing on unique insights and points of consensus.
A clear report might include “cleaned” versions of participants’ diagrams, stories, and action plans, along with an analysis of the results to highlight key findings.

Theoretical Foundations

Origin of futures workshops is often attached to the work of an Austrian futurist Robert Jungk, who developed the basic form of a futures workshop to increase democratic participation and to “incorporate a wide range of views, ideas and proposals of people whose lives are affected by some decision” (Bell, 2003). Since Jungk’s first workshop in 1962, uses and ways of organizing futures workshops have diversified and today various types of futures workshops are a rather common way of collecting, processing and organizing views on the future (Bezold and Miles, 2002; Hauptman and Saharan, 2013; Inayatullah and Song, 2014; Tuominen et al., 2014; Weigand et al., 2014; Heinonen and Ruotsalainen, 2013; Franco et al., 2013; Neuvonen et al., 2014; De Smedt et al., 2013; van Vliet et al., 2010, 2012).

Time plan

1. The preparation phase – the conference room (or rooms) is prepared (papers, pens, post-it notes etc. should be available). The workshop method, its rules and the scheduled course of the workshop are introduced.

2. Critique phase – actual start of the workshop. Here, the problem is investigated critically and thoroughly. 1,5 to 2 hours of time should suffice for this exercise.

3. Fantasy phase – creative phase where it is allowed to vision different possible futures, even goofy ones. Time needed for writing stories depends on how many paths the groups have constructed. Roughly 20–30 minutes per story is needed.

4. Implementation phase – the ideas found are checked and evaluated in regard to their practicability. If a solution has been found, an action plan is written down. This exercise should be quite simple so roughly 15 to 30 minutes of time for depicting the progress of the events from present to the projected future year of each future end state should be enough.

Typically, the workshop ends with a short final discussion where each group gets to say what their key findings during the day were. The time for each of these presentations should be no more than 10 minutes

Key takeaways

Futures workshop can be used for assessing features and finding alternatives for current activities, seeking possible new directions against the outlined future possibilities (scenarios) or for collecting images of the futures without an immediate use for this information in mind (food for thought). Futures workshop can also be used as a tool of proactive futures creation by collecting a group of stakeholders related to a specific problem and using futures workshop as a tool in forming a common opinion on the desired future and the most important actions needed to achieve that future.