In this brief presentation, futurist Charlotte Kemp uses a pizza‑making metaphor to illustrate how futures thinking should be integrated throughout a project rather than tacked on at the end. She walks through the steps of preparing a pizza—base, sauce, toppings, cheese—and points out that adding salt only as a final garnish fails to capture its essential role, which in reality permeates the dough, sauce, cheese, and meat, providing flavor, texture, preservation, and cohesion. By analogy, futures thinking must be embedded from the outset and woven into every decision and department, not treated as a checklist or delegated solely to marketing. Kemp concludes by positioning herself as a guide who can help teams cultivate a futures‑focused mindset despite her self‑declared lack of culinary skill.
Chapters
Let's explore what futures thinking is like. I love this as a metaphor. Fair warning, I'm not a very good cook, but I'm told that this is how it works. Imagine this is a pizza that you're making. You've got the pizza base there, and then you put on the tomato sauce, and then you start to add the various ingredients. Maybe you like some mushrooms, you've got some green peppers, Maybe some salami or other meat. I don't know if you're in the pineapple-on-pizza camp or not, but let's just put that to the side so that I don't offend anybody. And of course we'd add a whole lot of grated cheese because what is a pizza without cheese? And then we think, fantastic, our meal is finished. Have we forgotten anything? And then it dawns on us, we didn't add— Wine! The salt. So we sprinkle a little salt on top of the pizza, we deliver it to our family, and you'll get a response like I normally get when I give my family a meal. It's not very good. It doesn't matter that we added the salt on at the end. It was meant to be part of the process. The salt should be in the dough before you make the pizza base. The salt should be in the tomato base. The salt is probably in the salami and very definitely in the cheese. I looked up how salt is used in the cheese-making process, and apparently quite a bit. It adds flavor, reduces bacteria, gives it the texture, controls the moisture, and actually preserves the cheese. That's how essential salt is to the cheese-making process and salt to the entire pizza-making process. The salt brings it together and makes it a good meal, instead of a waste of ingredients. So futures thinking is like salt, and just like salt, futures thinking can't be added at the end of the process. It's not a box to check, and it can't be delegated to the marketing department because they know about trends. It can't be delegated to any one department because everybody in the team, everyone in the organization needs to be thinking with a futures-focused mindset. So just like salt in pizza, futures thinking should be at the start of every project and at the heart of every decision. So I'm Charlotte Kemp, not a great chef, but I am a futurist, and I can help your team to develop their thinking fit for the future.
