Metafuture is an educational think-tank which through research, writing, teaching, speeches and workshop facilitation helps organizations, institutions, cities, nations and international associations create alternative and preferred futures.
We are professional futurists who are informed by the innovative field of Futures Studies. We characterise a futurist as a person who employs time, especially future time, to transform the present towards the direction of preferred futures and uses the future to change the present. This needs to be done through substantiated, evidence based, structured, and rigorous processes as much as it is done through dialogue, intuition, insight and creativity. Through deeply democratic processes, the futurist helps organizations and institutions move from the default future – avoiding the used and disowned – to the preferred future.
Our working definition of Futures Studies is: the study of alternative futures including the worldviews and myths that underlie them. We use theoretical frameworks and methods from modern futures studies which have developed in the second half of 20th C and the beginning decades of the 21st C.
Our approach is based on the “Six Pillars” model of Futures Studies. This framework consists of the following methods and tools: the futures triangle, the futures landscape, emerging issues and trend analysis, the futures wheel, macrohistory, causal layered analysis, scenarios, visioning, backcasting, and the transcend approach to conflict resolution.