14-16 July 2026 | 9 hours of live & online training | From €349
A live and interactive online course designed to equip you with essential facilitation techniques and tools to strengthen and support your futures and foresight work with groups.
The quick overview:
Working with futures with groups is about so much more than choosing and running activities from the world of futures and foresight.
In this "back to basics" training, you'll learn essential tools to support your futures work with groups, and a repeatable process that you can use to scope, plan, design, deliver, and review your futures, foresight, and futures thinking sessions. Expect real world examples and case studies, interactive activities that involve futures methods and methods from the wider world of facilitation, and time to apply skills and give and receive feedback.
By the end of training, you'll have new skills and tools that you can apply immediately to help you design and lead successful futures sessions.
Dates: 14-16 July 2026
Time: 10h30-12h00 and 13h00-14h30 daily (CET - Berlin/Vienna)
Investment: €349-€499
Futures work is powerful. But in practice, it sometimes isn't as effective as it could be.
Perhaps you’ve witnessed this, or even experienced it yourself:
- Interesting discussions that don’t go anywhere
- Participants disengaging when things get abstract
- Groups struggling with uncertainty, disagreement, or complexity
- Tools and methods that participants enjoy, but don’t know how to use
- Workshops that end without clear action
Often, it's not the methods themselves that don't work as well as you plan, but the facilitation.
And facilitation isn’t just about delivery.
It’s about the process of scoping the requirements, being clear about intended outcomes and participant experience, designing with activities that support intentions and energy, planning for the unexpected, developing the workshop, closing, and following up, too.
That’s what this 6-part training course is all about.
What this training will cover:
In this training:
- You’ll get a deeper understanding of what facilitating futures and foresight means, and why it’s different to running other workshops (and what that means for us as futures facilitators).
- You’ll learn our Facilitating Futures & Foresight Framework, a narrative-powered planning arc to help you design programmes with a clear start, journey, and resolution, and our repeatable process for planning and designing futures and foresight workshops and sessions.
- We’ll introduce you to our core set of methods, in the form of hand cards, and show you how to choose the right methods for your desired outcome, whilst being aware of the energy of the room.
- We’ll teach you useful techniques to help you listen better, ask better questions, notice when something is “off”, give clear instructions, harvest information, and summarise, so that your workshop participants understand what’s happening – because futures workshops came sometimes seem fun, but seem to participants to lack a clear purpose.
- You’ll practice with fellow participants throughout, and have an opportunity to put together a session plan for a short futures workshop, which you’ll present to the group.
PLUS: Throughout the course we’ll model best practice, using real tools and processes from futures and foresight, and the wider world of facilitation. We’ll stop regularly to take you “behind the scenes” to show you what we’ve done, how, and why. We also have 30 minutes of “open door chat” after each session so that you can ask questions, talk about challenges or situations specific to you, or simply chat through what you’ve learned.
You'll leave this training with:
- an in-depth understanding of the Facilitating Futures & Foresight Framework, and of different ways of shaping futures workshops and sessions that lead to action;
- the ability to design and lead a short futures workshops to apply skills
- new approaches to developing futures and foresight workshops, and sessions that build on futures thinking, that are about more than just the methods
- a comprehensive set of all materials that you use during the workshop, plus tools, templates, resources to help support your practice, as well as resources contributed by participants during the sessions.
- individual feedback from peers and trainers to help you strengthen your approach to facilitating futures
- new perspectives from futures and foresight facilitators from different backgrounds
Who is this for? What is the format? And how much does it cost?
Who is this training for?
- futures and foresight practitioners who want to become more confident, effective facilitators
- facilitators who want to incorporate futures and foresight activities and tools in their sessions
- anyone who runs meetings or guides groups or creates experiences where futures and facilitation intersect.
What’s the format?
We run this over 6 x 90-minute sessions online, over three days, with a long break for lunch on each day.
Why? Because we’ve found that full-day workshops online are simply too much. This multi-session format gives you space to do other work, time to reflect on what you’ve learned, and an opportunity to work on applying your learning to share with the group.
After each session, we also have an optional “open door chat” that you can join, so that you can talk through about anything that’s on your midn.
How much does it cost?
We offer sliding scale fees, as follows:
- Individual practitioners who are self-funding: €349 +VAT
- Voluntary sector organisations or those under €500,000 turnover: €399 +VAT
- All other organisations: €479 +VAT
We also offer two bursaries that cover 75% of the fees for students, low-income practitioners, and anyone else who feels they genuinely can't afford the full fees. Contact us to discuss →
Join waitlist
This course is currently full. If you'd like to be added to the waitlist, add your details to the form below and we'll let you know if any spaces become free.
Who leads this course?
Your trainer and guide for this course is Suzanne Whitby.
Suzanne has been facilitating in international settings for 20+ years, and has spent the last 6 years working specifically at the intersection of experiential futures, strategic foresight, and facilitation. She has a soft spot for democratising futures and helping citizens shape futures, and created Walk the Futures to support this work in urban spaces. She is an active supporter of the futures and foresight community, and is the founder of the Futures Practitioners Europe Network, and the host of the Facilitating Futures & Foresight SIG.
You can learn more about Suzanne's futures at Futures Fit, and about her intersecting projects at suzannewhitby.com.
