How time travelling could provide ideas, answers and motivation to finally embrace transformation

“Organisations in the Global Majority have spent years calling for INGOs to hand over power, rethink their role, and act in solidarity rather than authority” – Charles Kojo Vandyck, West African Civil Society Institute and author of The Engine Behind the Mission.

INGOs are navigating an unprecedented perfect storm: a global context of escalating conflict and climate urgency, a loss of legitimacy driven by calls to decolonise and cede power, and a funding crisis caused by most donor governments cutting funding.

Amid all of this, many organisations are still just ‘tinkering around the edges’, standing still or prioritising their own survival.

With the climate crisis powering floods and hurricanes, and war and genocide playing out in real time, it’s difficult to take a step back and think big. But what the world needs now more than ever is bold thinking and transformative action.

Taking a trip to the future

Over the years we’ve seen how taking an organisation on a trip into the future, perhaps as far as 2038, is just what people need to get going.

Ask yourself, by 2038 will you be:

Co-opted by a right wing ‘family rights’ approach?
A digital activist hacking AI algorithms?
Working to get ‘the unconnected’ onto the tech platforms they need to access huge dividends in health and education which have come from quantum computing and artificial general intelligence?
Providing a critical bridge between Global Minority philanthropy and thriving local civil society in countries that have formed the ‘new progressive world order’?
A relic of the development funding heyday from the early 21st century?

To stimulate and provoke big ideas and bold thinking, we have produced a range of possible futures that could exist in 2038. Looking into and exploring potential futures can help us think through what we might need to be doing differently now and what our future roles might be. These scenarios can also help us explore what we can do now to make the bits we like in these futures more likely to happen (and the scary and dystopian parts less likely).

A new approach to futures work

This work hasn’t come out of nowhere. It is based on work we have done with INGOs over the years to explore potential futures, and the signals, trends and changes that underpin them. Futures work in the sector is not new, but has often focussed on a traditional 2×2 matrix, looking at funding for the sector and the issues we work on. Today’s complexities require a different path, so our approach moves beyond those factors to explore multiple variables around geopolitics, AI and society. This is the key to building futures that truly reflect the messy, multifaceted reality of our transforming world.

Too often though, futures work gets bogged down in discussing scenarios as predictions, focusing on questions like Are these right? Is scenario 1 or scenario 4 more likely? Futures are not intended to be discussed as such. They are simply a small number of a myriad of possible futures that may emerge by 2038. In reality, the world might look like a combination of elements from all of these scenarios, or something different might emerge that we cannot see today. Their purpose is not to be rightbut to catalyse good thinking and strategic ideas.

Creating space for the big questions

Using future scenarios can help you create a space to answer big questions like:

How do we actually cede power to the Global Majority?
What does ‘solidarity’ look like in a world of biometric surveillance and AI-driven control?
How do we survive a funding crisis that isn’t a ‘dip’, but a permanent shift?

If you are already asking yourself these kinds of questions, futures work can help you to imagine what your role might be in a drastically changed world, while also applying a racial justice lens, reflecting deeply on what it might mean to stop perpetuating colonial ways of working and how we might do this in multiple futures.

Travelling to the future in four steps

To use our scenarios (or any other ones we flag in our new report) here is a four-step exercise you can run with your senior leadership team to get going.

Take an immersive deep dive into the future. Get creative with posters, images or ‘artifacts’ to bring them to life.
Do a 2038 Audit by asking: What are we doing in these futures, if anything? Who are we working with? What skills do we have? Who is funding us in this future?
The Emotional Check-in: Create space for the ‘scary’ and ‘hopeful’ feelings these futures evoke.
The 2026 Pivot: Now ask: What must we START, STOP and DO MORE of today to make the positive futures more likely?

If you want to learn more about the scenarios and how they can help you in your work, don’t hesitate to reach out to either one of us on [email protected] or [email protected].

And if you’re up for some time travel with others, join us on 30 April for an event that will bring Bond members together to reflect on the challenges ahead, explore the sector’s direction and identify priority operational areas to inform strategic decisions about their organisations’ futures.