About SharedForesight
Participatory scenario planning for communities and organizations deciding together through structural change. A working tool, not another framework on a slide.
Our Story
Most of the planning methods organizations still use were formalized in a period of relative institutional stability. They assume the ground holds still long enough for a plan to pay off. Governments are under strain, climate impacts are arriving locally, economies are resetting, and the group ends up reacting to each shift instead of preparing for any of them. That is not a personal failing of the people running it. It is what those methods produce when they meet conditions they were not designed for.
The nine steps came out of twenty-five years of doing this work inside organizations, more than two hundred books on disruption and adaptive leadership, and five years of pulling the two together. A 2024 layoff produced the time to turn it into working software. What matters here is the result: a cycle that a congregation, a nonprofit board, or a company can open on a Monday morning and run together.
Most of what a group already has is built for running things, not for changing them. A shared calendar schedules the meeting. A document holds the minutes. A dashboard reports what happened last month. A strategic plan assumes the strategy is stable. None of them have an opinion about how a community should adapt when the ground moves, and none of them give more than a handful of people a way in. SharedForesight sits one layer above the tools you already use and gives the whole group a working surface for the practice: confronting what you are assuming, tracking what is shifting, rehearsing more than one future, and deciding with the dissent kept on the record.
Scenario planning is not new. What is usually missing is the word in front of it. The classic version is done by a small group, often with a consultant, and handed down to everyone else as a finished document. Participatory scenario planning is the same discipline run the other way round: the people who will have to live with the decision are the people who build the scenarios. They bring the signals, they rate the assumptions, and their disagreement is kept on the record.
That is harder to organize, which is why most groups never do it, and it is the part SharedForesight exists to make practical. Thirty people cannot sit in a room and draft three futures together. Thirty people can each bring what they are seeing, rate what the group is assuming, and argue with a draft. The result is a plan the community recognizes as its own, which is the difference between something that gets carried out and something that gets filed.
Our Vision and Values
Vision
Communities that meet structural change with a practice they have rehearsed. Adapting together becomes something a group learns and keeps, rather than a capability that appears in a crisis and dissolves when normal life resumes.
Mission
Put the nine steps inside working software, so a congregation, a nonprofit, or a company has a record of its own thinking that survives the people who did it and compounds across cycles.
Values
A framework is only useful when it is embedded in the work. A decision is not durable unless its dissent is preserved. The AI is only honest when it knows your community's context. Direction only adapts when people have a structured place to challenge it.
"The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters."
The communities most likely to come through the next decade are not the ones waiting for the old conditions to return. They are the ones that learn to decide together while the ground is still moving.
Nathan Rohm
Founder
Meet the Founder
Nathan spent twenty-five years running strategy inside organizations, and a lot of evenings on community bodies. He watched the same pattern in both: methods built for cyclical variation, applied to structural change, producing exhaustion in the people running them.
He worked at a midsize online video company that read the broadband wave early and turned an agency into platform infrastructure, and was acquired by the largest cable company in the world. He worked at a white-label content portal company and carried a mobile pivot through hostile conditions. He worked at a Fortune 500 company during the cloud migration era and watched an industry-blessed direction quietly calcify into the whole strategy. Each of those sits behind a specific step in the nine.
The reading gave way to a framework during the pandemic, and the framework became SharedForesight after a 2024 layoff finally gave him the time to build it. He writes about the product-management craft the framework came from separately, at adaptableproduct.com.
"Communities are good at this in a crisis and have nowhere to do it on an ordinary Tuesday. That is the whole problem, and it is a solvable one."
Our Promise to You
From Nathan, who builds SharedForesight:
"I promise to keep the framework honest. Every step in the cycle exists because a real group has been burned by not having it. I am building this for the people who feel the gap between what their tools assume and what their actual conditions demand.
I will keep the AI tuned to the framework. I will keep the decision log honest about dissent. I will keep the record something the next person to hold this job could read in six months and understand.
Thank you for considering SharedForesight as the working surface for your next cycle. I am paying attention to the work, and the practice is built to evolve with what you find."
Nathan Rohm, Founder
What Makes SharedForesight Different
Framework Embedded
Nine steps that live in the workflow.
Quarterly Cadence
Direction adapts on a seasonal cadence.
Dissent Preserved
Every decision keeps its alternatives and dissent.
Longitudinal Record
Cycles compound across years.
Ready to run your first cycle?
A five-field form produces a populated first cycle.
