Introduction to Futures Thinking and Foresight
July 2026 GLC Monthly Learning Call Brief
Learning how and why to practice thinking further ahead in our anti-trafficking work
Key Learning Points from our May Calls:
Futures Thinking is a structured, participatory practice for exploring possible futures, not prediction.
The STEEP framework (Sociocultural, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political) helps scan for early signals of change.
Futures blindness carries real risk: missed emerging exploitation, obsolete approaches, slower response.
Those closest to a problem are often furthest from power, so foresight must be participatory, not just consultative.
The weight of the past can quietly limit our ability to think and plan ahead.
Short donor cycles and case urgency are structural barriers to long-term thinking in the sector.
The right question isn't what will happen, but what might happen, and what we might do to shape it.
Introduction
Our Monthly Learning Calls tend to sit within a handful of broader themes we return to from different angles and perspectives over time, but every so often a topic comes along that has us step outside of our usual frame entirely. July's call topic was one of those. We were joined by Shiela Castillo, from United Edge, who introduced our community to Futures Thinking, a discipline more commonly associated with government and corporate strategy than with anti-trafficking work. Shiela spent the last several years bringing the discipline of foresight into social development and humanitarian work. Her brief but rich introduction to Futures Thinking asked us to consider something both uncomfortable and clarifying - that so much of our work in anti-trafficking is built to respond to what is urgent, and so little of it is built to anticipate what is coming.
Summary of our learning
What Shiela zoomed in on from the start, was how quickly the shape of exploitation can shift underneath approaches that were built for the world as it looked a few years ago. And while we might very well understand this it’s often not a concept we have much time or capacity to really sit with. What Shiela’s presentation did was lay a trail of breadcrumbs that can be followed, to help us take steps forward in developing our thinking about the problem. She posed an example of AI and its possible impact to generate reflection on how differently exploitation might look even a short distance into the future. In the world of Futures Thinking, a term Shiela referred to as pathological presentism (taken from the work of Roman Krznaric), describes how much of our current work is shaped - as with most sectors including government and humanitarian responses - in that it refers to a state of being so focused on the present that the future barely registers.
Shiela introduced the STEEP framework to help us think about what's changing around us in order to consider what might be coming down the track. This is a scanning method that looks at Sociocultural, Technological, Economic, Environmental, and Political signals of change. Applied to our sector, this ‘scan’ surfaces things like declining trust in institutions, the normalisation of exploitation, AI-enabled grooming and deepfakes, cryptocurrency obscuring financial flows, and the vulnerability created by climate displacement and disaster. She was careful to distinguish this kind of scanning from prediction, describing it instead as a discipline of paying attention and that in her view scanning is the lifeblood of foresight, something to be practiced regularly rather than treated as a one-off exercise.
A central concept in her presentation was the idea that the future isn't a single fixed point but a widening range of possible, plausible, and preferred outcomes, alongside a default straight-line extrapolation of the present that many organisations mistake for inevitability. The danger in this isn't just narrowness of imagination. It's what she called futures blindness: the risk of underestimating climate-driven vulnerability, missing new forms of exploitation as they emerge, or continuing to invest in approaches that have quietly become obsolete. When exploitation evolves faster than our institutions do, she argued, foresight stops being a nice-to-have and becomes something closer to a justice imperative.
Shiela also walked through a number of other foresight concepts more briefly, among them trends and drivers of change, scenario thinking, and the distinction between prediction and possibility. She spoke at some length about participation, arguing that foresight done alone isn't really foresight at all, and that those closest to a problem are often furthest from the power and resources needed to shape its solutions, which is why she insists that meaningful foresight work has to include the people most affected, not as a token consultation but as genuine participants in shaping what comes next.
Another feature she spoke about was the futures triangle, which describes the pull we can feel from the past when we try to think ahead, how easily the weight of old patterns and old ways of working can keep us tethered to what we already know, and the importance of noticing that pull so it doesn't quietly decide the future for us. She closed by framing foresight as a justice imperative, arguing that if exploitation continues to evolve faster than our institutions can respond, then thinking further ahead becomes not just useful but necessary, and by returning to a distinction she felt mattered most: the right question isn't what will happen, but what might happen, and what we might do to shape it.
Overview of our discussion
On both calls we had a vibrant discussion that had us exploring what is really keeping the sector from thinking more dynamically about the future needs of our work, and some of the genuine constraints involved in trying to change that. A recurring theme, raised early by Kneath (Chab Dai, Cambodia), was the tension between the urgency of survivor casework, where response cannot wait, and the short-term nature of donor funding cycles, which have in many cases shrunk to six or eight months and reward visible short-term outcomes over the kind of work that might address root causes. This set the tone for much of what followed, including a reflection I found myself offering in the moment, about whether the sector as a whole might be operating from something like a nervous system stuck in survival mode, in the same way an individual under prolonged stress loses access to creative and longer-term thinking, and whether that collective state might be part of what keeps us so oriented toward the present.
The group also spent time, particularly on the Western Call, on why futures-oriented work is so structurally difficult to fund. Dalaina (Dark Bali, Indonesia and the GLC Secretariat), pointed out that NGOs are rarely given room to fail in the way startups are, and are instead expected to demonstrate success on every funded project in order to secure the next one, which leaves little space for the kind of open-ended experimentation futures work requires. She shared an example of being really excited when a funder expressed that they wanted to provide funds toward innovation, only for the amount offered to be not much more than could purchase a new printer - a case in point of the gap between funders wanting to support risk-taking and what is actually made available to do so. Nicole (El Pozo de Vida, Mexico), named a deeper mismatch underneath this, that funding proposals are typically built on evidence from past results, while futures thinking by definition involves outcomes that don't yet have that kind of evidence behind them, and made a related point about strategic planning itself often being backwards-looking, with organisations generally strong at identifying what's wrong but far less practiced at articulating what an alternative future might actually look like.
Several real-world examples were raised to illustrate how quickly the landscape of exploitation shifts, and how policy responses can have effects beyond what's intended and shift the problem in novel ways. Leah (GLC Secretariat) raised new legislation in the Netherlands restricting migrant labour in slaughterhouses, a known site of exploitation, and the question of where those workers might end up instead. Irwin (The Salvation Army, India) noted that scam operations are already shifting toward Sri Lanka as enforcement tightens in other regions, and Faith (Azadi, Kenya) shared a story of forex trading scams run through Telegram and cryptocurrency as being a site of possible labour exploitation not yet recognised in the sector. Nicole also shared how a Mexican law intended to protect women from violence had opened up an unexpected loophole enabling a new form of extortion. Together these pointed to a shared foresight principle raised across the calls, that restricting exploitation in one place doesn't necessarily reduce it, and can simply relocate it elsewhere, which is itself a case for thinking further ahead rather than only responding to what's immediately in front of us.
Implications for the GLC
This call left us with more questions than answers, which feels appropriate for a topic like this one, but also with real momentum to keep engaging with it rather than let it sit as a single session. There was clear interest from both calls in having more conversations, with the idea even floated of forming a GLC futures thinking incubation or working group, potentially drawing on some of the gamified foresight tools Shiela shared. For the Secretariat, this call reminded us why we have a once yearly call on global trends in trafficking and our response to it (see our 2025 call), as well as one of the reasons we want members to get together to think collaboratively - hearing new things or even things we already know from different perspectives often helps connect dots or indeed can throw the spotlight on something we’d not considered.
So what better way to help us all start figuring out the ‘how’ of Futures Thinking than by getting together to talk. More broadly, the call is a prompt for us as a network to consider where our own planning, and our conversations with funders and partners, might be more shaped by the past than we'd like to admit, and where there might be room, even in small ways, to start asking what might happen rather than only what has happened before.
If this call resonated with you and you woudl be interested in having further discussions about it with other members let us know!
Sign in to the Members Area to watch the June call recordings. If you are not yet a member of the GLC and are interested in the calls or joining, email the Secretariat Team at team@globallearning.community, or read more about membership at globallearningcommunity.org/joinus.