Futurism Is Having a Moment in Post-Pandemic Foundation Strategy

In the world of philanthropy, the future is having a moment.

Many grant makers set strategies and goals to achieve over three, five, or maybe 10 years at the longest. But in an era defined by a pandemic, climate disasters, and a nationwide racial reckoning, more grant makers are rethinking how they plan and are applying the tools of futurism.

“The pandemic, together with the upheaval around George Floyd, made funders realize that there was a real risk in getting blindsided by big changes in the world around us,” says Gabriel Kasper, managing director of the Monitor Institute by Deloitte, who consults with foundations and produces reports on possible future scenarios.

“Funders and nonprofits are really good at imagining their preferred futures,” he says, but the sector isn’t as good at understanding how global risks and upheavals might affect their work. That’s where futurism comes in.

The field is a subset of strategy. It also goes by many names — future sensing, strategic foresight — and encompasses tools like scenario planning and in-depth research.

While large companies have long embraced this kind of thinking, corners of the nonprofit sector have also seen the benefits. Foundations are using futurism approaches to anticipate how trends like climate and demographic change, technologies like generative artificial intelligence, and threats to democracy might affect their existing strategies, reshape priorities, and open up new conversations with grantees.

“It’s not about predicting the future,” says Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, a nonprofit that has helped organizations apply the tools of futurism for more than 50 years. “Ultimately, it’s about being prepared and shaping a more desirable future.”

A whole industry of individual consultants and strategy firms has emerged over the past few decades to help nonprofits get ready for the next decade or more, but the Institute for the Future is among the oldest. The Palo Alto-based nonprofit spun off from RAND Corporation in 1968 with support from the Ford Foundation and has since advised thousands of organizations, including nonprofits and philanthropies, as well as companies and government groups.

With the help of futurist consultants, the Rockefeller Foundation in 2019 designed a grant-making prize that sourced thousands of visions of what food production and consumption could look like in 2050. The Omidyar Network formed an Exploration and Future Sensing team, also in 2019. And over the past four years, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has employed a futurist in residence to help the health-equity grant maker anticipate trends. Coming out of the pandemic, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation launched a future-of-families project.

Because of high demand, the Institute for the Future has been offering training courses specifically for foundations, with more planned in the coming months.

“It’s become particularly relevant as we wake up every day and some previously unimaginable thing is happening,” says Gorbis.

A Corporate Tool First

Futures studies dates back decades, but coalesced in the middle of the last century. By then, the U.S. military was regularly using scenario planning to understand potential wartime outcomes, and corporations were relying on strategic planning to gain a competitive advantage.

But strategic tools that benefit the military or businesses don’t necessarily work when the goal is improving civil society and people’s everyday lives. That’s why many philanthropies have been hesitant to adopt the ideas of futurism, says Katherine Fulton, a nonprofit strategy consultant.

“Twenty years ago, it was novel, and people were very skeptical about it,” Fulton says, partly because it came from the business world.

In 1998, while working at Global Business Network, a small consulting firm founded by people who had introduced what they called “scenario thinking” at the oil company Royal Dutch Shell, Fulton led a scenario exercise for the Council on Foundations about the future of philanthropy. A couple years later, she worked on a five-year project funded by the Packard and Kellogg foundations to bring foresight tools to philanthropy through training and a 2004 publication called “What If?” that aimed to demystify scenario thinking for the nonprofit world.

As organizations continue to grapple with rapid change and uncertainty, these ideas and tools have become more mainstream.

“Not only is it legitimate, it’s essential,” says Nora Silver, founder and faculty director of the Center for Social Sector Leadership at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “Scenario planning may have been the first toe in the water or an earlier version,” she says, but she’s noticed more futurism keynote speakers at foundation conferences over the past decade.

Grant makers are recognizing the need to be nimble in responding to crises while taking a longer view of what they’re doing, Fulton says. “The bookends have moved in both directions.”

‘A Branding Exercise’

Nonprofits try to change the trajectory of the future anytime they make a grant, start a new program, or propose a public policy, says Trista Harris, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s first futurist in residence, who leads a futurism consulting firm. “It’s just that the language of futurism and the specific tools are new to them.”

Some are put off by futurist jargon.

Melanie Herman, who spent the past 27 years as CEO of the Nonprofit Risk Management Center, says she’s seen the phrase “strategic foresight” thrown around, but doesn’t use it to describe her work.

“We believe that nonprofits should focus on building resilience and readiness and accept the fact that none of us know how the future will unfold,” she says. “No amount of strategic planning or strategizing is going to fully anticipate the impact of these forces beyond everyone’s control.”

There is also a lack of consensus on how to define this work, especially in the nonprofit sector. Consultants use different terminology and buzzwords to talk about essentially the same set of tools, says Suzette Brooks Masters, a senior fellow at the Democracy Funders Network. “It’s become a bit of a branding exercise,” she says.

Talk to 10 different futurists and you’ll get 10 different explanations of what they do.

W.K. Kellogg Foundation

But once you cut through the jargon, Brooks Masters is a believer in these methods. She directs the Democracy Funders Network’s Better Futures Project, which encourages donors to use foresight and visioning in their work. Democracy Fund, part of the Omidyar Group, for example, launched a program called Democracy TBD that brought together authors, economists, technologists, journalists, and others for scenario-planning conversations. Today, says Brooks Masters, the fund encourages staff to collect and analyze information that could signal changes, a practice sometimes called “scanning the horizon.”

“Even though philanthropies are one of the few societal actors that actually have a long-term time horizon,” she says, “inevitably people get sucked in to reacting to things that are happening in the present that may or may not be advancing their long-term goals.”

Innovating the Future

The Rockefeller Foundation saw the power of futurism when it developed a “vision prize” to source ideas for its food and agriculture grant making. In 2019, with the assistance of consultants at OpenIdeo and SecondMuse, the philanthropy spent nine months developing a toolkit to guide applicants, with prompts like “write a few hopeful headlines for news stories from 2050” and consider what would make this future idea possible.

Visions for the future are often dystopian, and that can make it challenging to inspire innovative solutions, says Roy Steiner, senior vice president for the Rockefeller Foundation’s Food Initiative. “When you can’t envision something, you can’t create it.”

The foundation invited organizations around the world to share ideas that could transform local food systems over the next 30 years. More than 1,400 groups from 110 countries applied. Ten winners shared a $2 million prize, each receiving $200,000.

Beyond the prize, “that future-sensing work really helped us identify priorities,” Steiner says. It set the stage for the grant maker’s three main food and agriculture programs: a food-as-medicine initiative, regenerative agriculture, and expanded access to school meals. That represented a big departure for the foundation, which funded research behind the Green Revolution, which helped increase crop yields to alleviate hunger in less-developed countries.

Bringing in a range of perspectives is key to this work, says the Monitor Institute’s Kasper. The work, he says, “needs to start with looking at the way lots of people see the future rather than just picking one perspective.”

Signal Swarms

Leaders at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation were going through an Institute for the Future training when the pandemic hit. They applied foresight tools to devise a Covid-19 response plan, which led to changes like new hybrid-work arrangements after the initial emergency phase of the pandemic and an increase in unrestricted grant making.

“We were reactive because of the pandemic, but we wanted to be more proactive as we move forward,” said Carla Thompson Payton, the foundation’s chief strategist and impact officer.

The foundation began organizing what it calls “signal swarms” to pay closer attention to changes that could affect staffing and grant making. Staff, grantees, consultants, and other foundation partners were asked to collect articles, academic studies, and other information about such topics as the future of families.

W.K. Kellogg Foundation

That research was then sorted into a few main themes — such as how families may be structured in 20 years — to organize deeper topical conversations.

Almost 2,000 people participated in small in-person coffee chats, listening sessions, virtual meetings, and a survey where they used a variety of foresight tools to help understand grantees’ visions of the future.

“The whole purpose behind the exercise is to break the mental models of what we use day in and day out and create opportunities for new ways of thinking,” says Payton. “We’re not being predictive, but it’s a way in which to gather thoughts and make some sense out of the signals.”

Ultimately, the idea is to help the foundation develop a map of investments over the next two decades. The foundation plans to share findings from this exercise later this year.

The Future Present

For several years, the Omidyar Network, started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, funded a team dedicated to experiments with foresight. The Exploration and Future Sensing unit helped the grant maker set grant-making strategies, says David Hsu, who had been on the team. Today, members of that group and others trained in futurism inform the network’s three main grant-making program areas: building a healthy digital-technology ecosystem, creating an economy that works for all, and fostering an inclusive society s.

As at many other philanthropies, Omidyar Network staff members have been thinking about how generative artificial intelligence could affect the future of the economy and workforce as well as social trust. In December, the grant maker announced an initial $30 million investment to promote the inclusive and responsible development of A.I. technology.

“It’s an area where we have been both doing grant making as well as internal strategy and research,” says Hsu, who now leads the Omidyar Network’s Building Cultures of Belonging program, which focuses on how to heal divides and build civic connection as demographics in the United States continue to shift.

Futurists love to point to a maxim attributed to the science fiction writer William Gibson: “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” For philanthropies that use foresight methods, that often rings true, says Fulton, the strategy consultant. “The dirty secret of much of this work is that often it just brings people into the present that already exists.”