Making futures together
Co-futuring is not a workshop technique — it is a commitment to building shared futures with the people who will live in them. Rather than producing scenarios behind closed doors, we designed a process that was participatory from the start. City officials, partners, and collaborators worked alongside us to stress-test assumptions and imagine divergent paths. Six future scenarios emerged from this process. Each described a distinct version of Helsinki's post-COVID trajectory — different in values, priorities, and social dynamics. The scenarios were not predictions; they were tools for decision-making, helping Helsinki Partners reason about strategy across different possible worlds. The work also produced a storyline and a marketing film to communicate the futures to a wider audience. The scenarios needed to be legible not just to planners, but to citizens, partners, and potential investors.
The co-futuring pilot was designed to be replicable. My Helsinki adopted the methodology into their standard ways of working — not as a document on a shelf, but as an active process.
Foresight as infrastructure
Cities plan in decades. Most organisations think in quarters. The gap between these timescales is where strategic risk accumulates. Our work with Helsinki Partners addressed this directly — not by producing a single long-range plan, but by building the internal capacity to think ahead systematically. By the end of the project, My Helsinki had integrated co-futuring into their development processes. Teams that had not previously worked with strategic foresight now had a repeatable framework for doing so. The scenarios gave them a shared language for discussing uncertainty and a structure for evaluating new initiatives against multiple possible futures. This kind of capability building is harder to measure than a deliverable, but it compounds. An organisation that can generate its own futures thinking is more resilient than one that commissions it once.
Six post-COVID future scenarios. One embedded methodology. A team equipped to keep thinking ahead without external support.
Next projects.
(2016-25©)
