Overview
A 3-day leadership and management programme designed to enable you to meet the dual challenge of balancing the need to anticipate and plan for plausible futures with creating preferred futures that are ethical, sustainable, and strategically sound.
Next programme
18-20 March 2026
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Programme overview
Rising complexities created by political instability, economic volatility, technological acceleration and shifting social dynamics are challenging traditional approaches to strategic planning and opportunity recognition.
Organisations must move beyond reacting and interpreting change and embrace working with divergent plausible futures using systematic and structured imaginative thinking – balancing anticipation with present day action that enables them to shape the future before it shapes them.
This programme brings together leaders and managers from health, energy, and adjacent sectors to develop and deepen their capacity for agile, forward-looking innovation and entrepreneurship – identifying future innovative pathways that offer clear differentiators and sustainable value creation.
The programme is deliberately designed for a cross-sector cohort. As health and energy face convergent disruptions from AI, decarbonisation, demographic shifts, ageing infrastructure, and decentralised networks, a unique element of this programme will be leveraging tensions between sector perspectives to generate insights that siloed programmes can miss.
Why join
- Spot what others miss: Learn to systematically scan the horizon, identify emerging signals, and build plausible, strategically grounded futures.
- Explore divergent futures to uncover multiple innovation pathways.
- Use frameworks to stress-test opportunities, turning insights into actionable innovation plans.
- Gain techniques to anticipate the future and the skills to act boldly in shaping it to your organisation’s desired outcome.
- Leave with a clear action plan around balancing future value creation opportunities with current business models and resource allocations.
What to expect over 3 days?
Pre-work
You /and your teams, will arrive with signals already gathered through a pre-course assignment, allowing for deeper engagement from the start. You will be asked to bring:
1. Three signals you have noticed in the past 6 months that felt significant but were hard to place in your thinking about the future.
2. One assumption underpinning your organisation’s current strategy that you suspect may not hold up against the pace of change.
Day 1: Seeing what others miss
Understand why most organisations get blindsided by change – not because the signals were not there, but because nobody was looking in the right places or connecting the dots. This session will introduce the STEEPV framework as set of lenses for systematic peripheral vision for engaging with the future.
The cohort will share and build on the signals brought from their individual pre-work, categorising them across STEEPV dimensions and identifying patterns of plausible changes.
Working in a cross-functional teams, you will hunt for weak signals across STEEPV categories drawing on the Cambridge ecosystem and beyond.
In teams you will cluster and prioritise signals based on potential impact and identifying the critical uncertainties that will drive scenario or plausible future building on Day 2.
An informal dinner with a series of speakers providing short provocations to generate future facing discussions around issues such as unusual stakeholders entering existing markets, new frontier markets, systems already disrupted and regulation and governance issues.
Day 2: Building plausible futures
Working with scenario planning methodology you will work in teams to build 3-4 scenario worlds using the critical uncertainties from Day One. These Scenarios will span integrated futures across health, energy, and adjacent industries.
E.g: What does 2040 look like if distributed energy and distributed healthcare converge? Where does centralised, control reassert itself?
Each scenario gets a name, a narrative, and a set of “what’s true in this world” statements.
This is where it gets interesting!
You and your team will inhabit different scenarios, spending time “living” there. Within each scenario you identify:
- What new problems are emerging and who has them?
- What existing solutions become obsolete?
- What capabilities become valuable?
- What business models thrive and are there new and unexpected players?
Scenarios will be pressure tested for blind spots and hidden assumptions, By the end of the day each team will have a cross -sector opportunity map.
Afternoon: Stress-Testing and Opportunity Spotting
Evening: College dinner with a guest speaker
Day 3: From Insight to Action
Using the opportunities identified across the Day two scenarios, you will work in teams to generative innovation concepts and to apply robust testing frameworks to identify which ideas work across multiple scenarios versus which are single-scenario bets? You will also engage in optionality thinking: how might you structure innovations to pivot as the future unfolds in practice?
This morning session will conclude with teams applying Blue Ocean value curve thinking to their innovation concepts to sharpen differentiation from present day offerings and identify potential for strategic projects to generate sustainable future facing value creation.
This move from incremental thinking into genuine differentiation will be captured in a visual artefact that you can use with your extended team post programme.
Moving from insight to action with practical tools: pre- mortem analysis to identify potential blockers, crafting a future facing strategic narrative, back casting to identify critical path decisions, coalition building and 90-day sprints.
Each participant presents an innovation concept plus a 90-day activation plan with clear decision points.
Post-programme
1. Week 6: Virtual reconvening – Participants report on their progress with their action plan followed by peer coaching.
2. Month 6: Virtual reconvening – Sharing valuable learning points from the individual action plans built out of the original programme. What is working in practice?
What you will gain:
- A portfolio of innovation concepts tested across multiple futures and with the tools to continue testing and refining them.
- Strategic narratives to mobilise teams and stakeholders and the ability to write new narratives as and when needed.
- A 90-day activation plan.