Maree Conway

Thinking Futures and Me

Following the successful launch of my University Futures website in 2006, I established Thinking Futures in 2007 to work with people to develop their capacity for strategic foresight, and to translate that capacity into stronger strategy processes for organisations.

I work with people in education, non-profits,  professional organisations, and government departments at all levels. I have a particular interest in the shifting nature of learning delivery, educational technology and our ability to re-think and re-shape what we understand education to be for the future. The future of university management, including the impact of professional relationships on university work, and the design of service relationships with stakeholders, are also continuing interests for my applied futures research and writing.

One important point: I am not a futurist. I am a strategic foresight practitioner.  This may seem like semantics, but for me it’s an important point. Futurist is a nice label but it brings with it connotations of certainty and predictability that I just don’t like (doesn’t an image of a crystal ball just pop into your mind when you hear ‘futurist’?). The future isn’t certain or predictable so what you need to do with the future is dive in, immerse yourself in it, and understand it better. That’s where I can help.

My purpose is to work with you to help you use your expertise and knowledge to build a strong understanding of the impact of drivers of change on your organisation, and to grasp the range of possible futures open to you as a result. If you ask me to tell you about the future of something, I’ll tell you about the drivers of change affecting that ‘something’, and then work with you to identify implications for your work and to identify what’s possible in the future. From that range of possibilities will emerge the elements of a future you prefer – and you can then take action today to achieve that preferred future.

For me, the work with you part is the most important. If you ask ‘a futurist’ to come and speak to you or at an event, you are taking the easy way out. Now, I’m on the speaking circuit, so this may be doing me out of a job, but that’s okay. The more difficult and time consuming way is to get involved in shaping your future, rather than stand on the sidelines and listen to someone else tell you what that future will be like. It’s very easy to say ‘that’s interesting’ when you hear or read about the future and then go back to the status-quo – because there’s no imperative for you to change how you think. My aim in my futures work is to help you move beyond the status-quo – in terms of both how you think about and approach what’s possible in your organisation’s future.

My Career

Until 2007, I held management positions in universities and TAFE (Technical and Further Education) institutes in Australia for almost 30 years, starting my career as a Graduate Clerk in a faculty at Griffith University in Brisbane. I then worked at La Trobe University, Footscray College of TAFE (as it was then), Chisholm Institute of Technology and then Monash University (following a merger), Swinburne University of Technology and finally Victoria University. Swinburne and Victoria are dual sector universities, with vocational and further education and higher education sectors in the same institution. During that career, I managed large faculties and planning units, and spent a fair bit of time in central governance and student administration units. I designed and led major change processes including organisational restructuring, process and functional reviews, developed and managed planning and quality frameworks, and worked with staff to develop positive and supportive work cultures.

My career has given me significant experience and expertise in not only how educational organisations work, but also in how to develop effective strategy that works for them. Based on many years of immersion in their processes (some of which I helped to design, review and improve), I have a healthy respect for academic work and culture, and a commitment to ensuring participative and focused strategy development and implementation processes.

With Thinking Futures, I’ve been able to translate my understanding of building strategy to suit complex, often anarchic and diverse organisations  to other sectors. I enjoy working with, and bringing practical outcomes to the work of  people at all levels of education, government, professional associations and non-profits.

I loved my career in tertiary education, which explains why I stayed in that sector for almost 30 years. Now, I love working in the futures field, and helping people to ‘get’ the future and why we need to go there today in our strategy work.

You can find out the details about what I’ve done and contributed to the field by checking out my resume, publications and presentations. My speaker’s profile is available on the Future Voices site.

Foresight and Me

I discovered futures work in 1999, when I was lucky enough to be asked by my then Vice-Chancellor to set up an internal planning unit that was to integrate futures approaches into the University’s planning framework. In hindsight, that was a life changing moment for me. Knowing nothing about futures work then, I have completed the Graduate Diploma in Strategic Foresight at Swinburne University of Technology and am contributing to the futures conversation globally, in particular through my involvement in the Shaping Tomorrow Foresight Network and the Association of Professional Futurists. I am about to return to Swinburne to do finish the PhD I started in 2003.

My expertise centres around environmental scanning, strategic thinking, and strategic planning, which I deliberately integrate rather than treat as separate processes to strengthen the quality and depth of strategic foresight in organisations.

When I’m not working, I’m reading or trying to stave off cognitive decline with crosswords and sodoku, and travelling whenever I can with my husband and occasionally my daughter, if she decides she can put up with us.

If you can stand reading other people’s travel journals, you can head over to mine to see where I’ve been. I’m trying to do an online travel writing course at MatadorU as well, in an attempt to improve the readability of my journals.