Postcards from the future
Here at Momentum, we ❤️ a warm-up.
Not for entertainment value (though that’s welcome). For orientation. A creative pause before the hard thinking begins. A way to loosen imagination before analysis tightens it.
A good warm-up lets colleagues step out of earlier sessions and concerns. It invites them into something low-stakes, suspends judgment, and brings people fully into the room before future planning – which can easily become heavy and analytical – begins. A creative exercise makes the future easier to enter.
So before a demanding planning session with colleagues working on climate finance, we ran a simple foresight exercise, ‘Postcards from the Future’:
Greetings from 2040! You are a participant at the COP45 in Norway, and have the chance to write a postcard to yourself back in 2025. Future you has a chance to share an experience, an update or advice with your younger self – what do they need to know?
2040 – far enough away to move beyond the tactical or strategic, and into the visionary and creative.
And colleagues really did! The postcards ranged from deeply worried to gently satirical. Some imagined breakthroughs. Others poked fun at process. A few carried quiet exhaustion. But suddenly, the future wasn’t abstract anymore. It was human.
Shared concerns surfaced, laughter followed, and within minutes the room had shifted from analysis into imagination — which, as it turns out, is exactly where serious strategy needs to start.
