The Future, By the People

Last week I wrote about a room of city managers spending four hours mapping horizons, digging beneath a stubborn problem, and working backward from 2040. Powerful tools. They share a quiet limitation, though. A handful of leaders in a hotel ballroom, however sharp, is still a handful of leaders.

The hardest questions facing local government are too big for any city hall to answer alone. Housing. Workforce. Fiscal sustainability. The fraying of public trust.

So on Tuesday afternoon at the Transforming Local Government conference1, a four-hour workshop picked up where the pre-conference left off and pushed the door open wider. Participatory Foresight: Shaping Futures with Community, led by AFI Strategy Director Hauson Le and Foresight Vector founder Steven Kenney, asked a deceptively simple question. What if residents weren’t just consulted about the future, but helped author it?

“There are, in round numbers, 6,000,000,000 futurists on our planet,” reads the Alvin Toffler line the facilitators used to set the tone. “There are so many futurists because every human carries inside her or his skull a set of assumptions about what does not yet exist.”

Those assumptions are an underused civic asset. That was the premise of the afternoon.

Participatory foresight joins two disciplines local governments know very unevenly. Community engagement is familiar ground, and every city runs some version of it. Strategic foresight remains a specialized practice still working its way into the mainstream.

Bringing the less-familiar discipline together with the everyday one is what defines participatory foresight. It’s also what makes it easy to mistake for the public-input process you already have on the calendar.

Conventional engagement focuses on what is, the problems and complaints of the present and near term. Residents get handed options already framed for them and asked to react, one comment card or survey response at a time.

Participatory foresight inverts each of those moves. It focuses on what could be, over a longer horizon. It treats residents as co-authors of a shared vision rather than reviewers of a finished one. It’s built to surface collective intelligence instead of aggregating individual opinions.

The case for doing it isn’t sentimental. Engaging more people in thinking about the future produces better decisions. A wider range of perspectives guards against blind spots, lends legitimacy to hard choices, and helps rebuild institutional trust. When residents help imagine the future, the future starts to feel like something shared rather than something done to them.

The heart of the workshop was a gallery of real case studies, poster-sized exhibits attendees walked, discussed, and marked with colored dots. Red for most useful in my community, blue for most feasible.

The first, filed under Creating Purpose, came from Denmark (see above). The 2025 Futures Barometer surveyed a nationally representative sample of just over a thousand Danes about their hopes and fears, and the results were sobering. Only about a quarter believed their descendants would live better lives than they do. A third expected worse.

Buried in the same data was a mandate for leaders willing to think long term. Seventy-three percent said politicians make short-sighted decisions, and would think better of a party that offered a long-term vision. Foresight is what the public is asking for.

The second exhibit, under Charting Pathways, answered the skeptic’s inevitable question. Does any of this lead to action?

The Childcare Futures 2030 project, backed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and IDEO.org, convened parents, providers, community organizers, and policy experts to imagine a childcare system beyond incremental reform. It didn’t stop at a vision. One cohort’s work traced a direct line to the St. Louis County Council voting to invest American Rescue Plan Act funds in childcare-teacher wages, a pathway from a shared future to a line in a public budget.

The workshop didn’t oversell the method. The friction in the room was part of the lesson.

The afternoon opened with an open house exercise built around a single framing question, Cross-Government Learning in 2040, that fanned out into paired prompts. The future participants wanted to create and the one they wanted to prevent. The changes today pushing their organizations toward that future and away from it. What from the past they needed to bring with them and what to let go of.

Attendees wrote on sticky notes and clustered them with like ideas. Not everyone found it natural. “I wanted to have conversations,” one participant said, “so it felt a little off to just go put sticky notes on the wall.”

The walls surfaced real disagreement rather than tidy consensus. Several notes on what to let go of named DEI, reflecting a view that seemed widely shared in the room, that the term had come to feel more performative than practical. That reading didn’t go unchallenged. One participant argued the room shouldn’t run away from the words, or the commitment behind them.

No one resolved it on the spot, and that was rather the point. Participatory foresight is designed to make tensions like that visible.

The questions that followed were equally unvarnished. Is this a slide toward direct democracy? The facilitators’ answer: informed participation requires some education, so residents aren’t just offering pie in the sky, but there’s also real value in freeing people to think without constraints. You need both.

Then a pointed reminder from one veteran facilitator. Evening meetings tend to draw the same retired regulars. Genuine participation means providing childcare, transportation, and support so the room looks more like the community. The method is only as good as who gets to be in it.

The workshop’s final task asked attendees to make it local. Identify a challenge in your own community where participatory foresight might fit, and pitch it to a partner.

As the facilitators put it, quoting futurist Thor Svanholm Gustavfson: “Embedding participatory foresight may be one of the most effective ways to shift ownership of the future from governments alone to society at large.”

Last week’s piece ended with the observation that you already know what’s coming. Your residents have a view of it too. Who in your community would you want in that room?

Onward and Upward.