In this instructional video, Charlotte Kemp, who brands herself as a “Futures Alchemist,” presents a concise framework for creating a futures plan. She outlines four sequential stages: (1) Gather Intelligence – collect all relevant data, insights, and information about the current situation and desired direction; (2) Manage Change – understand where you are, where you’ve come from, and address the human challenges of transition; (3) Describe the Future – envision possible scenarios, articulate a vision, and decide what futures to pursue or avoid; (4) Test the Strategy – monitor indicators, assess progress, and make course corrections as needed. Kemp emphasizes that these deceptively simple steps encapsulate many existing models and tools, and she highlights the scalability of futures thinking—from governments, multinational corporations, and military organizations down to small businesses, families, cities, and individual career planning. She concludes with a call to action, urging viewers to sit down with their teams and start sketching a futures plan using the four steps.
Chapters
There are 4 simple stages to any good futures plan. I'm Charlotte Kemp, Futures Alchemist, and here are the 4 stages. The very first one is that of gathering intelligence. What do you need to know? What is available? Where are you going? What are you looking for? You want to gather all of the intelligence, the information, the data, the The insights that you're looking for. You want to gather that together. Our second stage is to manage change. Now we need to look at where are we, where have we come from, where do we want to go to, and we have to manage the human struggle with what change looks like and how it feels. Our third stage is to describe the future. What could the future look like? If the future looked like this, would we want to go in that direction, or would we want to make a change? What are the different scenarios we are looking at? What is the vision that we want to cast? We want to describe the future so that we know what we want to aim towards and what we want to avoid. And our 4th stage is to test the strategy. Now that we've started on our journey towards the future, are the indications showing that we're going in the right direction? Do we need to make a course correction? And what other flags or indicators have we previously identified or are learning to identify that could indicate to us that there is a challenge or a disruption on the way? So there you go, just 4 stages and they're deceptively simple. Gather your intelligence, manage change, describe the future, and then test your strategy. You could sit down with just those 4 steps and your team right now and start to sketch out a new futures plan. Plan. But those 4 stages actually encompass a whole number of other models and business tools that are out there that you can learn to dive deeper. What I love about futures thinking is that it is so scalable. It's been used in the past by governments and multinationals and the largest military organizations in the world. But the same skills, the same insights, the same tools, the same stages can be used by any business, a small business, an entrepreneur. It can be used by a family. It can be used by cities. It can be used by an individual to plan their own future career out. These future tools are available to us all, and we're all natural futurists that just need to learn how to become a little better and a little bit more conscious and intentional about the future that we are creating together.
