Speculative design gives leaders a way to rehearse decisions before they have to make them. A team builds a specific future, with the products, services and pressures of a world ten or more years out, and the leadership works through what it would mean for today's commitments. The leader's job is not to do the design. It is to commission the work against a real decision, protect it while it is uncomfortable, and judge it by what it changes.
Most instruments available to a leader reduce uncertainty to a number: the forecast, the base case, the risk score. Speculative design does not tell you what will happen; it lets you practise deciding in a world where something unexpected already has. For the general case, see what speculative design is.
What leaders already bring
The parts of speculative design that most often fail are not the design. Our essay on the seven failure modes of speculative design in organisations makes the point bluntly: six of the seven are failures of framing, review and absorption. That is to say, of sponsorship, which leaders own.
You know which decisions are genuinely open. You control the calendar, and therefore whether the work arrives before the planning cycle closes. Your vision statement, board papers, risk register and investment committee are already instruments for deciding about the future, calibrated to the near one. And you can convene: put the finance director, the head of operations and a designer in one room for a day, which nobody else can do on demand.
Your decisions outlast your horizon
Leaders hold several clocks at once, and the shortest tends to win. The reporting clock is quarterly or annual. The governance clock is not much longer: boards reporting under the UK Corporate Governance Code publish a viability statement over a period the directors choose, and most have chosen three years. The Investment Association observed this in 2016 and argued for longer; in 2021 the Financial Reporting Council was still encouraging companies to extend the period. Meanwhile the asset clock runs for decades: buildings, systems, contracts and cultures outlast any leader's tenure.
Long formal horizons do not solve this on their own. A thirty-year projection built from today's assumptions is still today, extended. The problem is not a shortage of long-range numbers; it is that nothing in the leadership calendar asks what those numbers would look like in a different world.
Where it fits in how you lead
Most of the instruments you already use have a speculative counterpart.
| You already use | Its speculative counterpart | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| The vision statement | A described future with named services in it | A vision people can disagree with, not just endorse |
| The board paper | A board paper with a future artefact attached and its decision named | A discussion of consequences rather than adjectives |
| The investment case | The same case tested across several futures | Separates robust moves from bets on one future |
| The risk register | Implications from a future wheel, ending with "how does it go wrong?" | Second-order risks nobody has written down |
| The strategy away-day | A day spent deciding inside one future | Rehearsal, so the real decision is not the first attempt |
| The leadership KPI pack | A question audit and a decision log | A way to judge the work that is not "did it come true?" |
What to ask for. Most of the outcome is decided at commissioning:
- •A named decision. Which capital line, hiring plan, partnership or policy position will this inform? If nobody can answer, you are commissioning entertainment.
- •A horizon beyond ten years, so the work cannot collapse into defending the current plan; the practitioner's workflow explains why.
- •Written permission to break named assumptions, or the existing plan will reassert itself every week.
- •A receiving function: who will own the implications, and at what point in their cycle.
- •An evaluation plan agreed up front: a before-and-after audit of the questions your leadership team asks, a decision log, and reviews at six and twelve months, as set out in measuring speculative design ROI.
How to protect it. Uncomfortable work gets sanded down in review, because review exists to reduce risk. Keep a provocation track outside normal sign-off, attend the implications session as well as the reveal, and be the first to name the decision the work has changed.
A worked example: a replacement hospital and the ward with no beds
Imagine, as an illustration, the chief executive of an NHS hospital trust in England. Her board is about to approve the outline business case for a replacement hospital, due to open in the mid-2030s and to serve for decades. The live decision is how much of the building to commit to beds. She commissions a short speculative project against that decision.
The brief she signs. It names the change, the domain and the year: what is a hospital building for in 2040, if most hospital-level care happens at home? It names the assumption the team may break: that capacity means beds.
The signals that come back.
- •On 3 June 2024 Synnovis, which provides pathology services to the NHS, was hit by a ransomware attack that disrupted NHS services in London.
- •On 27 August 2024 NHS England published an operational framework for virtual wards, which let patients receive hospital-level care at home.
- •On 3 July 2025 the government published the 10 Year Health Plan for England, built on three shifts: hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention.
Her contribution here is one question: could someone check each of these? A slide reading "care is moving into the home" goes back.
The future wheel. At the centre: in 2040 most hospital-level care for the trust's population happens in people's homes, monitored remotely. First ring: fewer beds, more staff on the road, ward rounds by video. The second ring holds the twist. A ward fails one bed at a time; a network fails all at once. When the hospital's largest unit is a set of systems, one outage takes every patient offline together, and the Synnovis attack showed how far a single supplier's failure can spread. Meanwhile the home becomes a clinical space and relatives become unpaid staff. Third ring: the building the trust is about to approve risks becoming a stranded asset, and the town's attachment to its hospital beds becomes a political force in its own right.
The concept. Ward Zero: "The biggest ward in the hospital has no beds." A 24-hour clinical operations floor caring for around 2,000 patients in their own homes through sensors, video rounds and nurses on the road, while the building keeps theatres, imaging and a smaller core of acute beds. The sketch is the floor directory by the main entrance: "Level 3: Ward Zero. 2,140 patients today. 0 beds."
The capital team asked to drop the patient count from the directory, because it would read as a cut. She kept it: the number is what makes the board treat beds as one kind of capacity among several.
Implications. Human experience first: the patient recovering in her own bed, and the daughter who has become her night nurse. Then outward: who carries the burden of care at home, and who is shut out without a reliable connection or a quiet room; consent to monitoring inside the home; capital moving from concrete to staff and data; headlines about bed cuts; fewer buildings but more miles driven. And how it goes wrong: one ransomware attack leaves 2,000 patients unmonitored on the same night.
The backcast. Working back from Ward Zero: the policy direction exists in the 10 Year Health Plan, and an operating model exists in virtual wards. The rungs still to cross are a threshold (home monitoring reliable enough for acutely ill patients), a workforce at scale (community nurses trained for remote acute care), resilience standards for clinical networks, and the way a trust is paid for a patient at home compared with one in a bed. That last rung is institutional, and the one where the trust's voice might count.
What changes this quarter. The board paper attaches the floor directory and makes four recommendations in the board's own terms. The outline business case specifies two floors that can convert between wards and other clinical uses, which pays off whether or not Ward Zero ever exists. The bed model is presented beside the Ward Zero future, with a named trigger for revisiting the bed count. The risk register gains a line for synchronised digital failure. And one director becomes the named owner.
Six months later she repeats the question audit. Before the project, the board asked how many beds the trust would need in 2040. Now it asks what people will still need to come to a building for. That change is the return.
Where it goes wrong for leaders
Commissioning an exhibition. The project is scoped around a launch: a film for the annual conference, an installation in reception, a handsome book. They are pleasant and easy to point to, which is the problem. Nothing in an exhibition is obliged to change a decision. If the deliverable is an event, ask which decision the event is for.
Demanding certainty. The first question in the review is "which of these is most likely?", or the team is asked for a recommendation before the implications work is done. Either way rehearsal has been turned back into forecasting, and a team asked for a likely future will produce one. Ask instead which decisions look different in each future, and which moves hold up in all of them.
Delegating it away. The work goes to the innovation team or an agency, and the leader appears for the final presentation. Nobody with authority has named a decision, nobody has given the team cover in review, and the output arrives with no receiving function. Speculative design does not absorb itself. If you sponsor it, your diary has to show it: the brief, the implications session, the board paper. Our guide for strategists covers the analytical work you can hand over.
The case for making it normal
There is also an argument that is not about return. The people who will live longest with a leader's biggest decisions, the patients of 2040 or the staff not yet hired, are absent from every meeting where those decisions are made. Time spent in their world is the nearest a leadership team can get to giving them a seat. That is the ethical case we make for normalising speculative design, and it rests on one of our New Kind of Design principles: we'll never know what will happen tomorrow, until tomorrow. If so, preparing across several tomorrows is part of the job, and only a leader can make it count as work.
A first exercise for your next leadership meeting
- 1.Choose a decision on the agenda this quarter whose consequences will last more than ten years. Write down how long.
- 2.Beforehand, ask each member of the leadership team for the three questions about the future that matter most to it. Keep the answers as your baseline question audit.
- 3.Ask one person to bring three signals relevant to the decision, each a specific event with a date and a source.
- 4.Spend half an hour of the meeting on a future wheel: put the strongest signal at the centre, imagine it fully realised a decade or more from now, and push beyond the obvious first ring.
- 5.Close by asking which part of the decision now looks different, and which event would tell you to revisit it. Minute both.
- 6.Put a date in the diary six months out to repeat step 2 and compare the questions.
Where leaders can learn speculative design
Speculative Design Basics is our self-paced online course: 42 lessons, lifetime access, no prior experience assumed. For leaders two parts matter most: Creating Value, on how the practice connects to foresight, strategy and leadership, and The Ethical Imperative, on why time in the future should be normal rather than exceptional. If the first ten lessons have not improved your understanding and potential for impact, you get a full refund. Leadership teams that want to learn together can enquire about bespoke team training, and individuals with grounding can join the five live sessions of the Speculative Design Masterclass. The whole series is collected under speculative design for every role.
Key takeaways
- •Leadership is deciding under uncertainty; speculative design is rehearsal for decisions that outlast the people making them.
- •Most failures of speculative work are failures of sponsorship (framing, review, absorption), the part only a leader controls.
- •Commission against a named decision, beyond ten years, with permission to break assumptions and a receiving function agreed in advance.
- •Protect the uncomfortable parts in review, and attend the implications, not only the reveal.
- •Judge the work by the questions your leadership asks and the decisions it changes, never by whether the future arrived.
- •Normalising time in the future is an ethical choice as well as a strategic one.
Frequently asked questions
How should leaders use speculative design?
Leaders use speculative design to rehearse decisions whose consequences will outlast current plans. A team builds a specific future, ten or more years out, and the leadership works through what it would mean for today's commitments. The leader's role is to commission the work against a named decision, protect it while it is uncomfortable, and judge it by the decisions it changes rather than by whether the future arrives.
What should I ask for when commissioning a speculative design project?
Ask for five things: a named decision the work will inform, a horizon beyond ten years, written permission to break specific assumptions, a receiving function that will own the implications, and an evaluation plan agreed at the start. Avoid making an event such as a film or exhibition the deliverable, and avoid asking which future is most likely.
How do I know whether speculative design work was worth it?
Judge it in the present, not by whether the future came true. Audit the questions your leadership team asks about the future before and after the work, keep a log of the decisions it influenced, and review both at six and twelve months. A handful of named, traceable decisions is a strong result. Satisfaction on the day of the final presentation is a poor measure.
Can a chief executive delegate speculative design to the innovation team?
The making can be delegated; the sponsorship cannot. When leaders hand the work away and appear only for the final presentation, no one with authority names the decision, provocative material gets softened in review, and the output has nowhere to land. Leaders need to own the brief, attend the discussion of implications and take the results to the board themselves.
How can a leadership team learn speculative design?
Individual leaders can start with Speculative Design Basics, the School of Critical Design's self-paced online course of 42 lessons, which includes a chapter on how speculative design creates value for strategy and leadership and one on the ethical case for spending more time in the future. Leadership teams that want to learn together can enquire about bespoke team training, and those with grounding can join the live Speculative Design Masterclass.