Foresight Trainings Foster Resilience

Integrating futures-thinking into the organizational structure.

Imagining unprecedented challenges and opportunities higher education may face is essential to planning a resilient future for CSULB. 

As university leaders work to ensure futures-thinking becomes a core practice in strategic planning and decision-making at CSULB, the Beach 2030 team engaged the Institute for the Future to lead a series of intensive foresight training retreats this past academic year for Action Zone team members. 

The goal: To develop a definitive foresight toolkit to enhance strategic planning at The Beach. 

In 2018, Institute for the Future helped CSULB envision the world of 2030, facilitating the online, two-day Imagine: Beach 2030 event that sought input from the entire university community to analyze current trends and signals of change in order to map potential impacts to higher education the ensuing decade might bring. The ideas captured in that full-bodied brainstorm came together in the Beach 2030 strategic plan, a broad vision for the future that articulates the five chief priorities and seven action zones by which CSULB would work to align its services and mission.   

As teams comprised of CSULB administrators, faculty, staff and committee partners now work to complete projects that achieve the goals of our Beach 2030 vision, IFTF’s training aims to provide tools to enhance their capacity to imagine how CSULB can rise to the challenges and harness the opportunities of the rapidly changing world around it. 

Through foresight, we are working to “anticipate the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable,” said Dhushy Sathianathan, Vice Provost for Academic Planning, earlier this year.

Cultivating resilience requires us to be nimble and proactive amid ever-changing forces shaping higher education— technological innovation, societal shifts and climate uncertainty among them. Integrating futures-thinking into the organizational culture of CSULB will not only set us up for successful strategic planning across all sectors of our university, but also position The Beach as a forward-thinking institution recognized for its capacity to produce truly innovative ideas for the future. Equipping faculty and staff with CSULB-specific foresight tools and engaging in regular futures-thinking practice will help institutionalize this work on our campus, transcending silos to synchronize efforts as we work to realize our Beach 2030 goals.