Foresight Masterclass 2025
SCENARIO PLANNING WITH MĀNOA METHOD
Mānoa scenario building is designed to generate divergent, surprising scenarios that evolve from changes and impacts proliferating over several decades, eg, a generation. Because the intent is maximizing how different possible futures might be from the present, it is best suited for creativity, innovation, and transformational thinking.
Scenarios generated by this technique can be used for strategic work and wind-tunnelling decisions, policies, programs or products. It will offer a more significant ‘stress test’ than shorter-term scenarios might. Featuring a case study – the World Organization of Animal Health 100th Anniversary Foresight Project.
On the occasion of the Futures Studies 2025 Conference “Closed Future/Open Futures,” the Italian Institute for the Future is organizing an exclusive masterclass with Wendy Schultz on Thursday, September 25, to learn how to use Mānoa scenario building with its developer! In the evocative setting of Palazzo Venezia in Naples, participants will enjoy a unique training experience to master the tools of the Mānoa method and improve their futurist toolbox.
The masterclass registration fee also includes a ticket to the 2025 Conference, which will open on the evening of Thursday, September 25, and continue at Villa Capodimonte in Naples on September 26-27.
Programme
9.30-10.00 – Registration & welcome coffee
10.00-11.00 – Introduction
Introductions to each other
Getting to know each other – everyone please bring one or two examples of what you think is a new and emerging, disruptive change – either good or bad! Introduce yourself, and share your change.
Introduction to the method
Mānoa scenario building is designed to generate divergent, surprising scenarios that evolve from changes and impacts proliferating over several decades, eg, a generation. Because the intent is maximizing how different possible futures might be from the present, it is best suited for creativity, innovation, and transformational thinking. Scenarios generated by this technique can be used for strategic work and wind-tunnelling decisions, policies, programs or products. It will offer a more significant ‘stress test’ than shorter-term scenarios might. Featuring a case study – the World Organization of Animal Health 100th Anniversary Foresight Project.
11.00-13.00 – Emerging Changes and Futures Wheels
Emerging Changes – what’s new?
We organize and add to our list of surprising new changes – sorting by STEEP (social, technological, environmental, economic, and political) and by time horizon (likely to become widespread in the near term, mid-term, or far term).
Futures Wheels – exploring the cascading impacts of change
Focus on one emerging change, and ask, “What immediate impacts would we see if that change became widespread and common?” Then consider each of those impacts, and ask what impacts they would create – follow the impact cascade through primary, secondary, and tertiary impacts.
Repeat with two additional emerging changes, chosen from different STEEP categories.
13.00-14.00 – Light lunch
14.00-15.30 – Mapping Influences and Interconnections
Connecting the impacts across the futures wheels – Which impacts and changes amplify each other? Which cancel each other out? How does the system respond – innovations, public backlash, regulations, new artworks?
15.30-17.00 – Scenario building – telling the story.
Exploring key stakeholders via personas: create a character and describe what they are doing in the future created by these three changes, all their impacts, and the interconnections and collisions of those impacts.
What new innovations arise? What new household items and artifacts are common in this future? What do people celebrate? How is work different? Education? Leisure time? What new arts will emerge? What are the new crimes? How would your work be different?
17.00-17.30 – Feedback and discussion
Wendy Schultz
Wendy Schultz is an internationally renowned futurist with over 40 years of global foresight practice. She has designed futures research projects for non-governmental organisations, government agencies, and businesses, recently completed four global scenarios and multiple regional scenarios on the futures of research and innovation in a post-COVID world. Wendy specialises in participatory futures workshops and is currently curating explorations of the ethics of the emerging biotech age. Wendy holds a master’s and PhD in Futures Studies from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. She is on the faculty of the master’s program in Strategic Foresight at the University of Houston, is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies, a Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation, a Fellow of the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, and a member and former Board member of the Association of Professional Futurists.
Location
Palazzo Venezia is one of the most important buildings in the heart of the city of Naples, unique in its kind. Located along the lower decumanus, a few meters from the prestigious Church of Santa Chiara and Piazza del Gesù Nuovo, Palazzo Venezia, with its spectacular loggia, the “casina pompeiana,” and its splendid historic garden, stands out for the intensity and power of its history.
The masterclass will be held in this historic 15th-century building, in the charming Pompeian cottage within the palace’s enchanting hanging garden.
Address: Via Benedetto Croce, 19, 80134 Napoli NA
