I designed a six-month peer mentorship program for the International Leadership Association (ILA), Washington, DC, that brought together decision-makers from Canada, Sweden, the UK, the US, and Zimbabwe. The starting point was the central question: how do your beliefs about the future shape what you do?
I developed a comprehensive curriculum that connected philosophical inquiry with practical application, creating structured learning conversations that moved between abstract thinking and concrete leadership challenges. Participants gained entry through an application process designed with the ILA, ensuring a committed cohort ready for deep engagement.
The virtual format demanded new facilitation techniques (this programme kicked off two months before the global COVID pandemic). I adapted methods for international audiences, managing time zones and cultural contexts whilst maintaining meaningful dialogue across countries. My focus was eliciting each leader's implicit philosophy of future orientation, then connecting these foundational perspectives to their actual decision-making processes.
People don't just disagree about what the future should look like. They think about futurity itself in fundamentally different ways. Some leaders approach tomorrow as something to control, others as something to adapt to, still others as something that emerges from collective intelligence and collective action.
These philosophical differences directly influenced how participants allocated resources and responded to uncertainty. The cross-cultural element amplified these differences, creating productive friction between approaches.
The program was cut short by the very type of disruption it was designed to address, yet this proved the point: our assumptions about how change works become visible when those assumptions break down.
Challenge: Building foresight skills among international leaders, working across different cultures and time zones to create a confidential space for growing and challenging futures-thinking capacity.
Methods: Virtual peer mentorship connecting leaders across continents, online facilitation adapted for international groups, curriculum linking philosophical thinking with practical leadership, structured conversations exploring how leaders think about the future.
Insights: How leaders think about the future directly shapes their strategic decisions. Cross-cultural dialogue reveals different approaches to uncertainty that improve strategic thinking. Confidential peer environments accelerate leadership development in futures-thinking.
Future Applications: Curriculum design transferable to other contexts, virtual facilitation techniques applicable to global projects, cross-cultural mentorship model relevant to international development, future-oriented frameworks valuable across sectors.
Image: Eranos Archive / Olga Froebe-Kapteyn via The Warburg Institute
