Imagining the Future: Game Reflections with Southeast Asia’s Emerging Leaders

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to facilitate a session of the Dreams and Disruptions Game here in Manila with a remarkable group of participants from the Temasek Foundation and Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy Futures Thinking Programme. This vibrant cohort, composed of young Southeast Asian changemakers, came together as part of a regional immersion to deepen their foresight practice and reimagine the futures of governance, community well-being, and planetary care.

The workshop was organized by Nava Nath, the visionary founder of ToGather for Good, a mental health and wellness company based in Singapore. I’m deeply grateful to her for weaving together mental wellness, strategic foresight, and cross-cultural dialogue in such a meaningful way.

As expected, this cohort was top-notch—sharp, creative, and unafraid to explore wild possibilities. The game was not only fun, but also deeply revealing. We went far beyond surface-level projections. Participants imagined futures where emotions were commodified, memories deleted, grief criminalized, and even where dinosaurs were resurrected as therapists or planetary protectors. These provocations were not just speculative—they were reflective of deeper concerns, longings, and tensions in our societies today.

Reflecting on the scenarios and the conversations that followed, a richer understanding of foresight itself began to crystallize—one that transcends strategy and extends into ethics, emotion, ecology, and meaning. Foresight, as revealed through this session, is the ethical, emotional, and relational practice of imagining otherwise. It protects memory, confronts erasure, and rehearses sacred futures—across species, systems, and souls.

What foresight is really?

Foresight is first and foremost the ethical imagination of the unthinkable. The emergence of euthanasia lotteries, dinosaur therapists, grief bans, and memory deletion reminds us that foresight is not prediction—it is the ethical exploration of what we refuse to see or what systems are designed to suppress. It dares to imagine: What if the sacred is erased? What if mental health becomes criminalized? What if grief is outlawed? What if healing comes from creatures we thought extinct? These scenarios are not just creative—they are moral questions in disguise, compelling us to wrestle with the uncomfortable and the improbable.

Foresight also reveals itself as a struggle over meaning and memory. In many of the worlds imagined during the game, memory was deleted, hoarded, hacked, or smuggled. This reminds us that foresight is deeply concerned with who controls the stories we tell about tomorrow, and whose memories shape the pathways to get there. In this way, foresight becomes an act of narrative resistance. It seeks not only to forecast what might happen but to protect the fragile, enduring threads of meaning that connect our past, present, and future.

One of the most surprising and beautiful patterns that emerged was the idea that foresight is not just human-centered—it is multispecies and more-than-human. The scenarios went far beyond human governance and survival. Dinosaurs were reborn. Rivers were treated as ritual spaces. Animals were granted rights. These stories expanded foresight beyond anthropocentric boundaries. In its fullest essence, foresight is relational. It listens to the voices across species, timelines, and ecologies. It does not only ask what will happen to us—but also what kind of future we owe to others—not just other people, but the planet, its creatures, and future generations.

Crucially, foresight is also emotional and embodied, not merely cognitive. The scenarios made it clear: this work is not only about thinking ahead—it’s about feeling ahead. We often frame foresight as strategic planning or systems design, but these young thinkers reminded us that it is also about grief, longing, fear, joy, and healing. Foresight happens as much in the body and heart as it does in models and spreadsheets. It invites us to sit with uncertainty not just as analysts, but as whole, feeling beings.

Equally, foresight is sacred work—even if the sacred is contested. From AI prophets to memory-hoarding rebels, many scenarios reflected deep tensions around belief, ritual, and spiritual life. Foresight is sacred not because it deals with religion per se, but because it helps societies ask: What is worth preserving? What is worth becoming? What is too dangerous to ignore? In this way, foresight becomes a kind of moral cartography—drawing maps for meaning and navigating collapse not only through solutions, but through values and care.

Finally, the session affirmed that foresight is not just resistance—it is rehearsal. The participants didn’t simply warn of dystopias; they rehearsed radical hope. Preferred futures such as the Compassionate Post-Anthropocene reminded us that ethical, life-affirming futures are still available to us—but they require imagination, courage, and collective rehearsal. Through the game, participants reclaimed story, revived community, and began reweaving the world.

Imaginary Surprises and Hybrid Futures Worlds

The surprises that emerged from the Dreams and Disruptions Game were not merely speculative plot twists—they were profound narrative interventions that exposed hidden assumptions, repressed fears, and radical reimaginings of care, agency, and belief. One of the most striking was the Jurassic resurgence, where dinosaurs—once symbols of extinction—were reimagined as emotional support beings, eco-guardians, and even spiritual figures. This reversal disrupted the trope of ancient threat and instead introduced a poetic longing for deep-time kinship, as if the wisdom of pre-human life could restore emotional and ecological balance in a broken world. In stark contrast, the institutionalization of systemic euthanasia revealed a chilling logic where mental fragility is no longer treated with compassion, but eliminated for efficiency. Governments using resilience scores and lotteries to erase the vulnerable pointed to a dangerous future where well-being is dictated by productivity metrics, reflecting how easily health systems might criminalize the very conditions they claim to support.

Equally compelling was the normalization of memory deletion—not as punishment, but as a self-imposed coping mechanism in trauma-saturated urban societies. Yet, resistance emerged through memory hoarders, those who preserved dreams, grief, and ancestral truths, insisting that forgetting is not healing, and that memory itself can be a revolutionary act. This resistance deepened in the metaphor of Red Elevator 777, where people deemed emotionally unstable are disappeared by bureaucratic ritual—only to return transformed, disrupting systems that tried to erase them. In another surprising turn, deepfakes became the new gospel. Religion collapsed not from ideological conflict but from synthetic media that blurred reality so thoroughly that AI-generated prophets replaced sacred texts, and belief itself became programmable. The loss of trust in any spiritual narrative triggered a quiet existential crisis—one that demanded new forms of myth-making and symbolic resistance.

Even more intimate was the commodification of grief and love, where emotions like mourning and longing were banned, priced, or engineered. In these scenarios, emotion became contraband, and hackers streamed illegal grief rituals in secret networks. The act of feeling became subversive. This inversion—where being emotionally illegal was how one stayed truly human—served as a radical commentary on affective surveillance and the mechanization of care. In a final twist of poetic defiance, dinosaurs reemerged as insurgents, overthrowing food supply chains, becoming sacred beings, and leading a multispecies rebellion. What began as therapy evolved into revolution, revealing a deep yearning to reconnect with Earth's forgotten lifeworlds and to reclaim a more-than-human sense of justice.

Lastly, several groups envisioned emotional suppression as national policy—where states rewarded emotional obedience and penalized expressions like crying or hugging. In these futures, emotional intelligence was replaced by emotional compliance. Cities that outlawed grief became not utopias of peace, but haunting spaces of psychic absence. Taken together, these surprises unveil a future landscape where the core battlegrounds are not only technological or geopolitical, but emotional, spiritual, and ecological. The scenarios dared to ask: What happens when we lose the right to feel? To grieve? To remember? And in doing so, they reasserted that foresight must also be the act of defending emotional freedom, narrative sovereignty, and multispecies belonging in the face of systems that seek to erase them all.

The Politics of Imagination

The scenarios revealed a striking transformation: institutions that once promised care, order, and service have become sites of emotional suppression, memory erasure, and behavioral optimization. In worlds where bureaucracies delete grief, governments assign resilience scores, and AI determines spiritual legitimacy, foresight becomes a moral lens for asking:

What kind of leadership emerges when empathy is systematized?

When truth is programmable?

When survival is gamified through policy?

Leadership in these imagined futures is at a crossroads. Traditional, technocratic models of governance—rooted in control, prediction, and optimization—were shown to be brittle in the face of complexity, trauma, and ecological grief. The scenarios do not call for stronger bureaucracies; they call for more imaginative, emotionally literate, and relational leadership. Leaders of the future will need to go beyond metrics—they must become stewards of meaning, memory, and multispecies care. The return of dinosaurs as symbols of healing and rebellion suggests that leadership must expand its moral constituency—not just to people, but to planetary beings, nonhuman life, and future generations. Governance, in this light, becomes less about authority and more about facilitating ethical co-existence across difference, time, and species.

Bureaucracy as Ritualized Violence

Bureaucracy, as imagined in the Red Elevator or euthanasia scenarios, becomes ritualized violence—a system that disguises disappearance as order. These futures warn us of the hollowing out of institutional compassion when imagination is absent. Without imaginative foresight, bureaucracies calcify; they can no longer adapt to nonlinear disruption, let alone hold space for collective healing. The future demands imaginative bureaucracy—one capable of acknowledging emotional truths, engaging cultural pluralities, and responding to crises not only with policy, but with story, care, and symbolic depth.

Foresight, then, is not a luxury—it is an antidote to bureaucratic stagnation. It reactivates the social imagination that institutions often suppress in the name of stability. Through wild futures—where grief is illegal, love is streamed underground, and extinct beings return as healers—participants rehearsed what most governments fail to: how to prepare for what we cannot yet name. In this context, wild imagination is not escapism—it is strategy. It is the capacity to stretch the boundaries of the possible so that governance does not become governance of the dead: emotionally dead, spiritually disengaged, ecologically disconnected.

From Commander to Listener

In short, the practice of foresight repositions leadership from commander to listener, from controller to convener. It redefines governance as the ability to hold space for emergence, for grief, for beauty, and for transformation. And it reawakens bureaucracy as a site of ritual repair, not just of procedural enforcement. When linked to imagination, foresight opens portals to futures that are not only efficient or secure—but wild, alive, plural, and worth living in.

To the participants of the Temasek Foundation–LKYSPP Futures Thinking Programme: thank you for bringing your full selves to the work of foresight. Your imagination, your vulnerability, your strategic curiosity—they are not only inspiring, they are necessary. And to those reading: what futures are you refusing to see? What emotions, stories, or truths must be protected? And what disruptions are you willing to welcome—not to destroy—but to rebuild something wiser, wilder, and more just?