Future of Being Human an Arizona State University initiative

Reperception — and the foresight studio

Last updated 2026-08-13 · build 20260814T0314Z-83bb462d · Markdown version · corpus index

When Sean Leahy designed a graduate course on global energy futures for ASU’s Thunderbird School of Global Management, the syllabus named a goal most courses never state: “The emphasis is on reperception—shifting how leaders see and act in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and emerging transformation in global energy systems” (TGM 598 Global Energy Futures syllabus, Spring 2026). Reperception is what Sean holds futures teaching is for — the outcome that matters is a changed way of seeing, not a delivered body of content — and the course architecture that produces it, on his account, is the studio: a format in which failing is safe by design and students work from inside futures a conventional course would only describe (Sean Leahy, 2026). The claim matters here because teaching is one of the initiative’s primary instruments (Teaching carries the course record), and because reperception is the classroom-scale form of what the whole enterprise treats as impact: changing how people see and navigate a future being rewritten by transformative AI and other transformative technologies.

The argument

The claim arrives as course design. The overview of TGM 598 Global Energy Futures — taught in person at Thunderbird, March–April 2026 — reads: “This course is experiential and anticipatory. Students will engage in collaborative foresight studios, use global trend data, and simulate policy or market responses under alternate future conditions. The emphasis is on reperception—shifting how leaders see and act in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and emerging transformation in global energy systems” (syllabus, Spring 2026). The success condition sits in the perceiver: what the course exists to change is how its students see. The word carries a tradition. Pierre Wack, who built the scenario practice at Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s, held that scenarios earn their keep not by predicting but by changing the mental models of the decision-makers who use them — reperceiving the world — and the term has carried that sense in scenario planning since. Sean’s syllabi do not cite Wack; what they add is a claim about delivery.

That claim is architectural. “This course is designed as an applied strategic foresight studio rather than a traditional content-heavy survey. Evaluation emphasizes students’ ability to make sense of uncertainty, connect systems, and translate futures insight into strategic thinking relevant to global energy leadership” (syllabus, Spring 2026). The structure keeps the promise rather than asserting it: the midterm is a game — “Midterm Futures Lab: Scenario Framing & Uncertainty Mapping (Game)” — debriefed through a “Futures by Chance / Choice Reflection”. Teams build scenario matrices on paired critical uncertainties (“centralized vs. distributed energy systems; cooperative vs. fragmented geopolitics”) and write futures decades out; a dedicated session on energy justice asks “Who wins, who loses, and why”; the capstone requires “a clearly articulated preferred future” and backcasts from it to actions available now. A course aimed at “futures literacy and anticipatory leadership” does not lecture about reperception. It is built so that reperception can happen.

Why a studio? Sean’s answer begins with what each format hands the student (Sean Leahy, 2026). A survey course delivers a field in outline — its methods, its literature, its map of settled ground — and delivers it well. A studio hands over something a survey cannot: standing permission to move, to work from vantage points other than one’s own, including ones no conventional strategy conversation would entertain, and to use them to interrogate possible, probable, and preferable futures. On his account the permission is not a nicety of the format but its engine. Reading about an alternative future leaves the reader’s frame intact; the frame moves when students are expected to operate from inside a future — building it, arguing from it, deciding under its conditions. And permission of that kind functions only where failure is cheap: a studio is deliberately engineered so that a wrong turn or a half-formed idea costs little, socially and academically, freeing strange questions to be asked at all. The design conviction converges, from Sean’s side of the initiative’s foundations, with what Andrew Maynard argues as playgrounds, not playpens — permission-first learning environments — reached here through educational psychology and lab-building rather than through play.

This is also where Causal Layered Analysis — Sohail Inayatullah’s method, the deepest instrument in the course’s kit — does what Sean regards as its real work (Sean Leahy, 2026). CLA reads a future down through four layers, the syllabus’s version running “litany, systemic causes, worldview, and myth–metaphor”: from the headline, to the systems producing it, to the worldview holding them in place, to the myths beneath. A survey can teach the layers as content — this course does, in a full session (“Deep Futures: Causal Layered Analysis of Energy Transitions”). But inside the studio’s permission structure the method turns into an instrument students wield: descend through the layers of an energy future, ask what the world looks like if a deep layer shifts — and discover that some of the assumptions being excavated are their own. The same holds for used futures, Inayatullah’s term for images of the future inherited from elsewhere and held unexamined: the course’s second session asks students to “Recognize ‘used futures’ embedded in energy policy and markets”.

Reperception is the classroom-scale form of the conviction the Foresight Catalyst model codifies — that changing how people think about the future matters more than adding to the pile of unread reports — and the studio trains the capacity his fluid futures thread argues the moment demands: staying curious, adaptive, and imaginative while the field of possibilities itself keeps moving (Sean Leahy, 2026). This is active work, one design generation old, and the syllabi state intent rather than proof: whether a studio reliably produces reperception is exactly the kind of claim the initiative holds as revisable.

Lineage

In his own words

From the TGM 598 Global Energy Futures syllabus (Thunderbird School of Global Management, Spring 2026), course overview:

“This course is experiential and anticipatory. Students will engage in collaborative foresight studios, use global trend data, and simulate policy or market responses under alternate future conditions. The emphasis is on reperception—shifting how leaders see and act in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and emerging transformation in global energy systems.”

From the same syllabus, on how the course is assessed:

“This course is designed as an applied strategic foresight studio rather than a traditional content-heavy survey. Evaluation emphasizes students’ ability to make sense of uncertainty, connect systems, and translate futures insight into strategic thinking relevant to global energy leadership.”

And from the TGM 568 Metaverse & Global Enterprise syllabus (Summer 2026) — the sibling course, where the shift the studio aims at is written into a graded outcome:

“Reflect on the arc of intellectual development across the course — identifying where and how thinking changed, and what questions remain productively open.”

Engagement and reception

The syllabi are the record; independent assessment of what they produce is not yet part of it. As of 2026-08-13 our reception record documents no third-party evaluation of the foresight-studio format or the reperception framing — no published review, no independent account of whether the shift the courses aim at occurs — and we prefer to say so plainly. Classroom work rarely generates that kind of record quickly, and the initiative deliberately does not convert this work into outcome metrics (Philosophy); what is checkable now is the design itself, which is specific, dated, and on paper. Two calibration points from inside the record: the trajectory is visible against Sean’s own baseline — his Fall 2025 Global Digital Transformation course, the most conventional of the four syllabi, keeps a traditional midterm exam, where the 2026-designed courses move to games, portfolios, and pitches — and the format’s limits are not yet documented: no source we hold records where the studio approach has fallen short, and we note that gap rather than fill it.

Where to go deeper

The syllabi (the documentary sources)

Essays and episodes

Method sources (the tools the studio teaches, with their originators)

Related ideas-ring pages

Related corpus pages