Turn complex and uncertain problems into clear choices.
Specialist foresight expertise with practical government experience. Understand what's happening with systems thinking. Explore what's next with futures thinking.
- 10+ years in UK government
- Government Economic Service economist
- MSc Systems Thinking, Distinction
- Fluent in the GO-Science Futures Toolkit
A decision with no clear answer?
It's often hard to pin down the root causes of a complex policy, strategy or delivery problem, and harder still when stakeholders disagree on the diagnosis. It often feels like:
"The problem is hard to define, and not everyone agrees."
"We don't know if today's answers will still work in an uncertain future."
"We always feel like we're playing catch-up."
"We can't keep trying the same solutions. We need a new approach."
Decisions built on historical data or current understanding are fragile against shifting trends: today's fix can soon become tomorrow's failure. New issues, new options and new ways of thinking can feel risky. FAST brings the expertise and experience to make that change with confidence.
We've sat where you sit.
FAST was founded by Adam Martin after a decade in government, where he saw that complex problems needed better tools. The methods are grounded in academic training; the judgement about how to use them comes from practice. Textbooks help, but implementation matters more.
- Adam leads every FAST engagement. He spent over ten years in the civil service as a Government Economic Service economist, leading future-facing and complex work on regulation of emerging technology, primary legislation, analysis for green and white papers, cross-government reform, and live crisis response.
- He holds an MSc in Systems Thinking in the Public Sector and a Level 7 Systems Thinking Practitioner apprenticeship, both completed with Distinction.
- He knows the government context: how a permanent secretary briefing can make or break a project, how to engage ministers directly, and how immovable deadlines mean pragmatism isn't optional.
- Where a project needs more capacity, FAST brings in trusted associates, with Adam remaining accountable for quality and delivery.
What this looks like in practice.
These examples are drawn from Adam's professional experience in government and higher education. Get in touch to hear about more.
Shifting a whole department from reactive response to strategic policy
Midway through the pandemic, a government department's new leadership asked its strategy unit to help the department stop firefighting and start building policy for the future.
As methodological lead, Adam guided 20 strategy, policy and analytical colleagues through horizon scanning, uncertainty mapping, scenario development and capability building, creating resources designed to last beyond the programme.
Result: a department equipped to keep making long-term choices after the engagement ended, not just during it.
Turning disagreement into evidence, not an obstacle
Officials aiming to improve school attendance needed to build agreement about where the barriers were, and they needed broad input.
Adam designed and ran systems mapping workshops, starting with internal colleagues, then presenting their map to senior external stakeholders for review and improvement.
Result: gaps in understanding were filled, not just flagged, and disagreement became useful evidence rather than an awkward problem.
Building a foresight ecosystem for a Russell Group university
A university's senior leadership needed sharper institutional foresight to inform decision-making, policy engagement and risk assurance.
Using free tools and existing subscriptions, Adam built a three-tiered horizon-scanning approach, balancing AI automation with expert judgement, and integrated it into existing processes.
Result: horizon scanning stopped being an information-gathering exercise and started influencing real decisions.
From a single conversation to a full foresight programme.
Every project is shaped around the problem you bring. Whether you need advice, facilitation, training or tangible products, we'll tailor the approach to fit.
Framing Conversation
A no-obligation conversation about which methods could help with the issue you're facing.
Workshop Delivery
Professionally designed and facilitated exercises, whether with colleagues, stakeholders or senior decision-makers.
Futures Advisory
Expert support so your own team can deliver: scoping, guidance on methods, training and feedback on outputs, at a frequency and in a format to suit you.
FAST-Project
When you need both the expertise and the capacity to deliver it, for projects your team can't resource alone.
Scoping, delivery, outcomes. Value at every stage.
We use futures and systems thinking from the very first conversation, making sure we're tackling the right problem before designing the rest of the work.
You bring the problem
Book a slot to define your goal, explore which methods could help, and see whether we're the right fit, even if the answer turns out to be "no."
Book a free framing conversation (opens in a new tab)We develop and deliver
Whether it's a single workshop or a broader foresight programme, we bring the methods, tools and expertise to reach the agreed outcome. Government experience means submission-ready analysis and direct engagement with stakeholders and decision-makers.
You get outcomes, not just outputs
FAST exists to make an impact, not slide packs. Reusable products and capability building keep supporting your decisions long after the project closes.
A toolkit to match the problem.
We work fluently with the GO-Science Futures Toolkit that government teams already know, and go beyond it with systems methods, such as Critical Systems Heuristics, Soft Systems and the Viable System Model, that most futures suppliers don't offer.
Not every project needs every tool. This is the menu we draw from and tailor to your problem, not a checklist every engagement runs through. Select any tool to see what it does.
Clarify Situation
Map the real system, and whose views matter, before jumping to solutions.
Critical Systems Heuristics
Every plan rests on a decision about whose views count, whose needs matter, and where the problem starts and stops, and that judgement is usually made informally by whoever's in the room. CSH makes it explicit, testing who actually drew that boundary, who benefits from where it's been drawn, and whose expertise or interests were left outside it. The result is a defensible account of what the project is really for, and where its blind spots are, before those blind spots become someone else's problem.
Soft Systems
Complex situations have lots of interacting parts, and the people involved often disagree about what's actually going on; treating it as a straightforward puzzle just papers over that disagreement. Soft Systems builds a picture of the situation from each stakeholder's perspective, then compares those pictures against what's actually happening to see where the accounts diverge. The result is a shared, honest picture of the messy situation that everyone recognises, so the plan that follows isn't based on just one person's view of things.
Viable System Model
A plan can be well designed and still fail to reach its goals, because the organisation or team delivering it doesn't have the structures in place to coordinate, adapt, or make decisions fast enough to deal with its changing environment. VSM builds a map of an organisation, or sub-team, and compares it to the functions any viable system needs, from doing the work, to coordinating it, steering it, sensing the wider environment, and setting direction, showing where those functions are missing, in conflict, or poorly connected. The result is a diagnosis of what is missing to enable delivery, and actionable steps to build the operating model that's actually needed.
7 Questions GO-Science Futures Toolkit
Before shaping a response, it helps to know what a range of people, inside and outside the organisation, actually think is at stake for the future, and a single meeting rarely surfaces more than the confident, converged view. 7 Questions uses a set of structured open prompts, whether in one-to-one interviews or a workshop, that push people past describing today's situation and into imagining what a good outcome would look like, what could go wrong, and what would need to happen to get there. The result is a shared, honest account of where the real opportunities and risks are seen to lie, and where a project could usefully help, distilled into a short paper that shapes the next steps.
Sense Change
Turn signals and trends into evidence you can act on.
Horizon Scanning GO-Science Futures Toolkit
Decision-makers often only notice a change once it's already reached the mainstream, by which point there's little room left to shape the response. Horizon scanning systematically gathers weak signals of change from a wide range of sources, research, trade press, international and social media, then filters and clusters them to see which actually matter for your context. The result is an evidence base of emerging trends and early warning signs, weighed by likelihood and impact, so effort goes into the shifts worth taking seriously rather than reacting to news that's already old.
Trend Analysis
Signals of change point to somewhere the world's assumptions might be shifting, but on their own they don't say how far, how fast, or how solid that shift really is. Trend analysis works through those signals to identify the trends they point to, tracking their direction, pace and evidence base, without discounting the weaker or less certain signals, since those are often exactly where the most valuable foresight lies. The result is a set of characterised trends, not just a list of things that happened, showing what's actually changing and how confident we can be, so attention goes to the areas of greatest uncertainty rather than only what's already easy to prove.
Driver Mapping GO-Science Futures Toolkit
Not every trend deserves equal attention, but without a consistent way to compare them, we all tend to fixate on whichever driver is loudest or most familiar and miss the less visible ones, even if they have the greatest potential for impact. Driver mapping charts the drivers you've identified, then plots each against how important it is to the decisions you need to make and how certain its outcome is. The result is a clear view of what to act on now and what to keep watching, based on your needs and situation rather than a generic assessment.
Risk Assessment
External change creates new risk, but naming a risk isn't the same as knowing how big it is, who owns it, or whether it sits within the level of risk the organisation is willing to accept. Following the Orange Book framework, we assess the initial risk each driver poses by its likelihood and impact, identify the protective measures and mitigations that would reduce it, assign clear ownership, and calculate the residual risk left once those controls are in place. The result is a residual risk position for each driver, checked against your risk appetite, so you know which exposures need action now and which already sit within acceptable limits.
Define Uncertainties
Frame the handful of uncertainties that actually matter.
Futures Wheels GO-Science Futures Toolkit
The first, obvious impact of a change is rarely the only one, but most planning stops there and misses the second- and third-order effects that often matter more. Futures wheels put a single change at the centre of the page and work outward in rings, mapping its immediate impacts, then what those impacts in turn cause, and so on, building a picture of cascading consequences rather than a single cause-and-effect line. The result is a map of the knock-on effects, intended and unintended, that a change could set in motion, catching the second-order surprises before they catch you.
Cross-Impact Mapping
Groups of trends and drivers rarely move independently, but assessed one at a time, it's easy to miss where one shift would reinforce, counteract, or rule out another entirely. Cross-impact mapping tests each critical uncertainty against every other in a systematic grid, identifying which combinations couldn't plausibly happen together and which would have the strongest, most interesting mutual effects. The result is a shortlist of the combinations of factors most likely to occur together in reality, helping to build coherent scenarios and strengthen early warnings about how trends might develop together.
Axes of Uncertainty
Calling something 'uncertain' doesn't say much on its own; a single driver can play out in wildly different ways, and it's easy to talk past each other about what the uncertainty actually consists of. Working through each critical uncertainty, we use a mix of evidence and creative thinking to describe the genuine range of ways it could unfold, from one plausible extreme to another, until we're clear on the specific elements that actually matter to the decision. The result is a small number of well-articulated uncertainties, properly unpacked rather than just labelled, ready to frame a set of scenarios worth taking seriously.
Three Horizons GO-Science Futures Toolkit
Conversations about change tend to default to a single line, either defending how things work today or leaping straight to a future vision, with no way to hold both in view at once or talk honestly about the messy transition between them. Three Horizons maps three overlapping patterns together: today's dominant way of doing things and where it's starting to fail, the new patterns already emerging at the edges that could become dominant, and the transition activity connecting the two, some of it propping up the old system, some of it pioneering the new. The result is a shared picture of what's fading, what's emerging, and what to do in the meantime, making a genuine change conversation possible without pretending the present doesn't exist.
Choose Options
Turn insight into a defensible course of action.
Visioning GO-Science Futures Toolkit
Teams often talk as if the future will simply happen to them. Although we can't control the future, we can have real influence over it, but only if we're clear about what we're actually steering toward. Visioning asks people to articulate, in concrete and specific detail, what a genuinely good outcome would look like, deliberately unconstrained by today's roadblocks, then compares that picture against where things stand now. The result is a clearly articulated goal, the essential starting point for designing the system that could actually reach it, rather than drifting toward whatever the current system happens to produce; often the greatest value comes from exposing disagreements about goals early on, before trying to develop a policy, product or plan that can't possibly fulfil everyone's ambitions.
Policy Design
Good analysis doesn't automatically produce a good policy, and plenty of well-evidenced research still lands on a desk as interesting findings rather than something deliverable. Policy design follows the logic of the ROAMEF cycle, establishing the rationale for action and clear objectives, appraising realistic options against cost, deliverability and evidence, and building in from the outset how it will be monitored and evaluated. The result is a practical option, stress-tested against the realities of implementation, with a feedback loop built in from day one so it keeps learning and improving after launch, not a one-off decision handed down and forgotten.
MCDA
Cost-benefit analysis alone forces every factor into monetary terms, and things without an obvious price, reputational risk, strategic fit, public trust, get quietly dropped or hand-waved rather than properly weighed. MCDA sets out the full range of criteria that actually matter, monetary and non-monetary, weights them by relative importance, and scores each option against every one, combining them into a single transparent score rather than an implicit judgement call. The result is a transparent, defensible basis for comparing genuinely different options that shows its working, so the trade-offs are visible and can be challenged, providing a clear record of why one option was chosen over others.
Theory of Change
A plan can list plenty of activities without ever making clear how those activities are actually supposed to lead to the outcome being promised, so nobody notices the gap until delivery stalls. A theory of change maps the logical chain from inputs and activities through to outputs and, ultimately, outcomes, making explicit the assumptions about why each step should lead to the next. The result is a clear, testable logic that shows whether an option could plausibly work before resource is committed, and a map of exactly which assumptions need to hold true as delivery proceeds.
Communicate Insight
Bring people with you, through scenarios, personas and facilitated sessions.
Scenarios GO-Science Futures Toolkit
A single forecast hides uncertainty rather than resolving it, but jumping straight to a handful of ready-made scenarios can just swap one narrow view for four narrow ones. We explore how the trends and forces at play actually interact, using that to challenge assumptions about what's fixed, and stretch thinking across a wider range of possible futures rather than a fixed set. The result is a strategy that's been pressure-tested against genuine uncertainty, not one built for a future that never shows up.
Personas
A scenario or strategy described in the abstract, as trends, drivers and statistics, is hard for people to actually feel the implications of, and abstractions get forgotten once the room moves on. Personas turn a scenario into the lived experience of specific, representative people, working through what that future would actually mean for their daily life, their choices and their needs. The result is a strategy or scenario people can genuinely relate to and stress-test against real human circumstances, surfacing impacts on those affected that a purely analytical discussion would miss.
Speculative Design
A scenario written as a narrative or bullet points stays comfortably abstract, and people can nod along to a description of the future without ever really imagining living in it. Speculative design turns a scenario into a tangible object, an artefact, an image, a mocked-up product or headline, that could plausibly exist in that future, giving people something concrete to react to rather than a paragraph to agree with. The result is sharper, more honest reactions, including objections and excitement that a written scenario alone rarely surfaces, and a memorable way to bring that future into the room.
Futures Literacy Lab
Most futures work produces a plan or a set of scenarios for one project, and once that project ends, the organisation is no better equipped to think about the next uncertain problem that comes along. A futures literacy lab uses people's own images of the future not to produce a fresh set of scenarios, but to surface the assumptions hidden inside that thinking, and works with people to notice and question them directly. The result is not just a plan, but a lasting improvement in how a team anticipates change, a capability that outlasts any single project and carries over to whatever comes next.
Test Implementation
Stress-test the plan before it meets the real world.
Backcasting GO-Science Futures Toolkit
Planning forward from today naturally favours whatever's easiest or most familiar to do next, which tends to produce incremental steps rather than a route that actually arrives at the future you want. Backcasting starts at the preferred future and works backwards, identifying what would have needed to happen just before that, and before that, until the path connects all the way back to today. The result is a route to the goal built from what the destination actually requires, not from the easiest next step, plus clarity on which parts of that route are within your control and which need to be influenced.
SWOT GO-Science Futures Toolkit
A plan can look robust when judged against today's assumptions, but assessed only once, against the status quo, it never reveals how it would actually hold up if the world moved in a different direction. We test the current plan or model against a set of future scenarios, using Strengths and Weaknesses to score how it performs in each one, then use Opportunities and Threats to identify the specific changes that could be made to strengthen it. The result is a plan pressure-tested against a range of futures, not just today's, with a concrete list of adaptations ready to go rather than a vague sense that things could change.
Policy Stress-Testing GO-Science Futures Toolkit
A policy or plan that works well in the scenario it was designed for can still fail badly if a different, equally plausible future arrives instead, and that gap often isn't found until it's too late to fix. Stress testing runs the plan through each scenario and trials how you'd actually respond to the shock it presents, testing whether the plan holds up, needs strengthening now, or would need a different response altogether. The result is a plan strengthened wherever testing has exposed a gap, and a team that's already rehearsed its response, so that if one of these risks does crystallise, they're reacting from familiarity rather than starting cold.
Roadmapping GO-Science Futures Toolkit
Tools like systems maps, scenarios, visioning and stress testing are excellent at describing a moment in time or an acute event, but on their own they say little about the years of incremental change in between, which is often where the real shift actually happens. Road mapping joins those separate time periods together on a single timeline, working out what's actually necessary to move from one to the next, where genuine influence is possible along that path, and which early signals would tell you you've drifted onto a different track. The result is a plan that treats the future as a connected journey rather than a set of disconnected snapshots, checked continuously against reality as it unfolds, so drift gets caught early rather than discovered years later.
Straightforward to buy, ready for your checks.
We know procurement can take longer than the work itself. Here's what your commercial and assurance colleagues will want to know.
Routes to buy
- Direct award for smaller pieces of work, within your organisation's own low-value thresholds. We'll provide a clear written quote and anything your finance team needs.
- Your preferred route: happy to work through your existing arrangements, including as a subcontractor to a larger supplier.
Assurance
- UK limited company and SME, registered in England and Wales (No. 15465506)
- Registered on the Central Digital Platform
- UK GDPR-compliant data handling, with email and working files held in Microsoft 365 in the UK. See our privacy policy.
Costs
The framing conversation is always free. After it, you'll get a fixed written quote scoped to the work, so there are no surprises for your budget holder.
Indicative day rates are available on request: hello@futuresandsystems.com.
Tell us about the problem you're facing.
You bring the decision and the deadline. We bring the tools and techniques.
Together we work out the next steps.