Sabrina Sullivan "Unlocking What's Next"

This episode of The New Abnormal podcast features the renowned strategist / futurist / facilitator, Sabrina Sullivan.

In our conversation, she discusses her unconventional journey into foresight, the importance of imagination, and the leadership capabilities needed to thrive in an increasingly uncertain world.

Sabrina traces her career from consulting and sustainability into strategic foresight, describing how graduate work on climate scenarios revealed that organisations often prefer comfortable summaries over genuinely provocative futures. This insight has shaped her career: helping leaders embrace uncertainty rather than avoid it. She discusses her work at Ford Motor Co, where foresight was embedded into strategic planning, innovation, product development and executive decision-making through scenarios, signals, and "orthodoxy flipping" to identify new opportunities.

A major theme is the need to rethink leadership itself. She explains her ‘Leaders for Humanity’ game, which uses playful future scenarios to help leaders explore uncertainty, challenge assumptions and develop imagination rather than search for "correct" answers. The conversation also explores imagination as an increasingly vital capability. Sabrina argues that while organisations recognise its importance, few actively cultivate it. She highlights work with schools, executives and civic leaders to build futures literacy from an early age and create greater agency in shaping the future.

Throughout the discussion, she emphasises that futures thinking is less about predicting tomorrow than developing the mindsets, relationships and confidence needed to navigate uncertainty. Sabrina concludes by encouraging individuals and organisations to become "future shapers" rather than passive "future takers"…