Our work
Foresight with colleges, systems and state associations
Alongside its resource library, the Lab works directly with community colleges and the associations that serve them. The aim is the same in every setting: help people see change early, question their assumptions and make decisions that hold up across more than one future.
Each engagement starts from the questions a college or state is already facing. Most leave behind tools and habits the institution keeps using after the Lab has gone.
How the Lab can help
Ways of working together
Foresight workshops
Leaders, trustees, faculty or staff spend a day examining their assumptions, mapping the forces acting on their college and building scenarios. Sessions run for one college or bring many colleges together through a state association.
Board sessions and retreats
Boards learn to make the future an explicit part of how they govern: sharing signals, naming the assumptions behind proposals and testing decisions against more than one future.
Leadership and campus sessions
Cabinets, academic leaders and departments learn to use foresight in their own work, from program review and curriculum design to student services and workforce partnerships.
Scenarios and environmental scans
The Lab develops scenario sets and environmental scans for a college or system, so planning starts from a clear view of what is changing and what could happen next.
Foresight-informed planning
Strategic plans built on several plausible futures rather than one assumed path, with indicators that tell the college when to look again.
Keynotes
Talks for state and national conferences that challenge how audiences think about time, change and the future of community colleges.
Clients and partners
Recent work
The Lab’s work has reached colleges and associations in California, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri and Alaska.
- Community College League of California
- Community Colleges for Iowa
- Missouri Community College Association
- State Fair Community College, Missouri
- Palomar College, California
- University of Alaska Anchorage
From the field
Selected past work
Past work
The Future, Reexamined
Foresight session · Community College League of California · January 2026
Fifteen CEOs and trustees from California community colleges met to examine their assumptions, map the forces reshaping the system and build four scenarios for the next ten to fifteen years. The briefing records what they found and the vision they began to shape.
Past work
Five Scenarios for 2035
Scenario development · State Fair Community College, Missouri
Five ten-year futures for one college, from deep K–12 partnership to an AI-enabled campus. Each was written as a story, with headlines and voices, so faculty and community members could picture it and argue with it.
Past work
Four Plausible Futures for the Decade Ahead
Scenario report · 2×2 scenario matrix
A scenario report built on two uncertainties: who the college’s students will be, and what credentials will be worth. It develops four futures and the strategic questions each one raises for the institution.
Start a conversation
What question is your college carrying about the future?
Most work with the Lab begins with a conversation about that question.