Research Program

Futures Methodologies

Methods are as important in thinking as in doing

How do you make 200 people discuss futures-topics in a productive way, or turn 200 “trend spottings” into 10 relevant and potent trends that holds as starting-point for strategy development? Or how do you filter out all the futures-noise and find the whispers that will become the roars of tomorrow? And how do you select the most relevant uncertainties and turn them into vivid actionable scenarios?

Those and many others are the questions we’ve been struggling with ever since long before Kairos Future was named Kairos Future. The first methodology papers and books were written by our consultants in the mid 1980s, as a response to clients’ needs to structure their long-term discussion and to engage more employees and members in the discussions.

Since then we’ve continued on the methodology path, developing analytical as well as collaborative process tools and methods, trying them out in collaboration with clients. We’ve given courses and lectures in the field since more than 20 years and develop instruments to measure “futures-capabilities” in organizations. Our latest achievements in the methodology field are our co-creation platform Co:tunity and our big data-technology Dcipher.

We are, simply speaking, obsessed with methodology that matters and tools that works.