Helping Clients Think About the Future, On Purpose

I recently spent an hour with a community of coaches I am part of presenting on a question provoked by my Futures Studies: How do we help our clients think about their future constructively? 

In 2024 I completed a postgraduate diploma in Futures Studies at Stellenbosch Business School. I went in without a clear sense of what I would get from it. I had heard it was interesting, I was drawn to strategy, and I did not want to do an MBA. Most of what I have applied since has been in facilitating strategic work, but the thinking travels, and coaching is one of the places it travels best. The International Coaching Federation's Futures Report puts it well: “Coaching is, at its core, a future-facing practice, and futures thinking offers a structured, creative way to explore uncertainty and align today's choices with long-term aspirations”. We are already doing this work. The question is only which tools are worth borrowing.

Several frameworks are useful for coaches (and managers) in helping with purposeful, constructive futures thinking.

The Polak Game

To start I asked them two questions about themselves. Broadly, do you look at the world and expect things to work out, or do you mostly see the difficulty coming? And secondly, how much do you believe your own actions can shape the future you end up in?

Cross those two and you get the four quadrants of the Polak game, an exercise for surfacing how a person actually relates to what is coming. Most of the coaches answered in the same way: things will broadly be fine, and I have real influence over my own outcomes. I was not surprised, coaches are, by and large, independent practitioners who chose a path where our actions visibly shape our results, and we have built a worldview on top of that choice.

Now hold that against many clients, often sitting inside a large corporate, with people above and below them, performance reviews, and decisions such as restructures they did not ask for and cannot influence. It would be entirely rational for that person to feel they have very little influence about a gloomy future at all.

The useful question is not where you sit on the matrix. It is whether you have noticed that your client may be somewhere quite different, and whether you are coaching with this awareness

The 3 Horizons Model

Acknowledging that ‘what got you here won’t get you there’ is the foundational premise of the 3 Horizons framework. The first horizon is whatever is most prevalent right now: for an organisation, the business model, the customers, the culture, the way leadership works; for an individual, the habits and strengths and assumptions that have carried them this far. It is inevitably of declining importance. The third horizon is the aspirational future, what you want to be prevalent later. The second sits in the gap between them and asks what you need to start experimenting with in order to move from one to the other. 

I share this one openly with clients rather than holding it in the background. It is visually simple, people understand it immediately, and it gives a shared language within a session or two. Clients start noticing their own first-horizon thinking, which is more than half the work.

The coaches made two observations. One was that senior leaders often ride the first horizon extremely well and are rewarded handsomely for it, yet when you ask about their own further aspirations they have rarely given it much thought. Putting it to them plainly, that at some point they will run out of first horizon, so what are they doing about the third, is both gentle and incisive. The other was that this applies to meaning as much as to performance. A leader's business can keep growing while the meaning they draw from it quietly declines. The prevalence of each horizon is not a revenue scale, itt applies to purpose too.

The Futures Cone

When I finished my Futures Studies programme almost everyone asked me the same thing, ‘now tell me what is going to happen’, and that is precisely the opposite of the point. The Futures Cone counters our tendency to think in straight lines, if something is going up, we assume it keeps going up, we extend our graphs. 

Looking backwards you have a single line, because you know what happened. At the present moment that line can go in any direction, and the future opens into a cone of possibilities. The widest band holds everything possible, including things you would never expect. Inside it sits a smaller set of plausible futures, and inside that, the probable ones that follow if things continue on a more expected path. The one that matters most for coaching is the preferable future, which is how I influence the outcome, rather than a forecast.

This does not give a client answers, what it does is move them from believing this is definitely what will happen to asking what else it could be. And it connects straight back to that opening question about influence, because once a client can see several futures, the work becomes about bending toward the one they want.

2x2 Scenario Building

Acknowledging that many futures exist is not something a client can act on, so we can build potential divergent scenarios to discuss by taking two critical uncertainties and crossing outcomes on a simple 2x2 matrix giving us four workable scenarios.

Three things determine whether this works. The axes have to be genuinely uncertain, for example If a restructure is definitely happening, that is not an axis, what happens to your client's particular role might be. They also have to be external rather than internal. A question your client controls, such as whether they should respond in this or that way, is a fine coaching question but a poor axis, because scenario work is about the world you respond to rather than the choices you make within it. And they have to carry both high impact and real uncertainty in the client's own mind. If you propose something they do not actually feel uncertain about, abandon it.

When I demonstrated this live I used artificial intelligence, because it is uncertain for almost everyone right now. Crossing how much it disrupts a person's industry against whether their employer invests in preparing them produces four recognisable futures, ranging from being well positioned at the front of a wave to watching everything change around you without support. The specific scenarios matter less than what you do once they exist.

That is where the coaching actually happens. Start with how the four land emotionally rather than analytically. A client may reject one outright as something that could never happen, which is useful information in itself. Then put them inside each one and make it vivid enough to inhabit. What does that world look like, what is your organisation doing in it, what is happening more broadly?

From there you can either choose the one or two that feel most likely and plan into them, or, more powerfully, look across all four and ask what would be worth doing regardless of which arrives. If educating yourself about a coming shift leaves you better positioned in every scenario, you have found something to do that requires no prediction at all. You are not betting on one future, you are being constructive in the absence of knowing.

What struck me most in the discussion afterwards was how much of the value lies simply in naming things. Leaders are expected to be courageous and confident in uncertainty, and nobody ever explains how you build comfort with the uncomfortable. Naming the possibilities is one way. Once a scenario has a name you can talk about it, and once you can talk about it the fear starts to shrink. It gives a client something to get their teeth into instead of a vague sense that everything is changing at once.

None of this is about predicting the future, which is emphatically not what futures thinking does. It is about replacing "I don't know what's going to happen" with something a client can hold, examine, argue with and act on.

Which brings it back to where the session began. If you know where you are standing, and you have noticed that your client is standing somewhere else, you can get on with the real work of helping them move.