Strategic Foresight and Immersive Displays, with Mark Phillips and Jillian Humphreys

Jillian Humphreys (left), Danny Nsouli (center), Mark Phillips (right)
Graphic: Danny Nsouli

Interviewer: Danny Nsouli

Welcome to the latest installment of the Knowledge-Driven Podcast. In this series, Cyber Security Software Engineer Danny Nsouli interviews technical leaders at MITRE who have made knowledge sharing and collaboration an integral part of their practice.

In this episode of the MITRE Knowledge-Driven Podcast, Mark Phillips and Jillian Humphreys discuss their work in Strategic Foresight, using research and scenarios to provide decision makers insight into the future beyond typical planning cycles. To better illustrate this concept, we dive into the inner workings of their own scenario project. The team created an immersive display related to climate change and water scarcity in 2045 – a sandbox representing the dried Colorado River, to make complex issues tangible and engage sponsors.

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Podcast transcript

Danny (00:12):

Hello, everyone. My name is Danny Nsouli, and welcome to MITRE’s Knowledge-Driven Podcast. Today, I will be discussing Strategic Foresight and immersive displays with Mark Phillips and Jillian Humphreys.

Danny (00:23):

Mark and Jillian, would you like to introduce yourselves and tell the listeners a little bit about your roles and experience at MITRE?

Mark (00:30):

My name is Mark Phillips. I’m in N252, which is the Special Operations Directorate. Been at MITRE now just short of 13 years, and I’ve been working on Strategic Foresight with Jillian now, going on, I guess it’s been three plus years.

Jillian (00:53):

My name is Jillian Humphreys. I am in the Strategy Management Systems Department (SMS), that’s L231, over in ES&T [Enterprise Strategy & Transformation Innovation Center]. I am the Capability Steward for Strategic Foresight in my department. I’ve been working with Mark for about five years now, and I’ve been with MITRE for almost 14, so a long time.

Danny (01:19):

Great. And can you start by describing Strategic Foresight and what it does?

Jillian (01:23):

So, Strategic Foresight is a transdisciplinary approach to strategy or to risk management, depending on your perspective and the lens through which you are viewing the discipline. It’s been around for a while; got its start around 1945. And what it does is it provides decision makers with an analysis of options available to them over a longer time horizon. So, rather than your typical three-to-five-year strategy planning cycle–through which you would use some traditional tools to do some strategic analysis and then find out your path forward–this is dealing with greater uncertainty and, in a dynamic environment, starting at a 10-year mark, and then going further out in time. So, what you’re doing is you’re exploring the options available to you, to look at plausible, probable, and preferred futures, and then make decisions based on the evidence available, which will make your decision-making potentially wiser and also more defendable.

Jillian (02:33):

The definition we like to use comes from Richard Lum, who wrote the book Four Steps to the Future, which is “insight into how and why the future will be different than it is today.”

Jillian (02:44):

Mark, anything you want to add?

Mark (02:47):

Yeah. I think that was a really good summary, I think, other than the fact that it really seems to have captured the attention of some of our customers and has truly helped them.

Jillian (02:59):

And I think one of the key reasons it’s captured so much attention recently has to do with the outcomes and the results of the global pandemic. Folks were really caught off guard by the pandemic writ large. And so, coming out on the other side, we find that a number of our sponsors do not want to feel caught by surprise again. And so, they’re coming to MITRE, looking for support in implementing Strategic Foresight, as an approach to better understand the emerging issues and emerging opportunities that might be presented to them, so that they can be better prepared to pivot and also be better informed in their planning, going forward.

Mark (03:46):

I think that one of the things that’s worth mentioning is that (like many MITRE efforts) this is a data-driven process. Well, it starts with a question, proceeds through a research phase. And then from the research that’s done, we go through figuring out Patterns and Trends and Drivers of Change, and then move through Scenarios (which look at plausible futures), and then we do analysis of those. So, it is data-driven, like every other process that MITRE works on.

Jillian (04:32):

Definitely a data-driven approach, and it is very rigorous. Despite the fact that–on its face–it does seem to appear to be more creative in its approach and in the tools and techniques that we use, this is very much a mashup approach to thinking about Strategy or thinking about Risk. And that is because it is leveraging tools and approaches, not only from Strategy, but also from Human-Centered Design.

Mark (04:58):

And one other thing that we did… The way that Jillian and I actually first met on this is: I had used a technique with Special Operations, which actually comes from a way of developing curriculum for kindergartners and preschoolers, and I had been using it to help Special Operations transform the way they look at themselves. They’ve been fighting the same war for 18 years, and now they were looking at a different kind of war or a different kind of conflict, and so how are they going to change? And so it’s a way of approaching that process and it’s called Backward Design. And Jillian and I met, and we were able to do another mashup, which is to take Backward Design [and] Strategic Foresight, put them together, and seamlessly use the best of both of those, depending on what the customer’s need is.

Danny (06:16):

And how do you feel like that helps your customers?

Jillian (06:18):

So, I’ll touch on that a little bit more. I think one of the key things to Strategic Foresight and Future Thinking in general, which would include the Human-Centered Design and the Backwards Design elements that we’ve already mentioned really does, is it breaks them away from what Admiral Thad Allen called “The Tyranny of the Now”. So, it puts them in this different… It shifts the mindset, if you will, to thinking more broadly, to thinking more flexibly, about what could happen, or exploring other opportunities, without the constraints that occur in the daily operating environment. So, it’s really about shifting that mindset to think more creatively, not only about the problem that you’re facing, but also about the solutions that might present themselves to you, using the tools that come with the approach of Strategic Foresight.

Jillian (07:12):

It’s also collaborative, so it’s not just about getting the folks who have the subject matter expertise in a room to think about, “Oh, we already tried that, that won’t work.” It’s also about getting folks who are left and right of the problem as well, who may provide a fresh perspective because they’re viewing the problem through a very different lens than folks who would have the requisite subject matter expertise that you would normally rely on. So, getting those collaborative approaches and getting those folks who have different lenses, different lived experiences, young/old demographic differences, racial/ethnic differences, in a room to work through a novel problem yields novel solutions. And that’s also why the sponsors like it because it helps them think differently.

Danny (08:01):

Can you talk about any immersive displays you’ve been working on?

Jillian (08:05):

So, immersive displays are one part of the toolkit for Strategic Foresight. It’s not necessarily part and parcel of Strategic Foresight. It comes from a branch of Strategic Foresight called “Speculative Design” or “Experiential Futures.” What we find, in working with some sponsors and with certain groups of folks, is that a Scenario or a narrative about that Future may not be sufficient to convey the right messaging about that Future. You get a sort of a, “Cool story, bro, what do I do with this, now?” And so, if you are trying to take the next step with your sponsor (which is implementation or operationalization of their grand strategy), a story may not be enough to close that gap between where they are today and where they want to be 10, 20, 30 or more years into the future.

Jillian (08:58):

So, when we build these Experiential Futures or do these Experiential Design workshops or events with the sponsor, what we’re doing is creating tangible objects or creating situations in which the sponsor can truly immerse themselves in a specific slice of the Future that’s been presented by a narrative and understand what that Future might be like by interacting with artifacts from that Future. It really helps to close the distance between today, and a probable or a preferable or a plausible Future of tomorrow, on the topic of concern for the sponsor.

Jillian (09:41):

And so we did this recently–two Fridays ago, as a matter of fact–in the MITRE 2 corridor, around Climate Change and water security and water scarcity, where we built a 3-foot by 3-foot sandbox, which looked at what the environment might look like in the Western U.S., if the temperature increased by 2°F, and what that might do to the availability of water in the West and how folks might respond if water was not readily available like it is today.

Climate change immersive display sandbox Figure 1: The Immersive Display

Mark (10:15):

Yeah. I think that a couple of interesting pieces about the sandbox display: Number 1 is that it’s easy to look at the sandbox display and dismiss it as a sandbox, but a lot of research went into it. Again, data-driven. We involved some of the climatologists at University of Maryland. We did our own research, and that research is reflected in the sandbox, the idea being that the Colorado River dries up because of the Climate Change and what results from that. So, that sandbox is a little slice along the Colorado River that has dried up, and so the plants are reflective of the type of plants that would be growing–not along the Colorado River today (because of the Climate Change), but along the Colorado River in 2045 (when this event takes place).

Mark (11:23):

It also has water generators, which exists today, but yeah, you can buy them on Amazon–if you have $6,000, you can buy your own personal one. We put them in so that people understood that there were ways of getting water even when the Colorado River dried up. The advantage of this (at least to me) was to watch people play with the sand and play with the gravel because–as they were doing that–the story became real to them, and they weren’t asking the kind of questions that you would think they would ask about (“Why are you doing this?”), and those types of questions. They were asking questions like” “If water comes down the river in a rainstorm, what do you do about it?” They were actually internalizing it as if they were on the banks of the Colorado River.

Mark (12:26):

And that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to get people to step from where they are, into that situation. And something like Climate Change, something like water scarcity [and] protecting water, those are all very complicated concepts, and the design process–the Immersive Design process, Experiential Design–it’s about making these very complex concepts simple, and letting you step into them and experience them.

Jillian (13:00):

The other thing I’ll say is that, anytime we’re developing a Future, we’re not predicting the Future. That’s not the intent of any of the work that we do. We don’t have a crystal ball. We’re not reading tea leaves. The Futures that we’re developing–while they are based on evidence–we don’t know if these are truly the Futures that will unfold over the specified time horizon.

Jillian (13:28):

But what we can do (and what these Futures do do for our sponsors and for the folks that we develop them for) is to help reduce that surprise. And I’ll use an example. We developed a scenario for a sponsor that looked at what might happen in the event that critical infrastructure in Hawaii went down, and what were some approaches that might be taken to restore that critical infrastructure after it went down. And we actually used some Immersive Design techniques to convey what that might look like in the event: not only the infrastructure went down, but it couldn’t be restored immediately. And that was submitted to our sponsor for review.

Jillian (14:14):

Lo and behold, what happened about three weeks ago?[1] Wildfires hit Maui and the Big Island. Their infrastructure has gone down in a rather dramatic way, and there’s no real good timeline for when that infrastructure will be restored. We didn’t predict that, but understanding the evidence that was available around CI, critical infrastructure, and the impacts on Hawaii from a political, from a social, from an environmental perspective, helped us to create these scenarios, and then also create some artifacts from a Future in which the lights and the heat and the air conditioning and water could not be restored in a timely manner, and how our sponsor might need to address those key issues, not just for Hawaii, but for any place in the US where infrastructure is in critical disrepair.

Jillian (15:18):

So, these are some of the things that we do for our sponsors, to help them think through hard systemic issues that are presenting themselves.

Danny (15:28):

Just to dig into that a little bit deeper, why did you pick the topic of water security, and why was 2045 the year that was targeted to see how this disaster would end up?

Jillian (15:39):

So, I’m going to tackle the second question first. When we used Strategic Foresight, the minimum requirement for a Strategic Foresight project is usually a decade out into the future. The sweet spot for looking at transformational change from a social or a behavioral perspective is usually 30 years out in time, or 20 to 30 years out in time, I’ll say. So, we picked 2045 as the timeframe we were looking at because it fell right into that sweet spot for good quality Strategic Foresight work.

Jillian (16:16):

The reason we picked water scarcity and Climate Change is because it is a “Whole of Nation”, whole of government “wicked problem.” There is no singular solution for resolving it, but it does require multiple perspectives, and it requires a great deal of collaboration from all the government agencies, to come together to resolve.

Danny (16:38):

And you were talking earlier about a story you had written to go along with this display. Can you elaborate more about the significance of the story and why it was written?

Jillian (16:48):

That’s really the basis for Strategic Foresight. It’s really about storytelling. We are storytellers at our core, and stories are really how we convey ideas, novel ideas, around uncertainty and about the Future. That’s how you get people to understand novelty, and that’s how you help reduce anxiety around uncertainty and the Future, is by telling a story. So, we wrote this story to convey an idea around what a Future might look like, in the event that the temperature of the planet has warmed two degrees, resulting in drier and hotter summers, where there’s less available water.

Jillian (17:41):

And so, in the story, we talk about a town, located along the Colorado River, that has effectively experienced [a] zero-day water event, which means that they can no longer draw water from their main source, which in this case is the Colorado River. The river has reached what is called technically “deadpool” status, which is, you cannot draw any potable water into the municipality from your main resource. And they call in a specialist, an outsider, to the town to help them figure out new ways of accessing and obtaining water in this time of great uncertainty and crisis.

Jillian (18:26):

And so, this person (her name is Megan in the story), comes to town and she implements a series of practices which look very strange to these townsfolk who are used to doing things a certain way. And so, she helps them discover new ways of finding water, of conserving water, of using water in more mindful and ecologically friendly ways, so that they are being more mindful of their water usage and also reclamation practices, so that they’re returning whatever water they don’t use back, so there is less water that is being wasted.

Mark (19:09):

I think the other thing is that, if we had presented any of these ideas separately, just as ideas, we would’ve gotten perhaps pushback, perhaps “Yeah. Nice. Not interested”, boredom. But when you create a story, and you create (hopefully) believable characters, and people begin to relate to the plight that they are undergoing, and they begin to understand and relate to the characters, they’re caught up and they forget what actually [are] the issues and they internalize it. Willing suspension of disbelief, they move right into the characters. And that’s what you want, because that allows them, in their minds, to start working through some of these problems and to start engaging.

Mark (20:16):

We see that when we work with our customers, if we give them a plausible story and we say, “Okay, what does this story tell you?” Or “How does this relate to the problems that you have?” Or “What are you seeing as the things facing these particular characters?”, they’re able to come up with lots of ideas, where they wouldn’t have if you said, “Okay, tell us the problems that you are having.” So, it allows for transference a bit. It allows for people to get out of their own headspace. And it allows them to no longer be caught up in the now. And I think that’s a very important feature.

Jillian (21:05):

I think it also allows for better engagement and buy-in, because it is a story. It’s not a white paper. So, because it’s not a white paper, the data is interwoven into the story. So, all of the evidence we’ve gathered as part of our research is interleaved into the story, but it is done in an engaging and immersive and nuanced and compelling way. And so folks get very wrapped up into the story. They start rooting for certain characters, or they’re really interested in what is the outcome of the story.

Jillian (21:41):

In some cases, the outcome is, it’s not tied up in a neat bow because that’s not the way life works. And we tell the sponsor, “This is unresolved because you have to make a decision.” And if they have a vested interest in the characters, then they’re going to make a decision. It’s kind of mean, but also sort of a way of getting them to engage in the process.

Danny (22:07):

And how would something like this specifically help your customers?

Jillian (22:11):

It’s really about the buy-in. It’s about helping to reduce surprise. It’s helping to foster a different way of thinking through a problem. And it’s about the exploration of options that they may not have considered before, to foster (hopefully) improved decision-making. That’s really the secret sauce, if you will, around Strategic Foresight, Backwards Design, Human-Centered Design, all coming together in this lovely soup, if you will, or this, I guess, tossed salad, if you will, of methods that we use with our sponsors to do this work.

Jillian (22:53):

And it really is very helpful to them in thinking differently about the problems they face, especially as the pace of change gets faster, and they are faced with an increasing number of decisions coming at them more quickly with greater disruption. So, it’s about the speed. It’s about: how do you make decisions in the face of increased speed, increased complexity, increasingly with contradictions? How do you do all of that–while also being mindful of the fact that your decision has consequences in and of itself–and you need to be able to think through those consequences as well? So, what are the implications of the decision that you’re making? And how is that going to affect not only your operations, but also your customers that you serve, your partners that you work with, and the environment in which you work in? So Strategic Foresight really helps them think through all of those things.

Mark (23:54):

I think the other thing that it lets them do (at least in my experience) is it lets them really take risks and let go if you do it right. Customers who would normally be by the book, one step, go do the step, then you go do the step, then you go do the [next] step, and there’s no deviation. You can get them in a row and working through a Strategic Foresight process, and you see the creativity come out where you would’ve never believed it before. And I think that’s really what keeps me jazzed about it when we work with customers is that they almost explode with the opportunity to think (to use a cliche) outside the box and outside the present constraints, and start going, “Well, what if we started looking at this?” And I think that’s really the very exciting part of it.

Jillian (25:13):

Yeah, I would totally agree with that. It’s all about cultivating the psychological safety for them to feel free to be creative and take risks, without feeling like they’re going to fail. You are going to be wrong about 95% of the time in this space, because we are working with so much uncertainty. We don’t know what the Future is going to hold. And like I said, we’re not predicting the Future. We’re not creating models around Futures. And so, most of the time, what we’re looking at, likely, the scenarios we put together aren’t going to be right. And so, a lot of this is about giving people the freedom to think through a problem in a very creative way, but also giving them the space to be wrong.

Mark (25:58):

We write hundreds of Scenarios, and a lot of them just don’t ever get used. They’re great, great, great Scenarios, and you would sit there and read them, and you would just go, “Where did these come from?” Yet they’re not applicable to the customer, or they don’t really pass the sniff test, or for some reason, they’re not usable, or more importantly, the data doesn’t support.

Mark (26:36):

I think that’s the other thing is, for every Hawaii that we have, there’s probably 80 or 90 Scenarios that are sitting on the bench. But from each one of them, we learned something. We learned about the uncertainties. We learned what, if you will, indicators of those uncertainties would be coming. We learned about the technologies that we would be needing to consider. We learned about special points in time or special actions which would cause things to change. So, nothing is ever wasted. And we do reuse those Scenarios, but it’s just worth noting that there are hundreds sitting on the shelf.

Jillian (27:31):

And to Mark’s point, we are also constantly monitoring the horizon line to see what Indicators of Change are emerging. And so, it’s not that these Scenarios are lying fallow by any means. It could just be that it wasn’t the right time for them. So as these Indicators start to emerge, it’s a clue to us and to our sponsors that those Indicators are related to Scenarios which may be on a list somewhere, and now it is their time to shine.

Mark (28:01):

Actually, we just did that recently with a deliverable. We pulled the Scenario from the last period of performance, into this period of performance, and used it for one of our projects.

Danny (28:15):

So, on another note, what do you have on the horizon for Strategic Foresight or Immersive Demos?

Jillian (28:21):

So, there’s a lot of work that’s up and coming with a variety of sponsors, both on the civilian side and then also on the Defense side. Whether or not we do anything with Experiential Futures is really dependent on what the sponsor requests. There has been active interest in leveraging more of the Experiential Futures work because it does help, as Mark said, our sponsors [to] understand what a Future might look like, and so it helps them metabolize the information contained in a Scenario better, if that Scenario is linked to tangible objects regarding that Future. So, it just enhances that engagement and decision-making.

Jillian (29:11):

But for right now, I think the next thing coming up really is this option to play a water security game that comes from the Centre for Postnormal Policy and Futures Studies that was showcased at our Experiential Future, but not played. And there has been active interest in playing that game. Also, the Centre is very interested in getting feedback on their game, because it is still being piloted, and so they’d like as much feedback as possible.

Jillian (29:45):

But effectively, it’s a role-based game, where all the decision makers involved are trying to figure out a way of conserving water in a municipality, over a certain amount of time, and also in the face of increasing disruption. So how are you making decisions in the face of disruption? And as these disruptions are coming to you more quickly, what does that decision-making ultimately result in? Are you able to conserve water? Were you able to meet your goals? And so we’re looking to try to field that game, probably in the next month or so. So that’s another example of an experiential or participatory aspect of Strategic Foresight.

Mark (30:34):

I think it’s important for people to realize that Experiential Futures don’t have to be something that looks like the Death Star with blinky lights and all sorts of things. We had a sandbox, and we had a hundred people come through. And I think that everyone left actually understanding much more about what was going on, much more about the story, much more about Climate Change and water security, than they ever thought they would’ve when they said, “Huh, there’s the sandbox there.”

Mark (31:16):

Heck, we built a water absorption device in a shoebox, just to show a sponsor what it would look like. And it’s not based on physics. It’s based on a thing to get the sponsor thinking. It’s a simple idea to get people thinking. And so, I think the message I’m trying to get at here is: Experiential Designs do not need to be extravagant in order to be highly, highly effective. They just need to be well thought out, based on data, and well-presented.

Jillian (32:05):

Strongly agree. I mean, we could have done something with Legos and clay and pipe cleaners, and I think people would have gotten the same joy and same messaging out of it. So, these don’t have to be super high fidelity. They don’t need to use VR goggles or haptics or any fancy things coming out of like the SIMEX or the SEAL Lab[2] to be highly effective and convey a message about needing to take action against a challenge or a problem that multiple organizations are facing, or even a single organization is facing. Because we could have done this for just a single sponsor, but we chose to tackle a big, gnarly, hairy, wicked problem because we wanted to challenge assumptions people have about what water security and scarcity looks like, not only to those who are working on the problem on a regular basis, but what it might look like or how it might apply to other sponsors. And the example I’ll give is, we had somebody who works in FAA stop by and they’re like, “Oh, we just fly planes around. We don’t need to worry about Climate Change and water scarcity.” And Mark said…

Mark (33:16):

I was like, “Yeah, that’s great until the runways crumbled or the air’s too light to actually give you a lift for your blades to take off.” And then they were like, “Oh, yeah. Okay, good point. Would you walk me around the posters?” And that was great, right? I mean, we caught them. They came in because they wanted to play with the sand, no kidding. They wanted to play with the sand. And then we walked them around the posters. They had actually a lot more understanding of what was going on. And we had a board actually where they were able to talk about what they learned and how it would affect their customers and how it would affect other customers. Then I let them play in the sand. So, it was useful from that perspective.

Danny (34:10):

And lastly, are there any resources you’d like to shout out for listeners who’d want to learn more about this topic?

Jillian (34:15):

Yeah. So, I would say, if people are really interested in an introduction to Strategic Foresight, as I said before, Richard Lum’s Four Steps to the Future is a great primer on Strategic Foresight in general. Also, Alida Draudt and Julia Rose West’s What The Foresight is also a great primer. It’s also a workbook, an interactive workbook, so you can step through your own personal Future, while learning about Foresight at the same time. Highly recommend it. It’s very accessible.

Jillian (34:49):

For those who are interested in learning about Speculative Design, I strongly recommend Dunne and Raby’s Speculative Everything. It’s a great book. It’s also a fabulous coffee table book because it’s got a lot of really great pictures in it about Speculative Futures and how designers approach those Futures in different ways, and how to convey what that Future might look like through different mediums. So, highly recommend that book.

Jillian (35:21):

If people are more on the podcast bent, I really like FuturePod. It’s run by Peter Haywood. He’s always interviewing people in the Futures space. There’s also Julian Bleecker’s Near Future Laboratory Podcast with Julian Bleecker. And then, if you’re looking for design things, I always love 99% Invisible and Articles of Interest. Those are the two podcasts I listen to frequently, which focus on design perspectives. They always have great little tidbits that help me think differently about a problem.

Mark (36:00):

So, I only have one that I recommend, but I actually like the books that Jillian recommends. But one that you might not think of is a book by Ralph W. Tyler called The Basic Principles of Curriculum and Instruction. If you read that book, you will understand the Backward Design concept from the lens of an educator, but that is the Bible, essentially, from which the acquisition programs for the NRO Satellite Design Program comes from. It is also the Bible for how DOD Acquisition is done, and it is how our version of Backward Design for Futures work is done. So, it’s worth a read. Even though it’s a 1940s book, it is on Amazon.

Jillian (37:04):

Daniel Pink’s To Sell Is Human. While it is technically a consulting book, he has use cases after each chapter, and several of the use cases in the book have a Futures or Design lean to them. So highly recommended. It’s also just a great foray into consulting books. I am not a huge fan of consulting books in general, but Daniel Pink’s book was a great read.

Jillian (37:29):

And then the last book I’ll recommend is Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable. She’s written several books. She also teaches several classes at the Institute for the Future, which you can also find on Coursera, which MITRE has access to. So, folks who want to take those, those are free through Coursera, Intro to Strategic Foresight courses offered there. And her writing is also wonderful and phenomenal.

Danny (37:56):

All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on to discuss your work. I’d like to give a quick thank you to MITRE and the Knowledge-Driven Enterprise for making this show possible. And again, thank you, Mark and Jillian, for coming on to share. I’m sure our listeners learned a lot.

[1] August 8, 2023.

[2] SIMEX (Simulation Experiment) and SEAL (Simulation, Experimentations and Analytics Lab) are highly interactive MITRE labs for human-in-the-loop technology offering immersive experiences through AR/VR (Augmented/Virtual Reality) and haptics.

Mark Phillips, a former Naval Officer and member of Navy Special Operations, utilized his expertise in Futures Thinking and Design during his time at MITRE to support various teams, including the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Special Operations Forces (SOF), MITRE’s Alt Futures Team, and DHS CISA NRMC (the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, National Risk Management Center). With a background in performing arts, he excelled in crafting narratives and served as a lead Scenario developer. After 20 years of service, Mark recently retired from MITRE, leaving behind a successful legacy and a promising future.

Jillian Humphreys, the Capability Steward for Strategic Foresight in Strategy Management Systems (SMS) at MITRE’s Enterprise Strategy & Transformation Innovation Center, has offered her expertise in Futures Thinking to various organizations including the U.S. Census, the Secretary of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (ONA), MITRE’s Alt Futures Team in the Center for Policy and Strategic Competition (CPSC), and most recently DHS CISA NRMC as a Deputy Project Lead for 2 years. Her passion lies in creating tangible future artifacts to bridge the gap between the present and desired Futures. Jillian graduated with her MS in Strategic Foresight from the University of Houston in December 2023 and is poised for continued success.

Danny Nsouli is an Associate Cyber Security Software Engineer. He has a passion for computer graphics and enjoys learning about front-end solutions for consumer-facing project components such as data visualizations.

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