Looking ahead works best when you have different perspectives in the conversation. People living close to changing conditions often notice signals earliest. Older residents carry longer memory, younger people spot emerging technology trends. Service providers see where strain builds. Local businesses understand supply shifts and risks. When these voices come together, what's coming becomes easier to see and prepare for.
It starts with listening. Ask people what they're noticing: costs changing, seasons shifting, new patterns taking shape. Place these observations alongside any data you have until patterns emerge. Sketch out a few plausible scenarios and explore what would matter in each one. Ask which choices today stay useful across several possible futures. Often these look like strengthening relationships, growing local skills, and designing things that can adjust.
Thinking about the future takes practice and benefits from dedicated time and space. Creating opportunities to explore what might be coming, to test different possibilities, builds capacity for this kind of thinking. What we've noticed is that people who actively participate in imagining different futures tend to engage more deeply with them. So wide engagement matters.
Over time, these conversations about what's ahead become part of how the community works. They inform decisions, shape priorities, and help everyone prepare.
Something to chew on:
Whose view of the future could change what you see from where you stand?
Resilience Bites offers weekly insights from the Australian Resilience Centre, drawn from decades of work alongside communities across Australia and internationally. Each Bite explores an aspect of resilience and closes with a reflective question to chew on.
Across the series we'll explore themes that shape resilience in practice, including place, patterns, networks, leadership, learning, feedbacks, thresholds and the deeper work of change.
This series is for people working in communities, landscapes, systems and change. It will help you explore key resilience concepts, apply them in practice and build our collective capacity to create resilient futures.
To learn more about the Australian Resilience Centre and explore our work and services, please visit https://www.ausresilience.com.au/
To read published Bites, please visit https://resiliencebites.ausresilience.com.au/
