It was a mixed room: city managers, assistant city managers, a public information officer or two. The pre-conference workshop, Anticipatory Leadership: Shaping the Future with Strategic Foresight, was led by AFI Strategy & Foresight Director Hauson Le and Steven Kenney, founder of Foresight Vector. Their premise was simple and a little unsettling: the world is changing faster than local governments can adapt, and the usual tools—data, experience, last year’s budget—are necessary but no longer sufficient.

Le has a way of making that concrete. A modern car has gone from roughly 3,000 parts to 30,000. Pandemics have reshaped how people work, weather disasters have reshaped what services cities must provide, and polarization has reshaped community cohesion itself. Leaders, he argued, are operating in a VUCA world — volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous — to which he added a fifth letter, P, for the pressure of doing more with less.

Strategic foresight, the morning’s throughline, is not fortune-telling. It is the disciplined exploration of multiple plausible futures so leaders can act today with those futures in view. Preparation, not prediction.

Throughout the session, graphic recorder Peter Durand captured the discussion as it unfolded, distilling four hours of conversation into three large hand-drawn panels the room watched take shape in real time. This first panel frames the day: in a VUCA world—volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous—where life and technology change exponentially, strategic foresight offers a disciplined way to explore long-term alternatives and act with intention. Or, as the panel puts it, the future is always unknown—but we still must make decisions.

What made the morning land, though, wasn’t the theory. It was watching the theory get put to work on a real problem.

My table took up the future of the local government workforce and narrowed it to organizational structure. Around it sat people I’ve known and respected for years: Brenda Eivens, city manager of Cedar Park, Texas, who came up through human resources; Kat Caffrey, city manager of Des Moines, Washington, who once worked alongside Brenda in Cedar Park; and Heidi Behrends Cerniwey, city manager of Ellensburg, Washington. These are extraordinarily busy people. What struck me over the next several hours was how fully they gave themselves to an exercise with no deliverable, no constituents in the room, and no immediate payoff—except a better way to think.

The first tool was the Three Horizons framework, developed by foresight pioneer Bill Sharpe. It maps three versions of a system across time: Horizon 1, today’s prevailing way of doing things; Horizon 3, the emerging future that eventually becomes the new normal; and Horizon 2, the contested, unstable transition between them. Le illustrated it with the history of lighting—the candlemaker as the H1 manager, Thomas Edison as the H2 entrepreneur, and the chemist Humphry Davy, whose early electric-light experiments were the H3 vision. The point isn’t that one of them wins. It’s that an organization needs all three perspectives at once.

Our Horizon 1 came easily, because everyone recognized it: structures that are hierarchical and traditional, where doing something new usually means adding another full-time position, and where holding onto the status quo feels like the safe, responsible choice. Our Horizon 3 was harder and more hopeful—an agile organization, right-sized, with the appropriate mix of people, mindset, and technology, and accountability built in. Then came the weak signals that the future is already arriving: automated traffic enforcement, more pilot programs, departments of innovation, cross-functional generalists, automatic-aid agreements between fire departments, regional utility systems. Sharpe calls the space in between H1 and H3 as the “triangle of choice,” (see below) and observes that the area of greatest uncertainty is also the area of greatest freedom. You could feel that idea change the conversation at our table.

The second foresight tool dug deeper. Causal Layered Analysis asks you to peel a problem apart in four layers:

1. the headlines everyone can see

2. the systems beneath them

3. the perspectives that hold those systems in place, and, at the very bottom,

4. the metaphors and stories we don’t even realize we’re telling.

Deconstructing our topic was sobering. The headline: Tradition trumps change. The systems: culture, fear, civil service rules, union structures. The perspectives: a deep conviction that certainty is safe and that incremental change is the only responsible path. And the metaphors doing the quiet heavy lifting—If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, and I’m getting my piece of the pie.

Then we turned it around. Kenney and Le pointed to research showing that describing crime as “a beast” pushes people toward enforcement, while describing it as “a virus” pushes them toward prevention—same facts, different story, different solutions. We can choose our metaphor, in other words, instead of letting it choose us. Our table’s new story became a potluck: everybody brings something to the table, and what each person brings matters. From “evolve or die” and “from caterpillar to butterfly” flowed new perspectives—servant leadership, the greater good, everyone valued—new systems like sandboxes safe enough to fail in and a redefined employment relationship, and at last a new headline: A city reimagines its workforce to deliver better public service.

The morning's central work in one panel. At left, the Three Horizons framework sets today's workforce (H1) against the future the table wanted (H3), with the unstable transition (H2) in between. At right, Causal Layered Analysis digs beneath the visible headlines to the systems, perspectives, and deep metaphors that hold them in place. The reframing runs along the bottom: old stories—"off the rack," "my piece of the pie”—give way to new ones like "tailor-made" and "a potluck, where everyone brings something to the table," the same move as recasting crime from "a beast" to be caught into "a virus" to be prevented.

The session’s final tools pressure-tested that vision. Using a 2x2 scenario matrix, the group mapped how two uncertainties—shrinking versus new resources, technology as job-killer versus job-enhancer—could produce very different transitions. Then, through backcasting, participants stood in a preferred 2040 and worked backward, naming the moves they’d need to make in 2035, in 2030, and as early as this year to get there.

“We cannot achieve what we cannot imagine,” reads the Elise Boulding line the facilitators used to frame it.

The afternoon's pressure-test. A 2x2 scenario matrix (top left) maps how two uncertainties — here, whether AI becomes a job-killer or a job-enhancer — combine into four very different futures. Backcasting (bottom) then runs the logic in reverse, starting in a preferred 2040 and working back to name the actions, some as early as this year, that would make it real.

“This is not linear work,” one participant said during the debrief. “It’s relational.”

That caught something true about the morning. The frameworks matter, but the real value was the rare permission to step out of the daily work of putting out fires and think hard, together, about a thorny problem. Watching Brenda and Kat work the material—testing each other’s assumptions, reaching for the right words—I was reminded these are people genuinely working to make the best decisions they can for their organizations and their communities.

Later that afternoon, I caught Brenda on the elevator and asked, plainly, how helpful the pre-con had really been. "It was amazingly helpful," she said.

Since 1979, the Alliance for Innovation has helped local governments think differently, act boldly, and lead through change. Mornings like this one are the reason. Innovation capacity—the ability to anticipate change, respond to emerging challenges, and deliver meaningful improvements—is what keeps a local government resilient and forward-thinking, and strategic foresight is one of the clearest ways to build it. It equips leaders to explore what’s ahead, make sense of uncertainty, and act with intention rather than simply react.

The workshop ended not with a plan but with a practice—and an invitation to keep going. As Le reminded the room, the work doesn’t stop when the conference does. AFI’s monthly Member Meetups exist precisely so leaders can take these tools home and keep using them.