Strategic Dreamers

Foresight in Cultural Institutions: Building Future Resilience

Forum Pracuj w kulturze — “STABILNOŚĆ, ROZWÓJ, PRZYSZŁOŚĆ” | Workshop facilitation (Bydgoszcz)

Where & when: Młyny Rothera, Bydgoszcz | 12–13 June 2025 (workshop block: 13 June) | Narodowe Centrum Kultury
My workshop (exact title): “Foresight w instytucjach kultury: budowanie odporności na przyszłość” (Foresight in cultural institutions: building resilience for the future).

A practical workshop designed to help cultural leaders and managers treat “stability” not as standing still, but as the capacity to keep direction while conditions change – and to build that capacity through strategic foresight.

Challenge

Cultural institutions are increasingly asked to deliver public value under shifting conditions: changing audiences, resource pressure, technological acceleration, and overlapping crises. The real question becomes: how do we lead teams, shape programmes, and invest in capabilities when tomorrow will not behave like an extension of today?

This workshop addressed a specific gap: moving from reactive management (“we’ll respond when it happens”) to an anticipatory practice – one that helps institutions notice early signals, work productively with uncertainty, and translate long-term thinking into near-term choices.

Approach

I designed the session as a short but intensive “learning-by-doing” sequence—participants experienced the logic of foresight by producing tangible outputs.

1) Opening the future as a shared conversation
We began with a lightweight, human-centred prompt format (Strategic Dreamers Cards) to unlock future thinking across different roles and perspectives – quickly, safely, without performative certainty.

2) Horizon scanning through a structured lens
Participants practised reading the external environment using the STEEP frame (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political) as a way to build a disciplined “radar” for weak signals and emerging patterns.

3) From signals to strategic uncertainties
We translated observations into a small set of uncertainties that are both highly impactful and genuinely open – uncertainties that can reshape assumptions about audiences, funding, legitimacy, and operating models.

4) Scenario thinking as an institutional stress test
Instead of searching for “the most likely future”, we worked with multiple plausible futures to strengthen strategic imagination and decision readiness. A dedicated scenario set for cultural institutions (2040 horizon) supported the exercise and showed how scenarios can be coherent, provocative, and decision-relevant.

5) Implications: turning futures into choices
We mapped what different futures would mean for core areas of institutional practice – people and skills, programming, infrastructure, partnerships, and financing – so that foresight becomes a tool for management, not an isolated strategic report.

Outcome

The workshop produced practical learning outcomes aligned with day-to-day leadership work in cultural institutions:

  • a repeatable way to scan the environment and curate signals into decision-relevant insights,
  • an applied understanding of how scenarios support resilience (by widening options and surfacing hidden assumptions),
  • a clear bridge from long-term uncertainty to actionable conversations about capabilities, priorities, and “no-regret” moves across the institution.

Scale

  • Format: workshop within the national conference 6. Forum Pracuj w kulturze in Bydgoszcz (Młyny Rothera).
  • Theme of the Forum: “STABILNOŚĆ, ROZWÓJ, PRZYSZŁOŚĆ”.
  • Session: 13 June 2025, within the dedicated workshop block.