I’m honored to be joining the Dubai Future Forum 2025 — the world’s largest gathering of futurists, thinkers, and policymakers — to participate in a conversation that feels urgently necessary for this moment.

The panel I’ll be joining, “Relearning Imagination: Are We Actively Shaping Our Future?”, asks a deceptively simple question: how do we begin imagining futures worth wanting?

We talk endlessly about innovation, disruption, and transformation. Yet the cultural muscle we most need — imagination — is often the first to atrophy. Organizations optimize what they already understand. Institutions rely on what can be measured. Individuals get stuck navigating immediate demands rather than sensing what is possible.

This session brings together government leaders, design practitioners, and cultural change-makers to explore why imagination isn’t a luxury — it’s infrastructure.

It’s how people and societies build agency.

It’s how we learn to notice the signals of the emerging world before they fully arrive.

And it’s how we prototype meaning in times of volatility.

In my contribution, I’ll be drawing from the work I’ve been doing through Near Future Laboratory, helping teams build their own “imagination practices”: tools and techniques for making possibility tangible, cultivating new language for unfamiliar terrain, and using Design Fiction to create artifacts that spark agency rather than anxiety.

At Dubai Future Forum, this isn’t a conversation about prediction. It’s a conversation about perception — about training ourselves to see futures not as abstract scenarios but as invitations to act.

If you’re attending the Forum, I’d love to continue the discussion there!

If not, I’ll share reflections afterward, along with a few signals worth watching.

The panel I will be participating in is titled “Relearning Imagination: Are We actively Shaping our Future?”

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