Foundations · Quest Labs

Quest Labs · 2026

Foundations.

Where this comes from, what holds it together, and what makes it distinctly Quest Labs.

Lineage

These are some of the thinkers and frameworks that shaped what Quest Labs builds. Each name listed has a direct, traceable line to a specific Quest Labs tool, 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. Makēda co-authored The Power of Metaphor following Inayatullah & Milojević's CLA Masterclass.

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.

Participatory Action Learning and Action Research

PALAR · Community-based methodology

The research method beneath the practice. PALAR grounds every Quest Labs gathering in the principle that people living a reality are the experts on it. These communities don't passively receive the methodology... they become the knowledge generators and experts who validate the entire process.

The framework

ABCs for Futures Literacies

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 in an attempt to control the unprecedented rather than be the authors of alternative futures who learn to dance with uncertainty.

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 ABCs for 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.

Affective

Emotional intelligence · feeling states · mood · emotional processing

Behavioral

Actions · practices · habits · rituals · repeated behaviors

Cognitive

Thinking · analysis · knowledge · understanding · mental processing

Dialectical

Tensions · contradictions · both/and thinking · holding complexity

Embodied / Experiential

Direct engagement · learning through experience · participatory practice

Fun / Creative

Play · imagination · joy · creativity · experimentation

Generative

Creating · midwiving new possibilities · hospicing toward transformation

This work playfully invites futures researchers and practitioners across fields to liberate themselves from the pressures of the need to "get it right" in service of discovering what is possible. This work invites widened thinking and feeling capacities, because designing futures worth inheriting requires all seven literacies working in tandem:

Affectively (feelings as futures signals), we transmute overwhelm into orientation.
Behaviorally (action as alchemy), we make tiny shifts that have significant impact across widened time horizons.
Cognitively (inquiry as intervention), we widen our thinking capacities about what is possible.
Dialectically (paradox as pedagogy), we sit with pluralistic worldviews and different positionalities without shutting down.
Embodied / Experientially (wisdom in the body), we live into and prototype new futures.
Fun/Creatively (joy as technology), we activate joy and curiosity as liberatory transformative forces.
Generatively (generation as world-weaving), we co-create futures worth inheriting.

Together, these emergent literacies offer us not a conclusion cemented in certainty, but a beginning: an invitation to sense, shape and story a new way of being with uncertainty as we world-weave together.

The practice

Learning by arriving in the present moment.

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.

We learn what we need to learn by doing what needs to be done, together, and paying attention. That is the whole methodology.

The moment you are trying to meet becomes the curriculum. We're here to meet our futures Selves.

What makes it distinctly Quest Labs

1

Built from the braid

Multiple homes. Multiple epistemologies. Dena'ina land in Alaska to Stanford to Berlin: not a straight line, but a braid. My positionality is key to the methodology. Everything Quest Labs builds holds more than one way of knowing at once: not as compromise, as design.
2

The tools are the research are the toys

Every interactive tool, Quest Cards, Black Menagerie, STEEPS Bingo, CLA Mad Libs, is experiential futures methodology made operational. The experience is the gift. The play is the point.
3

Grounded in field-level training

Direct training with Riel Miller (UNESCO Futures Literacy Programme), Sohail Inayatullah & Ivana Milojević (CLA Masterclass), and Jake Dunagan (IFTF). MA candidate in Futures Research at FU Berlin Institut Futur. Twenty years of education practice across classrooms, staff development, and organizational futures work. Moving beyond a self-taught practice... this is a practiced praxis that lives within my bones.
4

A living collective across the globe

The Founding Questors span Germany, South Africa, Canada, and the USA. Multiple disciplines. Already in motion. Sandbox sessions across generations, across nation-state borders, across time and space.

This methodology is living. Come meet it.

The ABCs for Futures Literacies framework, the tools, the lineage: these are practices in motion inside every FLIP cohort and every Sandbox Session.

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