Scouting the River
Report and Resources for Applying Foresight in Education and Youth Development
We are living through a period of profound change, driven by multiple, interconnected forces. Education is at the center of these forces and must also evolve to meet them. This microsite is designed to present information and resources from recent research on major drivers of change that will likely shape the next decade and how the practice of foresight can help education and youth development leaders look beyond present conditions, recognize far-off signals as they move closer, and make better decisions today about the future we are working to create.
Education and youth development leaders are pursuing ambitious, long-term goals intended to fundamentally improve systems, opportunities, and outcomes for young people. Moreover, we are doing this when our world itself is radically changing. Foresight can help us understand and navigate the river ahead so we can develop the best strategy to minimize risks, maximize opportunities, and shape the future to come.
Research, tools, and conversations developed by EducationCounsel with support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
Note: This draft site is available for Mott Foundation grantees to revisit the foresight work ahead of the upcoming grantees’ convening. As we finalize the site, we welcome feedback during the meeting on what would make this resource most useful to your work. Please do not forward the site link or reproduce or quote its content while it remains in beta.
What Is Foresight and Why Does It Matter?
Many of the goals education and youth development leaders are pursuing are generational and transformational. They seek fundamental shifts in structures and culture toward more equitable, impactful learning systems that can help every young person thrive. Achieving those goals may take 10, 20, or more years.
Yet strategies for long-term change often focus on today’s problems, evidence, and conditions without fully considering what the world may look like in years to come. Emerging forces could create new risks, opportunities, obstacles, and accelerants for the work. Building foresight into strategy helps leaders account for those possibilities instead of planning only for the world as it exists today. This is especially critical in times of particular volatility and uncertainty.
Foresight is the intentional practice of looking beyond present conditions to understand the forces that may shape the future. Its purpose is not to predict the future but to help leaders consider multiple possible futures, test their assumptions, and make more informed decisions about the world they are working to create.
Foresight helps leaders:
Think ahead to the world you are trying to change
Identify and consider how forces shaping the next 5, 10, or 20 years could affect your priorities and the future you want to build for young people.
Prepare for multiple futures
Consider how the future could unfold and build options and flexibility into plans and strategies.
Act with greater clarity
Make the best-informed choices to lead through uncertainty and across changing conditions to impact the future.
This resource is grounded in a broad review of research, literature, and data; interviews and conversations with leaders across education and other fields; and engagement with leaders from more than 100 Mott Foundation grantee organizations. This microsite summarizes key findings and is intended to serve as one entry point or hub to consider what the future holds and connect to field leaders and resources that can help you go deeper into foresight and how it could improve your work and impact.
About the Research & Key Findings
The research behind this Resource
As the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation marked its 100th year and looked toward its second century, it was a timely moment to consider what may shape the future and what that means for the future of education and youth development.
This resource grows out of foresight research led in 2024 by EducationCounsel in partnership with the Mott Foundation. The work sought to identify potential drivers of change over the next decade and consider their implications for education and youth development, including the risks, opportunities, and needs they may create.
The process included a broad review of research, literature, and data; interviews and conversations with leaders across education and other fields; and engagement with leaders from more than 100 Mott Foundation grantee organizations.
The goal was to create space and structure for future thinking that could help leaders make better decisions and build stronger conditions for every young person, particularly those most marginalized, to thrive.
Research and literature review → Leader interviews and conversations → Engagement with leaders from 100+ Mott Foundation grantee organizations → Ten future drivers and practical foresight approaches→ Continued learning and field engagement
Together, this work identified several high-level insights, ten major drivers of change, and a set of practical approaches that education and youth development leaders can use to examine their implications, strengthen planning, and prepare for changing conditions.
What Our Research Tells Us
Powerful forces lie ahead (and all around)
The decade ahead is likely to bring significant turbulence and change – across technology, economics, governance, demographics, climate, health, culture, and other domains. Research points to multiple, significant drivers of change that leaders must understand and prepare for.
The drivers are deeply interconnected
These drivers overlap and compound one another, accelerating and complicating both risks and opportunities.
Education is at the center
Education is shaped by every driver and is also a driver of change itself – influencing what our education and youth development systems can and must do to support young people, communities, and society.
Change is nonlinear
The decade ahead will include twists, tipping points, and counterforces. Leaders will need to keep scanning, revisiting assumptions, and adjusting course.
Among the most powerful forces are counterforces
History shows that generational change and counternarrative are also powerful drivers of change, creating opportunities for redirection but also risk of destabilization.
The question is not whether change is coming.
The question is whether we and our systems are prepared for it, and how we can help shape what comes next.
Explore the Ten Drivers
Imagine moving down a river. Some stretches are calm and open, with a clear view of the path ahead. Others move quickly, with strong currents, unexpected turns, and obstacles that are harder to see and navigate. Research (and present experience) indicates that the decade ahead will likely look more like the second kind of river: dynamic, interconnected, and likely to bring significant risks as well as some opportunities.
Even in challenging conditions, however, leaders can take steps to understand what may be ahead and chart a better course. When EducationCounsel asked a rafting guide how to navigate the most difficult waters, her advice was simple: scout the river first. That is the role of foresight. It helps leaders identify far-off signals and deep currents, anticipate how conditions may shift, and make more informed decisions without assuming there is only one possible future.
The drivers shaping the river ahead
The ten drivers below offer a way to examine the currents, turns, obstacles, and accelerants that could shape our world, as well as our education and youth development systems, over the next decade. They are powerful, deeply connected, and already visible in many areas. Each driver section summarizes what may be changing, why it matters for education and youth development, and questions leaders can use to consider its implications.
What is changing?
The economic landscape is likely to be shaped by growing tension between growth and inequality and between globalization and protectionism. Workforce disruption, accelerated by technological change, may profoundly alter traditional employment patterns while creating new forms of opportunity. Public debt, spending pressures, and future recessions could accelerate these shifts.
Why it matters for education and youth development
Economic change may reshape the roles of secondary education, higher education, workforce training, and youth-development systems. Leaders may need to build more coherent, integrated pathways and stronger systems of lifelong learning that can prepare young people for the future while ensuring that disruption does not outpace response or deepen existing inequities.
Questions to consider
- How could income inequality and workforce disruption change what young people need from education and youth-development systems?
- Where might new pathways, credentials, or forms of lifelong learning be needed?
- How can leaders prepare for economic change in ways that avoid deepening existing inequities?
What is changing?
Technology may drive some of the greatest disruptive change over the next decade. AI and robotics, for example, could reshape how people live, work, learn, and succeed. The pace of change may be faster and more far-reaching than many institutions are prepared to manage.
Why it matters for education and youth development
The rise of AI will likely have profound implications for the goals of our education and youth development systems and how young people learn, access information, prepare for work, and develop the skills they need to thrive. Education and youth-development systems must consider how to prepare each and every young person for an AI world; mitigate risks related to privacy, bias, inequity, and cognitive offloading; and explore how technology could support more personalized learning and human development.
Questions to consider
- What do young people need to know and be able to do to thrive in an AI-shaped world and how do our education and youth development systems need to shift in that regard?
- How might AI and technology deepen inequities if access, privacy, and bias are not addressed?
- How could technology support more personalized learning consistent with the science of learning and development while preserving human relationships, cognition, and judgment?
What is changing?
Low trust in institutions, the rise of populism and authoritarianism, and major shifts in courts and government could reshape public systems in fundamental ways. These changes may occur through policy, law, funding, institutional restructuring, and changing public expectations. While some forces may be temporary, others likely reflect deep divides and may be more difficult to change course.
Why it matters for education and youth development
Changes in governance and institutions have profound implications for our public education systems, as well as equity, civic learning, and more. They may challenge long-standing commitments while increasing the need to rebuild trust, prepare young people for civic participation, and strengthen the broader education ecosystem.
Questions to consider
- How might challenges to public systems affect public education and youth development?
- What should young people learn and experience to participate fully in civic life?
- Which rights, commitments, or public structures may require renewed attention, protection, reimagination, or rebuilding?
What is changing?
Generational change may be one of the most significant latent drivers of the decade ahead. Young people shaped by technology, political conflict, the COVID pandemic, and changing expectations may distinguish themselves sharply from prior generations. At the same time, the nation is becoming more diverse, older, and differently distributed across places and communities. These and other forces are fueling debates about who we are as a nation, notably with regard to our foundational belief in immigration.
Why it matters for education and youth development
Demographic change will influence who education systems serve, what young people and families expect, where resources are needed, and how communities define opportunity and belonging. Systems designed for past populations may need to adapt to new realities, and renew our commitment to educating all persons.
Questions to consider
- How are the experiences and expectations of today’s young people changing?
- How should education and youth-development systems respond to greater diversity and migration?
- What assumptions about families, communities, and place may no longer hold?
What is changing?
Many indicators point to rising conflict and instability in the decade ahead. Political division and civil disorder at home, geopolitical competition and conflict, cyberattacks, terrorism, and the threat of cold or hot wars may all shape public life and institutional priorities, particularly for young people.
Why it matters for education and youth development
Young people will need the knowledge, skills, relationships, and sense of agency to understand and lead in a complex and interconnected world. Education systems may also face direct risks related to safety, disruption, public spending, information security, and social cohesion.
Questions to consider
- What do young people need to understand about a more unstable and interconnected world?
- How can education strengthen resilience, civic understanding, and social cohesion?
- How prepared are systems for conflict-related disruption, cyberattacks, or shifting public priorities?
What is changing?
Climate change may be among the most likely and impactful challenges of the decade ahead. Extreme weather, resource shortages, displacement, and growing energy demand could disrupt communities and education systems. At the same time, advances in renewable energy and other technologies could create new opportunities.
Why it matters for education and youth development
Climate and energy shifts may affect attendance, facilities, transportation, digital access, family stability, and community health. They also create needs and opportunities related to STEM learning, workforce development, sustainability, and resilient infrastructure.
Questions to consider
- How might climate disruption affect access to learning in the communities you serve?
- What infrastructure and support systems need to become more resilient?
- How could education prepare young people for emerging environmental and energy opportunities?
What is changing?
Cultural forces related to race, gender, religion, immigration, identity, information, and belonging are increasingly shaping politics and public systems. Division, mis- and disinformation, loneliness, and competing views of national identity may continue to intensify and produce countermovements.
Why it matters for education and youth development
Culture influences what communities expect from education, what schools and youth programs can teach, and whether young people experience trust, belonging, and connection. These forces may affect equity, public support, privatization, safety, and the ability to sustain shared goals.
Questions to consider
- How are cultural conflict and misinformation affecting your work?
- What helps young people develop belonging, discernment, and the ability to engage across differences?
- Where could cultural backlash create risks for equity, inclusion, or public education, as well as opportunities for renewal?
What is changing?
The last decade, particularly the COVID pandemic, demonstrated the systemic risks associated with global health. Future pandemics, mental health and addiction challenges, and unequal access to care may create continuing disruption. At the same time, advances in medicine, biotechnology, and AI could improve health and extend life expectancy.
Why it matters for education and youth development
Health conditions shape whether young people can learn, participate, build relationships, and thrive. Education and youth-development systems may need stronger mental health supports, more flexible delivery, deeper partnerships, and new approaches to serving learners across disruptions and longer spans.
Questions to consider
- How are mental health and well-being changing what young people need?
- What lessons from COVID should be embedded in planning and infrastructure for future events?
- How could health breakthroughs or longer lifespans change education and lifelong learning?
What is changing?
The next decade may bring a new age of exploration, including missions to our moon and those of other planets and new discoveries in the seas. Exploration carries risks, such as congestion and debris in space, but it also offers the possibility of significant discovery, innovation, inspiration, and even shared purpose.
Why it matters for education and youth development
Exploration can help young people imagine possibilities beyond current crises and deficit narratives. It may inspire a new generation of STEM learning, interdisciplinary problem-solving, and careers while creating opportunities to connect curiosity with public purpose.
Questions to consider
- How can education use exploration to inspire curiosity and hope?
- What new knowledge, skills, and pathways could emerging fields require?
- How can young people participate in and shape the benefits of discovery?
What is changing?
Education is both a critical connector of all other drivers and a major driver of change itself. Technology, economics, governance, culture, and demographic change are already reshaping education. At the same time, shifts within education, including privatization, personalization, new learning ecosystems, higher education reform, childcare, and lifelong learning, will shape society more broadly.
Why it matters for education and youth development
The education system is at a long-standing tipping point – with great need for a new, more impactful, more unifying frame. There are reasons for hope, including greater understanding of the science of learning and development, a stronger focus on youth thriving, and growing interest in broader learning ecosystems. There are also significant risks, including threats to equity and diversity, public education, coherent systems, and access.
Questions to consider
- What should the purpose and promise of education be in the decade ahead?
- How might schools, youth programs, families, communities, and other institutions form a stronger learning ecosystem?
- Which emerging shifts could advance thriving and equity, and which could undermine them?
Use Foresight in Your Work
Start with better questions
Foresight becomes most useful when it helps leaders plan, challenge assumptions, and make sense of what may be changing around them. There are many approaches when setting strategy, planning for long-term change, or stepping back with a team to consider the river ahead. Here are a few:
Estimated Value Analysis
Focus attention on key drivers based on how likely they are to occur and how significant their impact could be (on your work or overall).
Questions to explore:
- Which drivers of change appear most likely to affect our goal?
- Which could have the greatest impact if they occur?
- For those drivers that are highest likelihood and impact, what actions today could help avoid risk, leverage opportunities, or impact what lies ahead?
Pre-Mortem Analysis
Imagine different future outcomes, then work backward to identify actions worth taking today.
Questions to explore:
- What would a significantly better future look like (related to one or more drivers of change), and what may have helped create it?
- What would a worse future look like, and what may have contributed to it?
- What could we do now to move toward the better outcome or prepare for the worse one, particularly including actions that would be valuable under either possible future?
Intersectional Analysis
Examine how multiple drivers interact to create compound or exponential effects.
Questions to explore:
- Which drivers are most relevant to our goal or strategy?
- How might these drivers interact or accelerate one another?
- Where could their intersection create new risks, opportunities, or needs, and what entry points could help address or leverage multiple drivers?
Use these or other approaches, alone or in combination, including in planning, analysis, strategy, and continuous improvement. The goal is to strengthen how your team thinks about the future and identify practical actions that remain useful as conditions change.
These three approaches offer a starting point, but many organizations across the field have developed additional methods and tools for exploring possible futures, testing assumptions, and developing strategy for long-term change.
Continue Scouting: Field Leaders & Resources
Foresight is an ongoing practice
Foresight is an ongoing practice, and no single organization holds all the answers. In just the last two years, several organizations have released new analyses and tools to help with foresight, including in the education context. Continue exploring the foundational research behind this resource and organizations offering additional foresight frameworks, tools, and services.
Together, these resources can help leaders examine the drivers, consider their implications, and continue building foresight into education and youth development strategy.
Explore the foundational research
The Shape of the River: Understanding and Using Foresight in Education
Read the 2024 research summary introducing the foresight framework, ten drivers of change, and their implications for education and youth development.
Scouting the River Through Foresight
View the original 2024 presentation introducing the future drivers, the river metaphor, and initial approaches for applying foresight.
Field leaders and resources
The organizations and individuals below are among those offering research, frameworks, and tools that complement this resource and support future thinking across education and other areas.
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
Examines global trends shaping education, develops futures-thinking resources for policymakers and education leaders, and studies how emerging technologies and skills may affect learning and work.
Trends Shaping Education | OECD
Trends Shaping Education 2025 | OECD
KnowledgeWorks
Uses education-focused foresight to help leaders explore possible futures, recognize signals of change, and design more equitable and learner-centered systems.
Explore the Future of Learning – KnowledgeWorks
Institute for the Future
Develops futures research, methodologies, and practical tools that help organizations make sense of long-term change and prepare for multiple possibilities.
World Economic Forum
Tracks global risks, economic and technological change, workforce trends, and other forces that shape the context in which education systems operate.
The Future of Jobs Report 2025 | World Economic Forum
Shaping the Future of Learning: Education Readiness for the Age of AI
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Studies long-term global forces across population, resources, technology, information, economics, security, and governance that helped inform this research.
Ulcca Joshi Hansen
Ulcca works with leaders and teams across sectors, in companies, institutions and communities, who are navigating changes their playbooks were never built for.