Expert futurists will scan the health and well-being landscape to illuminate trends, as well as emerging issues with the potential to significantly impact the United States in the short (~10 years) and long term (~50 years). FORESIGHT leaders will make sense of these trends (historical patterns that may or may not continue into the future), considering whether the momentum behind each might cause it to bend one way or the other, or even break, in the future.

FORESIGHT’s public opinion researchers and 17 to 20 regional philanthropic partners will collaborate with regional connectors to learn from residents about their lived experiences with health and well-being as well as their aspirations for how a new system for health and well-being could work. This will help ensure that when FORESIGHT leaders identify common aspirations that will support regions as they develop their localized preferred futures, they will reflect the desires and expectations of diverse populations.

Health is related to nearly everything; what trends and emerging issues should influential leaders pay attention to most? Ensuring equitable and meaningful design of futures scenarios, and ultimately setting regions up to identify preferred visions for the future, requires that residents’ experiences must drive which trends should rise to the top when developing alternative scenarios, or stories, of how things might change in the future.

Using the prioritized trends and residents’ insights (and potentially insights from other key stakeholders), FORESIGHT architects will draft three to five alternative future scenarios that have the power to expand influential leaders’ imaginations and enable them to explore possible futures. At a landmark national convening, all FORESIGHT leaders will work together to visualize these alternative futures to determine their collective aspirations.

In a collaborative process yet to be determined, the work of Phase 1 will be synthesized into common themes that will support regions in identifying elements of localized preferred futures—no longer what might happen, or what has happened, but an informed view of what we all want to see happen. The themes will be widely shared, setting the stage for Phase 2, catalyzing new conversations, and continuing to shift the mindsets and actions of people who are committed to establishing a new trajectory for bringing about health and well-being in their regions.

Although the specific design of Phase 2 will depend on what emerges from Phase 1, the intent is to take insights to action. FORESIGHT leaders will work closely with a diverse group of people and sectors from handful of regions as they develop customized transition plans for bringing about what they helped envision in Phase 1. These plans will recognize the simultaneous validity of both meeting today’s responsibilities and pursuing tomorrow’s goals, and might include new policy and investment imperatives, new ways of partnering, new relationships, new organizational forms, new kinds of resource allocation, new technologies, new ways of measuring success, and more.

FORESIGHT is unlike many initiatives where the design of the process precedes the collective work. While doing things this way takes some getting used to, FORESIGHT’s process must constantly emerge from what is discovered through preceding parts of the initiative so that it reflects diverse interests and perspectives, including those of underserved populations, and so that we all have the opportunity to learn from one another in the future.