Quest Labs · 2026
Foundations.
Where this comes from, what holds it together, and what makes it distinctly Quest Labs.
Find a Sandbox Session → Explore FLIP →
01
Lineage

These are some of the thinkers and frameworks that shaped what Quest Labs builds. Each one has a direct line to a specific product, method, or practice.

Futures literacy as human capability
Riel Miller · UNESCO Futures Literacy Programme
Futures literacy as something people develop, not a prediction skill. The Futures Literacy Laboratory as a living research environment. "Rigorous imagining." This thread runs through every sandbox session and every gathering Quest Labs hosts.
Causal Layered Analysis
Sohail Inayatullah · MetafutureSchool / UNESCO Chair
CLA. Futures Triangle. Narrative Foresight. Portal of Possibilities grew out of conversation with this work. CLA MadLibs applies Inayatullah's four layers directly and makes academic rigor playful.
Experiential futures
Jake Dunagan · IFTF
"Better surprised by a simulation than blindsided by reality." The Experiential Futures Ladder and serious games tradition is the spine of every interactive tool Quest Labs makes: Quest Cards, Black Menagerie, STEEPS Bingo.
Postnormal Times
Ziauddin Sardar
Sardar's framework for navigating contradiction, complexity, and chaos is the theoretical heart of the Black Menagerie card game. The five archetypes are postnormal futures made playable.
Sarkar Sandbox
Modified from the Sarkar Game
The sandbox session format at Quest Labs is a direct modification of the Sarkar Game, adapted for futures literacy education, participatory practice, and community inquiry.
02
The framework

Seven Literacies for a World in Transition

Our relationship to our futures has been crafted and commandeered. Decades of deficit-model education trained whole generations to react to crises rather than be the authors of alternative futures and to dance with uncertainty instead of trying to control the unprecedented.

Quest Labs builds the infrastructure for what comes next while crumbling systems meet their maker. Built from scratch, from the ground up, with community wisdom as the foundation.

The ABCDEFG Futures Literacies Framework emerged from 545 contributions by 170 educators across two healing-centered gatherings. It is not a curriculum. It is a living methodology: seven interlocking capacities that, together, form a complete ecology of futures intelligence.

This is shadow work and emergence work. Everything everywhere all at once.

03
The practice

The framework emerged from lived experiences, not just theory behind a desk.

Most learning prepares you for a world that already existed. Participatory Action Learning and Action Research (PALAR) prepares you for what is arriving. You learn by moving, by reflecting, by moving again, with a cohort of people navigating the same uncertainty from different angles. The moment you are trying to meet becomes the curriculum. We learn what we need to learn by doing what needs to be done, together, and paying attention. That is the whole methodology.

04
What makes it distinctly Quest Labs

The methodology is living. Come meet it.

The ABCDEFG framework, the tools, the lineage: these are not artifacts. They are practices in motion inside every FLIP cohort and every Sandbox Session.

The methodology is living. Come meet it.

Find a Sandbox Session → Educator? Flip the Script is where this comes alive in the classroom → Researcher or funder? Let's talk →