Article
Barbara Maingon1,2
1Metafutureschool;
2 Uppsala University, Sweden
Abstract
The COVID-19 crisis shattered the illusion of a single predictable future and accelerated digital integration in educational institutions. These converging shifts created unprecedented conditions from which emerged an increasing demand for anticipatory thinking and the need for novel education models. Metafutureschool emerged almost organically from these conditions and from the synergy of its three founders, Sohail Inayatullah, Ivana Milojević and Adam Sharpe. This essay examines how new pathways for futures education emerged in the aftermath of COVID-19 through the lens of Metafutureschool’s story. Through interviews with Metafutureschool’s graduates across multiple contexts, this study reveals how digital platforms can support transformational learning while preserving academic rigor, and explores how futures education may be reimagined beyond traditional institutional boundaries.
Keywords
Futures Education, Futures Literacy, Causal Layered Analysis (CLA), Transformative Learning, Myths and Metaphors
Introduction
This essay began with a question familiar to many who explore futures thinking: how do we create educational structures that serve transformation rather than reproduction? I came to this question not as a distant observer but as an intern at Metafutureschool in 2025, invited to listen and collect the voices of its graduates. What follows is a partisan, yet reflective analysis and storytelling of a collective learning experiment, translating the lived experiences of those who participated in it into a broader conversation about futures education.
The COVID-19 crisis fundamentally disrupted and reshaped traditional education, forcing two intersecting shifts that created unprecedented conditions for the field to evolve. First, global education made what Tesar (2021) calls a “forced entry into becoming a virtual classroom” (p.1) as institutions worldwide moved online within a week. Secondly, the pandemic shattered the assumption of predictable patterns and teaching methods, yet also revealed the possibilities of new horizons; a turning point where new ways of thinking could emerge and take root (Karjalainen et al., 2022).
This convergence became significant particularly for futures education as the combination of digital acceleration and the collapse of predictability models produced fertile grounds for growth. The crisis revealed fundamental gaps in how organizations and individuals alike approach uncertainty, and while traditional education focused on replicating existing practices online, organizations across the globe found themselves not just wanting digital solutions, but new frameworks to build anticipatory thinking. From the crisis emerged conditions for futures educators to have a key role in building futures literacy in order to deal with uncertainties, understand emergence and respond to rapid and complex changes (Karjalainen et al., 2022).
Established institutions like the Institute for the Future and the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies have long operated as think-tanks and training providers, combining research, courses and corporate foresight. Newer organizations, such as the Frank Spencer Institute (TFSX) has expanded practitioner’s certification methods and corporate foresight training. Other programs such as at the University of Houston or the University of Turku’s Futures Studies centre sustain futures as an academic discipline. However, the pandemic also revealed fundamental limitations to how futures education had been structured and delivered. Like other academic fields, it remained largely constrained by institutional boundaries, traditional academic structures and geographical accessibility, thus limiting who could access quality programmes and when. The pandemic didn’t create these limitations but it starkly exposed and exacerbated them. Tamkang University’s experience illustrates how even the most successful programmes remained vulnerable. Even after having educated over 120 000 university students in futures studies in over a decade, the pandemic exacerbated pre-existing demographic and geopolitical challenges, hence curtailing its ability to “convene the global futures conversations for which it was known” (Leong, 2024, p. 5). COVID revealed these limitations, yet also created opportunities for the emergence of alternative approaches that could transcend institutional boundaries, geographical constraints and traditional access requirements.
Among these alternatives, fully virtual futures learning platforms, such as Coursera, EdX or Udemy have opened mass-scale access to foresight-related content, and represent a significant innovation. These represent one model of innovation, emphasizing scale and flexibility. These platforms have leveraged the post-pandemic environment to experiment with global reach and new pedagogies. These shifts aligned with UNESCO’s Futures of Education’s initiative which calls for democratizing access to knowledge and learnings (Couture & Murgatroyd, 2024; International Commission on the Futures of Education, 2021). However, this democratization raises critical concerns about maintaining academic rigor and quality assurance when operating outside established institutional frameworks and traditional accreditation systems. The challenge lies in ensuring that the increased accessibility and democratization doesn’t dilute the depth and academic rigor of futures literacy. Nevertheless, these transformations may signal a long-term restructuring of futures education preferring agility, networked collaboration, and global accessibility over physical campuses and traditional accreditation.
Looking forward, by 2030, the education ecosystem will be shaped by an intersection of technological acceleration and socio-political disturbance. Artificial intelligence and digital platforms will increasingly be embedded within the learning systems, redefining both teaching and learning processes, and promising both liberation and constraints (Burbules et al., 2020; Gürdür Broo et al., 2021). On the one hand, this shift towards life-long learning and flexible skill-based education, such as critical thinking, collaboration, digital fluency, will respond to the 21st Century evolving labour market, whilst on the other hand the focus on predetermined skills risks creating what Paris and Goodman (2011, as cited in Webb et al., 2020) call ‘mnemonic control’ where learning algorithmic systems reproduce past patterns, and shape how learners experience temporality itself. This becomes acute with broader systemic pressures: geopolitical tensions fragmenting international collaboration and straining public budgets, favouring defence and security spending allocations over the education sector; climate change forcing population displacements, increasing systems’ tensions and straining educational infrastructures (OECD, 2025). By 2030 mainstream educational institutions may find themselves trapped in an old temporal loop, repeating familiar patterns by adapting to the future instead of reshaping it, while struggling to maintain basic operations (Rasa, 2025; Webb et al., 2020).
It is within this context that Metafutureschool emerged. Created by Sohail Inayatullah, Ivana Milojević and Adam Sharpe, it aims to create a meaningful, accessible, yet rigorous learning environment, free from institutional constraints and that addresses the new conditions of futures education. As UNESCO Chair of Futures Studies, Inayatullah also anchored the school within the broader international effort of democratizing futures literacy and reimagining how learning can shape humanity’s future.
The story of Metafutureschool is not a strategic design alone, but a tale of timing, relationships, and of the organic spread of ideas. The metaphors that emerge from this story are used as analytical tools to reveal the deeper patterns of how alternative educational model navigate disruption, build communities and perhaps transform landscapes. Through this narrative journey, Metafutureschool becomes a window through which we can foresee how futures education could reinvent itself when traditional pathways become inadequate.
The Journey
Coral reefs are among Earth’s most vibrant and productive ecosystems supporting over a quarter of all marine species despite occupying less than one per cent of the ocean area. The reef’s survival depends on a precisely timed process: spawning happens in synchrony with the lunar cycles, and water temperature releasing new life into the ocean that can travel vast distances to establish new coral communities. This coordination creates resilient and interconnected networks of ecosystems.
Metafutureschool emerged in a similar way, when Sohail Inayatullah, Ivana Milojević and Adam Sharpe came together in natural harmony, their collaboration perfectly timed as COVID-19 confronted the world with the inadequacy of perpetual reaction. From this rupture emerged a hunger for the anticipatory mindsets needed to navigate uncertain futures. Like the reef, the school didn’t emerge through institutional planning, but rather as a response to changing conditions, strategically adapting by privileging timing, relationships and resilience over formal design.
Crisis as a catalyst
The birth of Metafutureschool was perfectly timed, but far from planned. Inayatullah had been working with the Victoria government in Australia, as part of a project exploring workforce futures which included creating an online course. However, when the project concluded, the course sat unused – a “rough product” as Inayatullah describes it, awaiting the right moment to find its purpose.
In 2020, the World’s systems shook. COVID-19 had cracked open the hard-shelled illusionary assumptions of a linear, predictable, single future manageable through past-informed reactive responses. Suddenly, the widespread loss of perceived control undermined the notion of predeterminism and increased feelings of vulnerability and uncertainty across populations and organizations. As the pandemic stripped away the institutional guarantee of security, and stability, an increasing demand for anticipatory strategies emerged.
Sharpe had experienced Inayatullah’s transformative teaching first hand in Bangkok and saw the potential of his dormant course. His reaction was immediate: “let’s make it an online course!”. “Become a Futurist 101” was born, and so the spawning began by a process of rapid prototyping and real-time learning.
What happened next reveals the organic and almost accidental nature of how transformative movements begin. As many organizations from the Pacific Community (SPC) to UNESCAP and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) asked themselves “how do we learn futures?”, early enrolments started trickling.
A very rough product was turned into something quite exceptional. Cheryl Doig, a futurist and owner of ThinkBeyond notes that Metafutureschool platform provides a credible research and action-based futures education, affordable, and accessible from anywhere in the world. The content of the courses is “exceptional in terms of quality” shares Lisa Fraser, who sponsored seventy disability sector leaders through the course. Unlike other online learning platforms privileging reach over intimacy, Metafutureschool emphasizes community and relational depth with its founders’ engagement directly shaping the experience. Perhaps its greatest power then resides in this passion; “it’s a unique value proposition” reflects Steven Lichty, a futurist, “passionately driven by its founders” delivering a bespoke experience with “heart and soul”.
Reflecting on this period, Inayatullah explained “we came up with a metaphor. And the metaphor was, let’s go from a little river to a typhoon as we changed our story”. What started as a single course quickly gained momentum, attracting groups and organizations across sectors to sign up. Yet, this typhoon was more than just about Metafutureschool’s strategic growth and a surge in participation, it also reflected how the pandemic created a collective moment of unmaking, when the loss of certainty and sense control became an opening for learners and institutions to engage in new ways of thinking about the future.
The COVID-19 crisis didn’t create Metafutureschool’s success, rather it revealed critical gaps in organizational preparedness and a global crisis of imagination, as organizations lacked the mental frameworks and processes to think beyond their baseline assumptions (Crews, 2020; Inayatullah, 2008). But this “failure of imagination” is as much organizational as it is deeply personal. Cate Houston, a Metafutureschool’s graduate, reflects on the illusion of predictability and control shared by the current deterministic models: the belief that by carefully analysing past and current conditions, the ‘right’ future can be predicted and planned accordingly. But life “tends to throw a volley of curve-balls” she says, potentially changing the world’s baseline assumptions overnight. By incorporating futures thinking into planning, these shocks might disorient momentarily, but won’t be destructive as alternative pathways have already been mapped out!
Shifting mindsets and challenging modernity through Future Studies
The notion of modernity, not just as a historical period, but as a monocultural mindset and narrative, has fostered the dangerous illusion that the world is objectifiable, knowable and fixable through the mastery over nature, over body and over the unknown. It has transformed the complexity of life into a linear, progressive path where the future is controllable and predictable (Akomolafe, 2017; Bussey, 2025).
Similarly, the mainstream education system reinforces modernity’s narrow logic. According to Bussey (2025), education has become a vehicle to colonize the imagination, rewarding answers over questions, and certainties over wonder and meaning. The result is a ‘crisis of becoming’ where individuals, communities and organizations cannot imagine different futures alternatives beyond the status-quo (Bussey, 2025; Bussey et al., 2008; Inayatullah et al., 2006).
The systemic practice of a ‘used-future’ often translates into feelings of fear, despair and paralysis emerging from people’s conditioned inability to reframe the poly-crises humanity is facing. Shadi Rouhshahbaz, a futurist, feminist researcher and facilitator, remembers how anxious and fearful she was of the future before taking Metafutureschool’s courses. Khabir Kamran, a foresight strategist, felt sometimes anxious at taking initiatives in life, whereas Houston mentions she felt “powerless in midst of conflicts”.
Inayatullah reminds us:
We get tired, we get depressed, we get cynical, yes, it’s part of reality. But Futures Studies is saying “let’s work together to create a different world. Our image of the future, our vision, they all make a difference” … this course is about how we can make a difference together… with real tools, real methods you can use to change your life, your organization and create a better world. (Become a Futurist – Futures 101)
Beyond methods and scenarios, Metafutureschool’s students began to feel a shift in mindset: instead of perceiving the future as predetermined, they started to approach it as a space of agency and choice. In fact, by teaching individuals to work with multiple alternative futures instead of a single most likely scenario, foresight breaks the illusion of predetermined outcomes (Dator, 1996). Futures studies gives people permission and the tools necessary to move beyond fear and determinism and into agency and creativity. Milojević (2005) extends this view by framing futures thinking as a deeply personal and political act, resisting dominant narratives and allowing new imaginaries to emerge, grounded in ethics, hope and transformation.
This shift from passive acceptance to active agency represents a fundamental transformation in how Metafutureschool’s students understood their relationship to the future. Dr Susann Roth, Advisor at Asian Development Bank and Future & Foresight practitioner, mentioned the introduction to futures thinking was “life-changing”, “it opens mindsets and creates a safe space to think and work differently”. Fadi Bayoud, Director of Strategic Anchors, also reflects on his journey with Metafutureschool sharing that it allows individuals to “build capabilities for future preparedness, how to shift mindsets and acquire holistic thinking” preparing you for the “unknown-unknowns”.
The future as an open space to resolve conflicts
However, as new future possibilities and visions emerge from practicing foresight, so do tensions, notes Milojević. Competing futures visions collide as they challenge existing assumptions about power, resources and legitimacy. This is a natural part of the transformation process that requires conflict transformation approaches so that groups and individuals can learn to navigate and transcend these disruptions and divergences.
At the same time, Milojević had already been developing conflict transformation work with the National Disability Services in Australia, and once again the timing was perfect. She transformed her existing expertise into Metafutureschool’s second course – Conflict Transformation. According to Milojević, futures thinking allows for a reframing of traditional reactive conflict resolution approaches into proactive conflict prevention. Through the visualization of preferred futures, individuals can step out of deterministic and often violent narratives locking them into zero-sum visions, and step into more dialogic spaces. Rouhshahba mentions how the courses have elevated the depth of her work in peacebuilding. Houston now recognizes that there are “steps one can take without resorting to explosive responses… violence is not inevitable”.
In order for resolution to happen, transformation must take place across both realms – the inner and outer. Conflict must be understood not only through external manifestations, but also through internal narratives. The integration of futures thinking thus becomes transformational as it enables individuals to name and reframe these inner narratives and envision alternative social and structural arrangements. They become co-creators of peaceful and multiple futures.
According to Milojević, conflict transformation futures are about learning how to live with difference, with uncertainty, and with multiple possible futures. This requires both inner courage and outer change.
As deeper transformation unfolded, it became clear that Metafutureschool’s real offering was not simply futures literacy: it was personal transformation. Learners, having explored structural and relational dynamics, were increasingly asking a more intimate question “what do I do with my life?”. In response, Inayatullah and Sharpe co-created the third course, “Personal Futures”, taking the tools and methods and turning them inwards.
CLA: transformational power of the metaphor layer
The metaphor or myth layer of the Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) holds a profound transformative power because it represents the deepest meaning-making in our human consciousness. It shapes collective and individual beliefs, values and narratives underlying worldviews, social systems and everyday realities. The metaphors emerge through the embodied experiences and social interactions that connect individuals and groups, thus becoming our shared myths that build worldviews (Inayatullah, 1998; Inayatullah, 2017; MacGill, 2015). When dominant metaphors become distorted or outdated, they misalign the entire societal structures. However, by reframing and transforming these deep stories, societies and individuals can unlock alternative futures (Inayatullah, 1998).
For Metafutureschool’s students, it was perhaps the most transformational element of the entire framework as they described its profound impacts across cultural and organizational contexts. Kristel Griffiths, Strategy and Foresight Advisor at the Pacific Community (SPC), observed “making a visual metaphor has been so powerful for our strategic plan in terms of delivering the visuals behind our key focus areas that have really made people come together”, whilst also noting how “speaking to some of my Pacific colleagues, really coming from a cultural lens, finding metaphors that suit them, from the metaphors of their past to who they are and who they aspire to bring out” has proven particularly resonant. Dr Roth described CLA as “a powerful tool for transformative futures,” emphasizing how “the four levels of analysis—litany, system, worldview, and myth/metaphor—offer a profound way to understand why change happens or doesn’t,” and how it “helped me (Dr Roth) break free from limiting thought patterns”. Lichty, working extensively in African contexts, highlighted CLA’s “incredible versatility” and noted how “the myths and metaphors, the stories we tell ourselves, often include internal narratives like ‘I can’t do this,'” but when “articulating these on paper or publicly, especially in communal African environments, allows for valuable group feedback,” making “this communal aspect significantly enhance CLA’s value in non-Western settings”.
These various applications demonstrate CLA’s powerful capacity to facilitate transformation at both institutional and deeply personal levels. The Asian Development Bank’s collaborative work with Indonesia’s BAPPENAS reveals how CLA and specifically the metaphor layer opens new mindsets for strategic thinking by moving beyond surface-level issues to explore the deep underlying assumptions that shape institutional approaches to development challenges (Milojević, 2025). The workshops extended beyond just theoretical application to reshape concrete policy domains helping develop national maritime policy and enabling deeper exploration of housing and broader futures across Indonesia.
Yet, the personal dimension is equally profound as Lichty’s observations about how individual metaphors and internal narratives like “I can’t do this” can be transformed through communal articulation, and Rouhshahbaz’s profound personal breakthrough in reframing her Iranian passport from perceived weakness to unique strength, illustrate how CLA enables personal futures work that fundamentally shifts individual self-perception and possibility. Additionally, SPC’s Compendium of Pacific Practice in Strategic Foresight explores how CLA works for deepening understanding and fostering transformational thinking. The document highlights how Pacific cultures have embraced it as a culturally appropriate tool for sharing indigenous wisdom and navigating towards more promising futures.
CLA and particularly the metaphor layer function as a cultural mirror and transformation catalyst by providing the imaginative foundation for change, transcending surface-level adjustments to touch on fundamental narratives that shape how individuals, communities and organizations envision their futures.
Interconnected Futures practice: From a coral spawning to a mycelium networks
As Metafutureschool graduates mature beyond their initial transformation, the coral reef metaphor transforms into something more complex and interconnected: a mycelium network characterized as network symbiosis. Graduates of Metafutureschool have naturally spread futures knowledge, creating mutual benefits, thus embodying the mycelium metaphor. Fraser exemplifies this symbiotic relationship, describing how “I really use it everywhere now… I use it personally, I use it with people when they’re wanting to change or when people are stuck,” whilst simultaneously building her professional identity through “seeding it in places where I think that and seeing what happens and who picks it up”. Doig similarly embodies this symbiosis, using her course learning as “foundation to run local communities of practice (10 people at a time)” and emerging as the “futures auntie” through “just regular contact with people and just being able to share ideas in a space that is safe”. Dr Mete Yazici, mentions he uses the Futures Triangle and Six Pillars approach in the workshops he runs to expose the mindsets that may create certain futures so alternative futures can be sought and meaningful change created.
At an institutional level, Griffiths and her colleagues at SPC have woven Metafutureschool tools into the organizational DNA, creating the Pacific Pathfinder Toolkit, adapted for Pacific context. This interconnected web functions on the principle that individual flourishing depends on collective flourishing, creating what Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) describes as “the spirit of the community – what is good for one is good for all”; a living network where knowledge flows multidirectionally, supporting both individuals and the broader ecosystem of futures practice.
Exploring futures pathways for Metafutureschool
Looking towards Metafutureschool’s futures, Inayatullah offers a vivid culinary metaphor for the school’s evolution. The founding team’s “mix has been quite powerful,” yet Inayatullah acknowledges their uncertainty about expanding to “bring in new chefs and cooks,” despite wanting to create “a food court with little stores”. While the founders envision growth and experimentation, they recognize that this raises practical and strategic challenges. These tensions are well reflected by graduates and institutional partners who have all offered valuable insights on both aspirations and areas of improvements. Their visions span from enhanced cultural integration and indigenous knowledge representation to global accreditation pathways and institutional transformation. Simultaneously, they’ve identified practical challenges around linguistic accessibility, alumni engagement, course content updates, and the need for more advanced specialization options. Drawing on the voices of its graduates and founders, I imagine four trajectories.
Scenario 1: Distributed Futures.
The original food court metaphor, expressed by Inayatullah and Milojević, imagined a bustling space where diverse futures offerings could co-exist. Instead of growing centrally, Metafutureschool expands laterally. The food court emerges organically, through distributed leadership and alumni-led innovation. As graduates start hosting their own tables by developing regional ‘pop-up stalls’ for example, drawing from the core frameworks but adapting them to local needs. Trust and mutual recognition ensure the ecosystem thrives while a shared culture of praxis safeguard the quality of education. Shared responsibilities lighten the administrative burden as it is distributed across the network. In this scenario, former students become co-creators, chefs, offering new dishes made with the base ingredients provided in Metafutureschool’s course and flavoured with local context and cultural insights. The founders maintain the curriculum, offer mentorship and ensure that new offerings align with the school ethos of accessibility, depth and transformation. That way, specialized learning tracks can emerge, not through a centralized institution, but via peer feedback, trust and demonstrated practice. Metafutureschool expands through alumni initiatives while remaining grounded in the founders’ guidance.
Scenario 2: the archipelago
Responding to the graduates’ call for formal recognition and culturally relevant learnings, Metafutureschool builds partnerships with universities across different regions (Middle-East, Asia-Pacific, Africa etc.). Rather than a single institution, it becomes an archipelago of co-created accredited programmes, adapting the core futures methods to local contexts, languages and pedagogies. A shared global certification framework ensures quality and coherence while allowing diversity. Students can earn locally recognised qualifications that reflect both global futures literacy and regional cultural wisdom, addressing graduates’ calls for micro-qualifications that connect with regional educational networks and provide formal recognition of their futures expertise. In this scenario, Metafutureschool becomes less a school and more a global academic standards body, setting rigorous benchmarks for futures education while enabling culturally resonant, locally accredited learning experiences worldwide.
Scenario 3: the circle of circles
This scenario responds to interviewees’ calls for “greater embedding of cultural context” and “more prominent representation of Indigenous practitioners” by fundamentally reimagining what constitutes futures knowledge. Instead of adapting methodologies to different contexts, indigenous ways of knowing become the foundation where futures thinking emerges. The SPC’s insight that “strategic foresight and futures thinking is tōfā sā’ili (wisdom searching)” and that “our future is in our past” points toward epistemologies that have long embraced cyclical time, ancestral guidance, and relational worldviews. In this radical transformation, Metafutureschool recognizes that the statement “strategic foresight and futures thinking is not new to the Pacific” (Toelupe Tago, 2021, as cited in Pacific Community, 2022), applies globally, meaning that indigenous communities around the world hold sophisticated futures traditions. The courses aren’t centred around the current frameworks anymore, instead learning emerges from community leaders, cultural practitioners, knowledge keepers, who teach from their own cultural traditions. Metafutureschool then outgrows its institutional identity and becomes a shared learning space, a circle of circles, where communities teach their own futures wisdom. A very risky transformation, with potential losses (coherence, quality control, even recognition…), but the promise is profound: a futures education that does not seek to master the world, but to be changed by it, creating space for epistemological humility, cultural renewal, and the possibility of being taught by what unsettles us.
Scenario 4: Choreographed Future
A radical fourth scenario can be imagined. Advanced AI systems master futures methodology delivery, allowing students to access personalized foresight education on demand, simulating workshops and scenarios and even creating original foresight tools in real-time, thus threatening Metafutureschool’s (and other learning platforms) relevance. In this scenario, the school becomes a training platform for learning to work with AI futures-systems and its limitations: crafting ethical AI prompts that counter algorithmic bias and foreground voices that are excluded from AI training data; collaborating on human-AI scenario building; facilitating transformation by creating empathetic, relational support for transformation pathways. The new focus of the school is on finding futures wisdom rather than on futures methods. Students become choreographers of AI futures systems, creating deeper transformations through non-human collaboration while developing the judgment, empathy, and meaning-making that remain uniquely human.
Causal Layered Analysis to uncover evolution pathways
Causal Layered Analysis helps us uncover the deeper structural and cultural shifts underlying global education and Metafutureschool’s evolution, and highlights how the transformations may unfold over time (Table 1).
Table 1: Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) of Metafutureschool (MFS) and global education
| 2020 | 2025 | 2030 | |
| Litany | COVID-19 disrupt traditional education; MFS launches courses as response. | Traditional adaptations; MFS consolidation & global alumni network. | Funding cuts, pressures, & fragmentation; MFS partnerships & culturally adapted curricula. |
| Systems | Reactive digital acceleration; MFS bypasses institutional constraints. | Pedagogy unchanged & control regained; MFS alumni network & quality control. | Fiscal constraints & platform-dependent approaches; MFS distributed governance. |
| Worldview | Shattering of assumptions; MFS embraces uncertainty, agency & personal transformation. | Incremental changes: adaptation vs transformation; MFS community building.
|
Tech solutions; MFS regional wisdom & “intra-action” (Barad, 2007) |
| Metaphor/Myth | Fax machine with paper jam; Coral reef spawning | Added touch-screen to fax machine; Mycelium network. | Multiple compasses pointing to different norths; Archipelago |
Conclusion
Metafutureschool’s journey illustrates the dynamics of an emergent learning ecosystem. Its evolution, from the coral reef to the mycelium network, reflects its emergent form: an adaptive, interdependent community where knowledge circulates and relationships sustain the whole. This evolution also illustrates a strategic intent: moving from seeding (the reef) to scaling and interconnection (mycelium), ensuring resilience and adaptability. Dynamics of global shifts can be read as waves gathering momentum, sometimes swelling into typhoons that disrupt established patterns, creating opportunities for reflections, consolidation and innovation. Looking ahead, Metafutureschool may structure itself in different ways: through distributed initiatives, partnerships across regions deeply embedding culturally rooted futures practices. These pathways show us not only how the school’s future is shaped by its curriculum, but also by structures and relationships that support its evolution.
More broadly, Metafutureschool’s story suggests that the field’s futures lie not in reforming existing structures but in cultivating conditions for new forms of academic community to emerge organically. The trajectory also reflects the futures field’s potential broader shifts: from institution bound programmes to networked and culturally diverse practices where reciprocal facilitation help build futures literacy within communities, organizations and institutions, thus also moving towards ecosystem logics. By nurturing its ecology of learnings, Metafutureschool can contribute not only to its own growth but to the evolving practices of the futures education field itself.
Notes
Interviews were conducted via multiple formats: Zoom video calls, WhatsApp, and written responses. Zoom interviews were transcribed using Fathom AI transcription software.
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