Leaders as Futurists
Six-month peer mentorship program
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 action. I designed this curriculum to connect philosophical inquiry with practical application, moving between abstract thinking and concrete leadership challenges.
The six-month peer mentorship program was delivered through the International Leadership Association (ILA) in Washington, DC, and brought together decision-makers from Canada, Sweden, the UK, the US, and Zimbabwe. The central question was simple: how do your beliefs about the future shape what you do?
Participants entered through an application process designed with the ILA, ensuring a cohort ready for serious engagement.
The virtual format demanded new facilitation techniques. The program launched two months before the global COVID pandemic, which meant adapting methods for international audiences and managing cultural contexts across time zones before anyone had language for what that required.
The focus was drawing out each leader's implicit philosophy of future orientation, then connecting those foundational perspectives to actual decision-making. How people think about change directly shapes how they allocate resources and respond to uncertainty. The cross-cultural element amplified these differences and created productive friction between approaches.
The program was cut short by the very kind of disruption it was designed to address. That proved the point: our assumptions about how change works become visible precisely when they break down.