About

My name is Catarina Zuzarte Tully. For the past 15 years I’ve been the Director of the global foresight collective School of International Futures (SOIF), and I’m the primary author of Playing with Time.

Like many people who are in the systems change field and others who have founded and run a not-for-profit on fumes, I have followed an unpredictable road to get where I am now. I have worked in the UK Prime Minister's Strategy Unit under two Prime Ministers. I spent three years in the UK Foreign Office, a career perhaps most notable for ending with my being arrested in northern Uzbekistan shortly after leaving. I also spent several years at Procter & Gamble, first as the Finance Manager of a distribution centre as well as the Strategy Lead for Beauty Care. I worked on the UN Secretary-General's mandate review—the one in 2005, not 2025. I ran a restaurant in Saint-Louis, Senegal, for a year, and later worked for Christian Aid across 25 countries in Central and West Asia, as well as across Africa.

In my current role at SOIF, I work with a core team of 35 fabulous people and a wonderful community to strengthen, co-create, and implement Futures-inspired Transformative Stewardship (FTS), a unique and powerful theory and practice of social change. The shared and collected knowledge of these 5,000+ global organisers, practitioners, clients, scholars, activists make FTS, and this book, possible.

Credentials are of obvious importance. But the journey we are about to go on together calls for an introduction at a deeper level. So, I want to share how I got here and where I am going.

Even as a small child I was interested in the themes that you will see explored in this book. My Catholic upbringing led to my interest in social justice, community, the distribution and practice of power. Moving frequently between Portugal and the UK gave me an appetite for different perspectives, the stimulation of travel, and fascination with people. While my many names—Isabel Maria Santos Neves—connected me with many generations of my family on my maternal Portuguese side, I also identified with East London, where my paternal British grandmother was born. Through it all, communities of transience and adventure-seeking have felt like home. I credit my knack for connecting the dots, relentless drive for impact, and—according to close friends—a tendency to be a "chaos muppet" to this upbringing. (And, perhaps, genetics). These qualities have served me well in my messy career.

Travel has taken me to many parts of the world. I speak just enough of several languages to know how valuable—and yet unimportant—words are to communication. Living between cultures has given me a deep appreciation for different ways of seeing the world, while also making me aware of my own assumptions and blind spots. I write from an Anglo-Luso, Western, Catholic position, shaped by my family, education and professional life, and by the privileges those have afforded me. By temperament, as well as said privilege, I am both hopeful and pragmatic: optimistic about what people can achieve together, comfortable with uncertainty and risk, and always looking for practical ways to move ideas into action.

You will also notice that many of the ideas and practices that have most profoundly shaped this book come from women. That is not an editorial choice so much as an observation. Throughout my life, I have found myself learning with remarkable women, personally and professionally, and many of the qualities that underpin Futures-inspired Transformative Stewardship—relationship-building, stewardship, care, collaboration, curiosity and shared leadership—have often been embodied most visibly by them. I share this simply to be transparent about the influences that have shaped me, not to suggest that wisdom belongs more to one group than another. This work has been enriched by extraordinary teachers of every background.

Even after more than twenty years, I still don’t feel entirely comfortable describing myself as a futurist. I have always thought of myself more as a user and commissioner of good strategic foresight than as its supplier. What has always fascinated me is not the future itself, but why different people imagine it differently—and how we navigate through those differences to move beyond conflict to liberation. I am far more interested in how people's experiences, identities and contexts shape the futures they imagine—and how they listen to, learn from and act on one another's perspectives. And I certainly don’t feel comfortable being asked about the trends that I think will shape the future–that question is more appropriately asked of the 1500 young global foresight practitioners in the NGFP network. Ask me instead: How can we use what we think we know about those trends to unlock change today? In many ways, this book is my attempt to answer that question.

In 2022, around the time of SOIF’s ten-year anniversary, a few people encouraged me to think about codification, including three American changemakers who really pushed me to think about scale and sustainability. Kathryn Clements, board member of the Long Now Foundation, observed that organisations in emerging fields often reach a point where they need to write down their intellectual backbone. Simultaneously, eminent futurist Paul Saffo challenged me to think about whether I wanted simply to spend the next decade doing more of the same. There was also much to learn from having accompanied Glenda Eoyang's journey of transitioning on from the field of Human Systems Dynamics, which she had created 25 years earlier. These, and many other signals, highlighted it was time to capture what we had learned.

Looking ahead, my role at SOIF is changing. Like many organisations, we’ve arrived at a point of founder transition, and it is time to invite in the next generation of leadership to embrace the next 15 years, and beyond. At the same time, our community members are doing the mighty work of scaling the practice of Futures-inspired Transformative Stewardship. As humanity navigates a growing “polycrisis”, constantly walking the tightrope between progress and disaster, hope and despair, SOIF is also redesigning itself to better serve the urgency and scale of this moment. We are on a journey to turn ourselves inside out: shifting to focus on each of the 5,000 people in our community as a transformative centre within their own networks. Our role is becoming more about strengthening the connections, shared norms and simple practices that help many people act together powerfully. In doing so, we are making explicit the patterns and ways of working that have often existed implicitly across our community. This book is a core part of that work. It is an attempt to codify, share, and hand over the knowledge, practices, stories and lessons that our community (within and beyond SOIF) has developed over the years, so that others can take them forward, adapt them and build on them.

This organisation-wide endeavour reflects a shift in my own role, too, as I move over the next two years from being a primary node and clearing house to one node among many. It’s not an exit, but it is a change. I am looking forward to spending the subsequent years embracing the Joker archetype, seeing what new mischief might help the field grow and setting up the Pointy Stick Brigade (which is a story for another day). It is time for the next generation of our community to take ownership, shape the next chapter of the work in their own image, and guide you in years to come through the future editions of Playing with Time.

For most of my life, writing has meant staring for hours at a page of scribbles, mounting anxiety filling my chest as I mentally toggle between languages and words. I don't naturally think in linear arguments. My process is much messier than that. I noodle on ideas for a long time. I draw systems maps and cover paper with arrows and diagrams. I hold conversations in my head. I can usually see the threads of an argument and get perhaps 80% of it down quite quickly. But then comes the difficult bit: working out the order on the page, polishing the language and making it feel right for a particular audience, place and time.

This last 20% has always been immensely challenging. I routinely found myself surrounded by interesting, important—and unfinished—ideas, only to realise a year later that the conversation had moved on and I had missed the chance to contribute an insight that might have been useful.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) changed that. For the first time, I could take the systems map in my head and talk it through at length with an editor who would not tire or get frustrated–indeed, who often had a knack for uncovering hidden patterns. I could explain what I thought was happening, who the audience was, what the argument might be and why it mattered, and then get help organising all that dynamism into clear, concise language. Phrased differently, AI helped me convert oral material into a written draft that I could then shape, challenge, reorganise and complete. It did not replace the thinking. It helped me translate the thinking into writing.

That has been a massive, empowering shift for me personally. But it also points to a wider dilemma.

One of the arguments running through this book is that many of the practices we most need for systems change have not been widely shared precisely because the barriers to communication are so high. The people doing the work are very rarely the people writing the books. They are building coalitions, being a shoulder to cry on, brokering power, navigating institutions, showing up to champion someone when it’s necessary, experimenting, understanding what helps someone safely share their experience, adapting to last-minute changes and all the other ways that make change happen on the ground and in the moment. Producing a book is somewhat at odds with the pace and nature of our work: writing well takes time; publishing takes time; being recognised as an expert takes time. This is to say nothing of the role of resources, access, and skills, including which language you get to communicate in. Many, of course, have made this observation before. Entire academic fields have debated questions of privilege, knowledge, authority and legitimacy for decades. What interests me here is not the theory, but the lived reality. In our turbulent world, knowledge and power need to sit not only with institutions and experts but with the people doing the work on the ground. We need learning spaces that centre practitioners, innovators and stewards as holders of knowledge in their own right. Using AI not as a writer or author but as an aid to writing helps bridge the gap between skillsets and resources and helps writing happen at a pace that suits the urgency of this work.

To be sure, the written word is not necessarily the most natural way for many of us to learn or communicate. I love great writing. I admire people who can work magic on the page. But I much prefer dialogue. If we were sitting together, we would not be moving through a neat linear sequence of points. We would be exploring connections, following threads and moving backwards and forwards across a complex web of ideas.

Yet writing matters because writing travels. And Futures-inspired Transformative Stewardship needs to travel. We are at a point where the dissemination of this approach and vital tools is no longer optional. Writing, I therefore conclude, is the best way to translate something that was born in three-dimensional relationships, conversations and practice into a form that can move further, influence more people and become part of a wider conversation.

It is not lost on me that relying on AI can be hugely problematic. For one, large language models are profoundly challenging for anyone interested in a transformative future because they are, by design, rooted in the past. They are trained on what has already been written, what has already been recognised, what has already accumulated power and visibility. Moreover, the datasets on which contemporary AI systems have been trained reflect the inequalities, exclusions and biases of the societies that produced them. They over-represent dominant voices and under-represent others. Women, Global Majority, Indigenous peoples, younger generations and many others have long experienced what it means for knowledge systems to overlook, minimise or appropriate their contributions. AI systems reproduce these dynamics at scale. Moreover, the dominant AI business model is fundamentally extractive, relying on uncompensated creative human endeavour, poor and often unsafe labour practices, inadequate protection of civic spaces for users, and a substantial environmental impact.

Even so, the risk of not writing—which is to say, the risk of not creating a primer that can travel—outweighed the risk of engaging with AI technology. Being direct about its role, and providing context around the decision to use it, is my attempt to mitigate against the harms large language models present.

This book was written by a human being, and by the many human beings whose work contributed core practices and ideas about power-brokering, translation, stewardship, and bridge-building. It has human blood, sweat, creativity, passion, and emotions in it—particularly mine. I, personally, have created and worked through the material line by line and conversation by conversation, building the narratives, surfacing the arguments and creating everything from the ground up. Multiple human beings have edited and sharpened this manuscript, and SOIF’s advisory board provided continual feedback on intentionality and ethics. And AI helped me to organise and express ideas clearly.

My experience has convinced me that, when used ethically, and when actively managed by human beings who are aware of its problems and weaknesses, AI can help people communicate who previously struggled to do so. It can help practitioners articulate knowledge that might otherwise remain invisible. It can democratise whose voices are heard. Because the goal of this book is to share what we have learned, I am including the following four principles which I used to guide the appropriate and responsible use of AI, and which you may use, too.

1. Centre human voice, human judgement and human experience. The ideas, stories, examples and arguments come from lived experience, conversations, projects and relationships accumulated over many years. AI can help surface, organise, synthesise and challenge those ideas, but it cannot and should not generate them independently.

2. Be explicit about attribution and provenance wherever possible. One of the most troubling aspects of current AI systems is the way they can obscure where knowledge comes from. Futures-inspired Transformative Stewardship, by contrast, depends upon reciprocity, acknowledgement and relationships. Ideas do not emerge in isolation. They emerge from communities, practitioners, colleagues and collaborators. Wherever possible, I have tried to honour that reality.

3. Treat AI as something that requires active stewardship rather than passive acceptance. AI outputs were challenged, rewritten, fact-checked and interrogated—by skilled and experienced human beings. References were verified. Claims were reviewed. Assumptions were questioned. In practice, this required substantial additional work. But that work is essential. AI can accelerate some tasks, but it does not remove the need for judgement.

4. Use AI in service of power-brokering rather than power concentration. Throughout Playing with Time, one of the recurring themes is how to make visible knowledge that might otherwise remain hidden. For me, the most valuable role AI played was helping translate ideas that existed in conversations, systems maps, relationships and practice into a form that could travel further and reach more people.