RADAR: From Signals to Strategy
A Futures Experience for Educators
The future is coming. We live in unprecedented times with increasingly complex trends driving change, transformation, and even decline in our societies, schools, and our environment.
Yet we can design a better world. Being able to develop strategy for multiple, possible futures is an enormous advantage! And it engages us in a uniquely human superpower: imagination.
Leaders must learn to design the future they want for their organizations. Radar will equip and empower diverse teams of engaged educators and leaders to develop together a “futures literacy” needed to design our preferred futures.
How are you building this muscle as an educational leader and community influencer?
How might we build our capacity for agility, creativity, and agency through futures literacy?
June 5 & 6, 2025
THE Mount Vernon School | Atlanta, Georgia
Detailed schedule, including keynote speakers, coming soon.
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN
Plan to attend Radar, Mount Vernon Ventures’ newest set of experiences, coachings and workshops to build and enhance your futures literacy, strategic positioning, and scenario planning. Over two days, gain new insights and strengths in leading with futures scenarios planning for your own school’s context and preferable futures. This methodology can also complement and enhance strategic planning that is in place and/or being developed!
WHAT YOU WILL DO
Design a prototype for your school’s strategic positioning in an area of your choice including emerging technology, financial sustainability, people management and leadership, and instructional programming. Work collectively to ensure that our unknown futures prove to be preferable ones – more just, equitable, regenerative, and even beautiful futures.
WHO SHOULD ATTEND?
Optimize your experience by bringing your team of leaders, big questioners, dreamers, and change-makers. Come for the networking, as well. Mount Vernon attracts thought and action leaders from around the world.
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
ERIC HUDSON
Facilitator & Strategic Advisor
Eric Hudson is a facilitator and strategic advisor who supports schools in making sense of what’s changing in education. He specializes in learner-centered assessment, human-centered leadership, and strategic program design.
Over the course of his career, Eric has designed and facilitated professional learning and strategic retreats for hundreds of schools and learning organizations. Most recently, he spent a decade at Global Online Academy (GOA), first as an instructional coach and ultimately as Chief Program Officer, working with schools around the world to rethink where, when, and how learning happens.
Prior to GOA, he spent 12 years in the classroom, where he taught English, Spanish, and journalism to middle school, high school, and college students. Working with students is how he developed his passion for designing empowering learning experiences. Eric serves on the board of the Association of Technology Leaders in Independent Schools (ATLIS). His Substack newsletter “Learning on Purpose” has been featured in The Marshall Memo and The Educator’s Notebook.
He has a M.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. from Cornell University. He lives in Cape Cod, MA, USA.
HOMA TAVANGAR
Co-founder, Big Questions Institute & the Oneness Lab
Homa Tavangar is the co-founder of Big Questions Institute and the Oneness Lab.
She brings 30+ years’ experience helping diverse organizations and individuals to build cultural, racial and global competence, strategic governance, and visionary, generative leadership in diverse schools and organizations. She coaches leaders on accountability for equity, leading through crisis, and advises on strategic design and planning. She has co-authored seven books for educators, and is the author of best-selling Growing Up Global: Raising Children to Be At Home in the World (published by Random House) and Global Kids (Barefoot Books). Her most recent publication is 12 Big Questions Schools Must Answer to Create Irresistible Futures with Will Richardson.
A graduate of UCLA and Princeton, Homa was born in Iran, has lived on four continents, speaks four languages, and has heritage in four world religions. She serves on several Boards, including ISS (International Schools Services) and is a judge for the Templeton Prize, considered the “world’s most interesting prize” with a purse calibrated to exceed the Nobel Prize.
She is married and the mother of three adult daughters.
June 5 — Day 1: Discover + Anticipate
8:30 AM - 7:00 PM ETThrough inspiring talks, facilitated workshops, and table group teaming, we get to know the futurists gathered here and orient towards the fundamental skills and practices of futures planning. We explore the core mindsets and skillsets of strategic futures thinking: scanning signals, sense making, leveraging trends and forces, and designing scenarios. We end the day by developing an initial set of futures scenario prototypes — stories and narratives imagining various futures, designed to provoke insight and action in the present. We’ve journeyed from foresight to insight.
A nighttime event of artistic wonder will bring us together again at the conclusion of Day 1.
June 6 — Day 2: Envision + Shape
8:30 AM - 3:00 PM ETWe engage the futures approaches we experienced in Day 1 to dive more specifically into applying our developing practice to opportunities in our organizations. Through colleague interactions and group discussions, we reflect on how to integrate these tools and processes into our school/workplace contexts. We learn tools and processes for testing our scenarios against unexpected changes and disruptions. We move from insight to action and realize the deep purpose of futures thinking is to take new, different, and better actions in the present. As we near the end of Day 2, we design a prototype for your school’s strategic positioning in an area of your choice including emerging technology, financial sustainability, people management and leadership, and instructional programming.
Upon registration, all participants will receive MV Venture’s Spring 2024 Transformation R&D Report, Imagine Then, Act Now: Futures Literacy for Learning Organizations.
This 40+ page report addresses questions including:
- How might we position our organizations strategically to anticipate, envision, discover and shape the future?
- How might we nurture diversity which reveals multiple perspectives and opportunities?
- How might we become learning organizations who can adapt to the changing world with agility, creativity, and agency?
Radar builds on the research from this R&D report and applies methods of futures literacy to design strategic positioning prototypes for participants’ unique school contexts.
