Playing with Time

This book is different.

It is written for people who are actively trying to transform the systems around them in a time of uncertainty and change. It is written for people who are experiencing the present as a period of frustration, anxiety and retrenchment—but who also know that it is a time of extraordinary possibility to shape a positive future. It is written for people who understand that transformation is ultimately about power: speaking truth to it, challenging it and redistributing it. It is written for people who feel a sense of stewardship: a responsibility to connect people working across past, present and future in service of a more prosperous, secure and sustainable world.

Future generations are not strangers who happen to live later. They are extensions of ourselves, just as we are extensions of those who came before us. Playing with Time is rooted in this simple idea. It invites us to loosen our grip on the present, reconnect with longer-term horizons, and allow possible futures to reshape how we act today.

This moment calls for our creative, collective response. It asks us to articulate and defend the values we care about, work across difference wherever possible, and act for the wellbeing of current and future generations. These are things that all of us can do. This book shows how.

This book introduces Futures-inspired Transformative Stewardship (FTS): a practice that helps leaders, communities and movements to be inspired by the future to transform today's systems.

FTS is multidisciplinary, drawing together strategic foresight, systems thinking, and network weaving into a practical way of working that helps make the invisible work of transformation more visible, intentional, collective—and scalable.

Here are three key things to keep in mind as you start to read.

First, the futures and foresight field has spent more than seventy years helping people think systematically about uncertainty and possibility. It has developed invaluable tools and frameworks for exploring alternative futures and stretching beyond the constraints of the present. Yet much of this work has focused on individuals or ideas about the future, rather than on how communities and systems themselves transform.

Second, more recent fields such as Human Systems Dynamics and Network Weaving have provided insight into precisely that issue: how change emerges in communities and systems through relationships, patterns, simple rules and the interactions of many people working in different contexts. FTS emerged from weaving these practices together—to help people move from imagining better futures to bring them into being through systems change; and then to transform how we learn together to do this better, making visible the patterns emerging across a global community of practice.

Finally, the practice rests on four core assets. The FTS Manifesto sets out core principles and values, distilled from fifteen years of conversations across a global community. If you take only one thing from this book, let it be this. Everything else builds upon it. The archetypes—the Weaver, Sailor, Gardener and Joker—help people recognise how and why they might want to play with time. The FTS Whirlpool provides the overarching container for the practice, connecting work and tools at the mindset, intervention and systems layers into a coherent whole. Within it, the Long-term Governance Prism brings sharper focus to the neglected systems layer: how we build future-prepared and intergenerationally fair organisations, movements, and societies.

The first principle of the Manifesto reminds us that playing with time requires us to look backwards as well as forwards. What we inherit matters just as much as what we imagine. So, in that sense, this book is also a memoir—to honour the countless contributions that have shaped this practice. It tells the story of a field, an organisation and a community: including SOIF, the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners network, and a wider global community of more than 5,000 changemakers whose conversations, experiments, successes and failures—and, above all, whose commitment to learning together—have made this work possible.

Inside, we'll also explore why this moment matters and why new forms of governance are urgently needed. We'll examine why so many promising ideas struggle to scale or achieve impact. You'll find tools, case studies and frameworks designed to sharpen your thinking and strengthen your practice. Most importantly, you'll find an invitation into a community that continues to learn together, sharing experiences, questions and lessons across generations, cultures and sectors. And you’ll learn something about yourself: the different ways you can approach playing with time as a Weaver, Sailor, Gardener or Joker—the four archetypes we use to guide you through this material.

I hope this book will resonate with futurists and experienced foresight practitioners deeply immersed in the field. It pays tribute to the extraordinary innovation that is happening in often-isolated pockets globally and invites reflection on the crossroads moment we are in—not only for the world, but for the futures and foresight field itself. My hope is that practitioners will connect insights from this collective journey with their own practice, helping us move beyond isolation towards greater connection, shared learning and action.

This book is also for community organisers, politicians, business leaders, philanthropists, educators, public servants and activists—people who may never have come across the futures and foresight field, let alone transformative stewardship.

Ultimately, this book is not just for futures thinkers. It is for people in every field. It is about how anyone can use a futures approach—alongside other capabilities—in service of transformative stewardship. It is not a book about becoming a futurist; it is a book about becoming a better steward of change.

With such a broad audience, you will not agree with everything in these pages. Nor should you. This practice has been shaped by people working across many disciplines, cultures and political traditions. Some readers will find certain ideas too radical; others will think them not radical enough. Whatever your perspective, my hope is that this book helps you recognise that transformative change is never the work of one person, one profession or one worldview, and offers a practice for working across our differences to midwife the new while hospice-caring the old.

Likewise, not every section will be equally relevant to every reader. This book is intended as a companion rather than something to consume in one sitting. Return to it at different moments in your journey and different ideas, stories and tools will become useful. As you change, the book will change with you.

Above all else, this book is an invitation to play with time. To see the present differently and joyfully, reconnect with the past, explore possible futures, and allow both to build our confidence and hope and intergenerational solidarity to transform how we think and act today.

Serious work need not always be solemn. Throughout history, humanity has imagined, rehearsed, experimented and played its way into new futures. In that spirit, I hope this book becomes less a manual than a travelling companion: something to return to whenever you need fresh questions, different perspectives, renewed courage or simply a reminder that you are not doing this work alone.

This book has been designed to be explored as much as read. It covers a lot of ground through a series of conversations with the archetypes, organised into Acts and, at times, Scenes. Not every conversation will be relevant to you at every moment. Depending on where you are in your journey, you may want to: dive deeply into the community behind this work, learn about different international case studies, explore the forces shaping the world today, get an introduction to new practices, or focus on the Manifesto and practical tools. Each conversation begins with a short summary to help you decide whether it is the right one for you at that moment.

You can certainly read the book from beginning to end. Equally, you can follow one of four curated paths through the material based on the archetypes: the Weaver, Sailor, Gardener, and Joker. Each represents a different way of approaching transformative stewardship, signposting conversations most likely to resonate with that perspective. We also invite you to take a short quiz to discover which archetype you most feel like today.

Whenever you want to step back and reconnect with the whole, you'll find a Navigation Section containing an summary of the book, a map of the conversations, a guide to the key concepts and a glossary of terms.

Ultimately, this book belongs to you. Read it in the order that serves you best. Read it alone or with others. Argue with it. Adapt it. Build upon it. Try the exercises at the end of each Act. Most of all, bring your own experiences into conversation and community with others in the Play Area.

Because this practice, like the future itself, is something we create together.