Climate change, biodiversity loss, growing pressure on resources, geopolitical disruptions, and social transformations are no longer part of the background. They are reshaping the very conditions under which organizations make decisions, innovate, manufacture, cooperate, and transform.
Alternative Futures is a pedagogical setup developed at emlyon business school in 2018 to help students, faculty, researchers, and learning organizations explore these transformations differently. Not by trying to predict the future, but by learning to pluralize futures, reveal strategic blind spots, and identify opportunities for action starting today.
How it works: one real organization, students, and multiple possible futures
Each learning organization brings students a real-world case and introduces them to its ambitions, activities, stakeholders, projects, vulnerabilities, and questions. Students are not asked to act as consultants tasked with validating an existing strategy. They learn to shift perspective.
Their mission is to question the organization’s worldview, investigate the driving forces already at work in its environment, imagine multiple possible futures, and then design immersive experiences that allow the learning organization representatives to project themselves into those futures.
The goal is simple: to help organizations see what they do not yet see, discuss what they may sometimes prefer to leave unsaid, and turn the exploration of futures into a capacity for decision and action now.
A four-stage learning journey
The pedagogical setup is structured around four complementary learning experiences.
First, students learn to analyze an organization’s worldview: its implicit assumptions, dominant narratives, ways of framing problems, and approaches to setting priorities.
They then conduct an inquiry in the Anthropocene to identify driving forces and critical actors that could transform the organization’s environment.
They then move on to developing possible-future scenarios: plausible, contrasted, and sometimes uncomfortable narratives that put the organization’s current choices to the test and reveal new ways of acting.
Finally, they design immersive experiences to bring futures to life: characters, settings, objects, and staged situations intended to generate a more vivid, concrete, and demanding strategic conversation.
What a learning organization gains
Participating in Alternative Futures means agreeing to become a space for learning and transformation.
The organization benefits from a structured external perspective on its worldview, an investigation into driving forces that could affect its future – but to which it may not be paying sufficient attention, multiple future scenarios, and a discussion of its room to maneuver in a fluctuating and constrained world.
It also joins a network of organizations willing to work with students, faculty, and researchers to co-create a new strategic “grammar” that serves both organizational prosperity and the habitability of the Earth. This ambition is developed further in the article “Pluralizing the Future to Govern Organizations in the Anthropocene” (in French) and the op-ed “Why Organizations Should Be Wary of Positive Scenarios” (in French).
What faculty and researchers can do with it
Alternative Futures is also a transferable pedagogical setup. The articles published on Atelier des Futurs document the learning journey, its pedagogical intentions, the resources that can be used, and key considerations for those wishing to run a foresight course or workshop at their own institution or with their own partners.
The pedagogical setup can inform courses in strategy, foresight, sustainability, responsible innovation, design fiction, leadership, and organizational transformation. It can also open up research opportunities around futures literacy, learning organizations, pedagogy in the Anthropocene, and new forms of collaboration among researchers, students, and practitioners.
To explore these ideas further, see also « Developing futures-literate students », « When strategic foresight meets planetary boundaries » and « Why corporate strategy must become collective in the face of planetary boundaries ».
Why participate?
Because organizations need new spaces in which to think differently about their responsibilities, dependencies, vulnerabilities, and choices.
Because students need to learn to work on real situations, with real organizations, in a world where ready-made answers are no longer enough.
Because foresight is not simply an exercise in imagination. It must become a collective practice of clear-sightedness, responsibility, and transformation.
On this point, see in particular “Experiencing Futures to Avoid the Pitfalls of Societalization”, “Decision-Makers, Managers, and Researchers Must Work Together”, and the FNEGE video on the principle of responsibility.
Become a learning organization or implement the pedagogical setup
Do you represent a company, nonprofit organization, local or regional authority, public institution, or organization undergoing transformation? You can bring students a real-world case and engage your organization in a rigorous exploration of alternative, possible futures.
Are you a faculty member or researcher interested in adopting the pedagogical setup? The resources published on Atelier des Futurs are designed to make it easier to adapt the learning journey to other educational contexts.
Alternative Futures does not invite us to choose a future. It invites us to learn how to act when multiple futures become possible – including those we would rather not have imagined – and when others are no longer possible.
