Our vision is an equitable world in which everyone has the agency to create their future.
Prospect Studio specializes in strategic foresight and equity-centered design to reimagine and reinvent education.
“The future is already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.”
We love this quote attributed to William Gibson. Our mission is to disrupt that distribution by partnering with organizations to craft their vision of the future, develop workable plans to get there, and share tools and techniques to support it.
Our Practice
We work with a range of education-focused organizations. These include educational institutions, (schools and school districts, county offices of education, colleges and state departments), and a variety of non-profits, start-ups, and philanthropies.
The creation of a Graduate Portrait is central to Prospect Studio’s process. The Graduate Portrait becomes the “North Star” for a district, encouraging a bolder, more equitable, and more aspirational promise to students, families, and the community. This process is highly collaborative. It supports districts in engaging meaningfully with their diverse communities—creating input, design, and feedback activities. The process intentionally uses strategic foresight (or futures thinking) and equity-centered design to imagine what students will need to thrive in the future, which moves districts to transform in significant ways.
The Graduate Portrait in this process is complemented and supported by an Adult Portrait—which answers the question, what will adults need to be able to do to support every student in attaining the Graduate Portrait? Additionally, both of these are further supported by yet another critical piece, a System Portrait—that is, how will the system need to change to help adults to support students? Implementing these changes takes time, collaboration, and different ways of relating and working, and so we call all of this work a district’s long-term vision.
Long-term Visioning
This work aims to help organizations create a rich, aspirational, viable and sustainable picture of the future they want. This includes assessing trends, identifying priorities, and creating vision artifacts that vividly capture the work and prepare organizations for planning and implementing toward that desired future.
Collaborative Vision Creation
Our work is inherently collaborative. We believe that diverse groups, embodying a range of perspectives and experience, create more robust and resilient futures, and are better able to address unintended consequences. To that end we work with a variety of diverse design teams from inside the organization and across other stakeholder and community groups.
Contextual Research
We begin our engagements with a process of listening, based on a combination of ethnographic research and appreciative inquiry. We want to understand the current state and recent history in order to design for the habitual roadblocks, identify the emerging bright spots, and build a coalition of allies.
Horizon Scanning and Weak Signals
We consider the wider field and interesting analogous field examples. Using trend and demographic research, and physical and virtual learning journeys, we explore and assess the ways in which the field and the local context are changing, including the 'weak signals' of change and emerging ideas.
Creating Artifacts
We create artifacts to capture the spirit of the vision. These often convey much more than words can, and more effectively. They become tangible reminders of work done and changes made.
Stress Testing Emerging Ideas
We design group processes to vet the draft ideas as they emerge and evolve. This method provides multiple options for feedback, and ensures a more robust end result.
Strategic Planning
Our strategic planning process begins with a series of collaborative exercises, designed to help you identify what you want to be true for your organization.
With this clear destination in mind, we help you develop effective strategies to get there. By guiding your team in crafting appropriate metrics, indicators, and strategic actions, we help you coordinate these elements and begin moving in the right direction.
Regardless of whether you’ve completed a long-term visioning project with us, we can help you clarify your goals and prioritize the actions needed to achieve them.
Leadership Coaching and Training
We offer leadership coaching and training for veteran and emerging leaders, either to complement other services, or as a standalone option. Clarifying strategic priorities and then backwards mapping from a desired future helps leaders to make decisions and discern courses of action more easily. Gaining fluency with strategic foresight, innovation practice, and design thinking add practical, forward leaning, skills to a leader’s portfolio.