Reflections on the Dubai Future Forum 2025
Spending last week at the Dubai Future Forum was a mind expansion and a heart lift, as it is every year, with 2500 of my closest friends – a jokey line, but not a joke.
I walked through the Museum of the Future thinking and feeling: these are my people. Untold diversity of backgrounds and experience united by one thing – passion and commitment to working with communities and leaders not just to envision better futures but to bring them into being.
Some things that stood out for me:
The brilliant symposium on strategic philanthropy – reimagining the sector and charting how we put youth and community-generated insights and capabilities at the center of the change that philanthropy works to support.
“Focus is the new currency ... what if a nation’s most valuable asset is the focused and interconnected minds of its people?” ... "National Cognitive Potential” as an intriguing take on indicators that look beyond GDP.
The continuing deepening commitment to Intergenerational Fairness ... mechanisms making young people’s involvement in decision-making authentic, not performative ... IGF moving from a value to a principle.
Seeing the winners of the inaugural Dubai Foresight Awards recognized for their world-changing work – Pasifika Futures embedding indigenous knowledge into community-led design of long-term regional development frameworks ... City of Longevity creating a systematic participative model helping citizens live healthier longer lives ... Congo Basin Futures advancing preservation and sustainable management of that region’s tropical rainforests.
Youth foresight practitioners everywhere I turned – grateful to learn from you! – UNICEF’s playbook/toolkit launch, Teach the Future, Next Generation Foresight Practitioners, “Future of Childhood” activation/workshop, and more.
Building and leveraging “futures barometers” in Denmark and New Zealand to convey to national and other-sector leaders what their constituents wants their tomorrows to look like.
New takes on the futures of cities through lenses of belonging and shared experiences, of resilience, of architecture and cultural spaces as catalysts for more inclusive futures, of urban ecosystems that balance technological advancement and social well-being.
Finally, mercifully, going beyond the hype cycles and the obsession with monetization to actually thoughtful dialogue about AI and what it can mean for humanity.
How we might practice futures thinking as a lived practice – new ways developed by Julienne DeVita and Eric Popiel to go deep in this work we do and using that depth to take our work with clients and stakeholders to new places of impact.
Too many personal meet-ups to list, with old friends and brand new ones – I treasure the time together with each of you and am excited to sustain our dialogues going forward.
Unmeasurable thanks to Patrick Noack, Eman Ebed Alkadi, Isabella Pirolo, Lana Abdelhameed, Maryam Yousuf, Bilal Emad, and the whole DFF team.
Grateful for the bonds with my friends and collaborators in Friends of the Forum and Global Futures Society.