The Community College Futures Lab uses strategic foresight to help leaders, boards, and systems navigate uncertainty and make intentional decisions about institutional direction.
Structured sessions where leadership teams examine assumptions, explore drivers of change, and develop scenarios that surface real implications for direction.
Equipping governing boards to make the future an explicit part of how they decide—testing decisions across futures, expanding time horizons.
Translating emerging trends and early indicators of change into usable, decision-relevant insights leaders can take into the room.
Long-range plans grounded in multiple futures rather than a single assumed path—resilient across different conditions, intentional in direction.
Strategic foresight maps the range of futures your institution might face — so you can choose, not drift.
Those impacts are unfolding in conditions that are complex, fast-moving, and uncertain. Without actively engaging the future, institutions risk becoming less relevant to the students, workforce, and communities they are meant to serve.
The Lab is designed to address that challenge. It develops tools that allow leaders to navigate uncertainty and make intentional decisions about who their institutions become.
Read the full vision →Strategic foresight is a structured approach to thinking systematically about the future. It is not prediction. It is a way of examining how different future conditions could unfold and how those conditions would shape institutional choices. By making multiple futures visible, foresight allows leaders to test decisions, surface assumptions, and consider a wider range of possibilities before direction is set.
Anticipatory governance is a way of operating in which boards regularly and explicitly engage multiple possible futures—not to predict what will happen, but to govern more wisely in the face of genuine uncertainty. It replaces a single assumed path with intentional engagement across the range of futures the institution may need to navigate. It is not a single activity. It is a way of leading.
The Lab is an applied think tank, not a consultancy. Its work centers on a specific discipline—strategic foresight—and is grounded in real-world application with leaders, boards, and systems. Rather than delivering a recommendation, the Lab develops tools and processes that build foresight capacity inside the institution, so leaders can continue to engage uncertainty after the engagement ends.
The Lab works with community college presidents, cabinets, governing boards, trustees, system leaders, and state-level associations. Its services include foresight workshops, anticipatory governance training, foresight-informed strategic planning, executive retreats, policy briefs, and experiential foresight installations.
The Lab is led by Andrea Henderson. Her work draws on more than two decades of state-level community college leadership, including 18 years as Executive Director of the Oregon Community College Association and 6 years as Executive Director of the Arkansas Community Colleges Association. She has been appointed by the Governor of Arkansas to the Economic Recovery Task Force and the Career Education and Workforce Board, and by the Governor of Oregon to the Task Force on Higher Education and Workforce. She holds formal training in strategic foresight from the University of Houston. She has presented on strategic foresight at ACCT, AACC, the AACC New Presidents Academy, the League for Innovation in the Community College, the Rural Community College Alliance, the Community College League of California, the Missouri Community College Association, and the Wyoming Association of Community College Trustees. She has published in The EvoLLLution and ACCT Trustee Quarterly.
Foresight-informed strategic planning grounds long-range plans in scenarios rather than a single assumed future. Rather than projecting forward from current conditions, the planning process examines a range of plausible futures, defines a preferred direction, and develops a plan that is resilient across different conditions. The result is a strategy that reflects both uncertainty and intentional choice.
Reach out about workshops, board sessions, planning engagements, or speaking. We'll respond within two business days.
