Escaping "Neutral" Data:
Embedding Futures Thinking into Strategy

00:00Thank you for joining me today for another episode of Data Stakes, where I have conversations with professionals who work directly in the institutional research or effectiveness field or are data adjacent in their role in higher education. Today's conversation will focus on strategies that contribute to organizational ability to vision cast and frame the future as an essential part of strategic planning. My guest today is Viviana Onda. Dr. Unda is the head of Institutional Research and Planning, Strategic Planning, Accreditation and Continuous Improvement at El Camino College, a community college district serving approximately 31,000 students in Torrance, California. Dr. Unda recently earned the Art and the Science of Futures Thinking Foundations and Frameworks from the University of Cambridge Professional and Continuing Education in November of 2025. So Viviana, thank you for joining me today to talk about something I recently began embedding into strategic planning at my former institution. That is future thinking. When I saw your continuing education achievement on LinkedIn during the fall, I decided I had to invite you to guest on the podcast. I think the importance of embedding future thinking into strategic planning and other operational tasks can't be overstated. So according to the Institute for the Future, future readiness means being able to anticipate change, envision possibilities, and take actions to shape a better future. Can you tell our listeners why you became interested in future thinking and what made you enroll in the Art and the Science of Futures Thinking coursework?

01:41Thank you Debbie for having me here. I'm happy to share some of the learnings in that course. So what happened was through a staff member. One of my staff members was taking a foresight essentials course in the Institute for the Future. And she started talking about this and how futures thinking could be incorporated into strategic planning and into the implementation of strategic plans, which is where we are right now. in my institution and she started talking about it and I got very interested. She got a fellowship for that course actually because it's very expensive to get one of those courses in the future. So she applied for a fellowship, she got the fellowship. So said, okay, I'll try to find something that is a little less expensive and I ran into the Continuing Education Department or unit of the University of Cambridge and I took this course and it was fascinating.

02:19Yes, it is.

02:36It was really fascinating. So that's kind of the story how we got here and how we started talking and exploring the idea of futures thinking within strategic planning.

02:45Love how you both chose different organizations to do the learning with because this way, it's the power of two. You're both taking the same course, now you're going to be able to use the best that you got from each course. So we both know how important buy-in is when I'm starting something new on campus. What strategies do you use to bring others on board? When you're introducing something that maybe some of your colleagues have never done, which is think really robustly about the future. And what tips do you have to share when those campus partners aren't as comfortable with the concept as you are?

03:28Yeah, so I think we're still actually working out that and how we incorporate this new tool that, and actually futures thinking is not very new as a tool. I think that it has come back because of where we are, because of the conditions and the environment and the setting where we are right now. So I think there's a couple of things that we do whenever we want to incorporate something that is new.

03:39Correct.

03:54Thing is trying to incorporate, in this case, futures thinking into the current processes or the current practices that the college has. If you try to get in something and you do like a one-time all thing and it's just for the record I did it but it's not really part of the culture of the fabric of the college, it won't really work. So that's I think the first thing that we try. We try to incorporate things into what's going on in the college and in that way you have more likeability of working. The other thing that we do, sometimes we've tried, is get early adopters. Sometimes you have people that are really enthusiastic about it, that really like this new idea. And if these are either formal or informal leaders, you have a better probability that people are going to follow because there are early adopters that are using the tool or are using some practices that are related to the tool. The other thing that we do, at least in the community college where I work, I know that generally in California community colleges, governance is a very important piece. Participatory governance is a very important piece. So if you happen to be the chair of a community or you happen to be a member of a community, a kind of institution, that's a perfect place because then you start exploring this idea, you start discussing the idea, and then if this is understood as an idea from the community and not an idea from one particular person, if it's coming from the body or a body of the college, then you have more likeability as well that people take it seriously and start trying it out. So I think that those are kind of the strategies or tips that we use anytime that we're

05:28Yes.

05:43Trying to get something new in.

05:46Well, you know, when we talked about doing the podcast together, I shared with you that we used Dr. Richard Lums' Four Steps to the Future. And so I had a couple of focus groups along with administrative counsel, and I really liked how he began with the past. because run at the moment, the future looks pretty scary. It's not solid. Higher education is changing at a faster rate than anybody could ever have anticipated. But what happened was when we did the first step, which he recommends that you look back 50 years, all three of those groups realized we've faced scary times before. We faced lots of large, abrupt changes before. And we came out different, and I believe we came out better and stronger. And I really think confronting the scary of the future along with a past that probably felt scary also really helped to bring some buy-in and prepared everyone for thinking about what kind of a future we wanted to see. So let's return back to the coursework you completed. What types of activities were recommended as critical to advancing future thinking?

06:59Yeah, so I think the first, before going into the activities, I would like to highlight some of the principles that we started learning about. I would say that these principles were like the foundation of everything that came after. we talked a lot about strategic foresight and how strategic foresight is different from forecasting, which is what generally we do. We talked a lot about systems thinking and how thinking about systems and clusters of practices and procedures, when you think about them in an interrelational way, it's very different than if you're thinking in silos. That's a very important piece when you're trying to put in practice futures thinking. We talked about scenario planning, we talked about horizon scanning, too. We talked about biases. Bias is also very, very important because cognitive biases are always there and if you're trying to actually explore the future, you need to kind of try to get, more aware of those biases because those biases don't allow you to kind of imagine and that's the other principle that we talked about a lot, imagination. That's why it's called the art and science. That's why the name of the course is the art and science because it is science but it's also a little bit of art there, how you break those kind of inner

08:10Yes.

08:24Limits or borders that we have and you start thinking about things more creatively, right? So the role of imagination was also super important. So once we kind of dealt with those principles and we got a lot of examples, the course was full of examples and videos and besides all the more theoretical part that the professors were sharing with us through video, we got into the activity. So let me share because in this infographic that I created we can talk, we can kind of move along that and talk a little bit more about the activities.

08:57Sounds perfect.

08:58Are you able to see the infographic Debbie? Perfect. That's good. as you see, activities are in like the third column of the infographic. me put it a little... Is it too small for you there?

09:00It is great. I can see it. No, that's fine.

09:17Okay. because then you can see it all. So you see, this is kind of the way in which we, or I was learning about futures thinking is in phases. So there are certain things that we do first, which is the framing. So here's like, you're trying to define what's your key question. What is it that you want to know? What is it that you want to explore? And that is in futures thinking, that's called framing. And when you are in that phase, discovering the scope of these foresight, work that you're going to start to do and you clarify what's your research question, let me put it that way, the exploration question. There are two main activities there. So you have mind mapping and you have domain mapping and we did both of them. So the mind mapping is just a visual brainstorming tool and you use this to just connect ideas, connect issues around the centrifugal. So it's like a very big brainstorm, first brainstorm that you do, right? Then you do something that is pretty similar, is domain mapping. And here you start identifying a little bit more than ideas, things like key actors and systems and factors that are shaping this topic that you want to study. that's kind of the first phase. After that, it comes the exploring phase. And in the exploring phase, what you're doing is you're identifying trends. is the, think, I love this piece because you're identifying trends and signals of change and uncertainties, but things that are emerging. So many times, and that's the, I think the advantage of future thinking, many times things that are going to be really big in the future are really emergent at some point. They're very, very small. And this approach allows you to kind of look at those. So you do this, you have there are three activities, horizon scanning, you have the futures radar, and you have access of uncertainty, particularly So we didn't do everything here. We talked about horizon scanning and we did some horizon scanning. And this is the one where I was telling you about emerging trends and weak signals and drivers of change and those things. I think we did it in kind of the course went through different domains like healthcare and education and technology. So you could do it kind of you could put in practice this in multiple domains. and then we had some specific homeworks then I kind of went to my own topics because you have your own topics within higher education. And then we get to the realizing stage and here basically is trying to understand how all these forces and ideas and trends are shaping the present and how those things that you're finding, right, very small ones, very subtle ones, can influence the future. And this is the futures triangle and then we can stop at some other point because I did do a very specific exercise with the futures triangle where you're basically looking at how the push of the present and the pull of the future and the weight of history interact among each other and allow you to see how would a future on a particular topic look like. That's basically what the futures triangle does. And then you get to Almost the last phase the anticipating phase. This is also very fun because here's like you are gonna just create Future scenarios, right? You're gonna develop these future scenarios You're gonna explore all the implications in future scenarios and then is where you get the scenario planning You get the causal layered analysis. I love that causal layer analysis Imagine like a nice birth basically and you analyze it in four levels You have the surface trends then you have the systemic causes the worldviews and the underlying narratives. You get a lot into myth, into ideologies in the sense of, not in the sense of political ideologies, but in the sense of deeper ideologies. I really like the causal layer analysis. But I would say the most typical one, or the one that people know the most is scenario planning. And you work with these two axes of uncertainty, and you look at scenario planning from four different perspectives. And finally you get into shaping, is, here's when I think you use it for strategic planning, right? You translate all these insights and all these ideas that you've been trying to work on and you've been trying to explore and you've been trying to foresight. You translate that into insights and into strategies that will allow you to be one, more nimble for the future. Second, you're being able to foresight things that your competitors are not being able to foresight and that makes you be a better competitor and it makes you have an advantage compared to your competitors or to your institutions. And the activities there are two. We work basically in back casting, not in alignment, but in back casting, which is you start from the preferred future and you work backwards and you identify what are the steps that you would need in order to get to that So that also was a very, that was a beautiful exercise that we did. We created like four different higher education scenarios. It was my homework, so I did that. And then how would we get there? just, you know, that's why it's also that kind of like an art, because you're really putting a lot of creativity about, how will we get there? So you feel that your cognition is opening up.

15:12Right. One of the things that we talked about was I stressed that you had to be willing to put almost anything on the table. That what I had hoped... was that once we got to scenario planning on my campus is that we wouldn't limit ourselves because well budget is lean right now or this is the type of student or well we don't have this service or we have that debt but that we would say these are this is the this is the future that we want now what are we willing to do to achieve it What are the things that restrain us and we can't do? mean, there are some realities. And then how are we framing it up with what we're doing right now? Because that was something that I liked about Richard Lumb's book was that he states several times that we are shaping the future every day. We shaped the future with today's actions. And he also emphasizes that future thinking isn't predicting the future. So many of our colleagues are trying to navigate the future of data work right now, particularly due to the impact of artificial intelligence. So you actually posted some information about the futures triangle on LinkedIn. And that graphic included direct application of futures thinking to data work. Can you tell us more about the four pillars in that graphic? They are, they were, I love these, the push of the present, the pull of the future, the weight of history, and how present, future, and past interact. Can you talk a bit more about that?

17:00Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And let me pull it up so that I think that again, it's nice to see it because it really helps. Yeah, it really helps.

17:05It's, yes, it's great to see it.

17:10Can you see you, Debbie? Okay.

17:11Great. Yes, perfect.

17:13So this was my attempt, again, this was an exercise that I had to provide right for the course. And I thought about data visualization because I've been working on data visualization at this point like around 10 years or so. And I thought that these, I didn't find anything like this. I really wanted to do something new and kind of push my own cognition about, okay, what are the new things that we could think about? when it comes to data visualization. And as we know, the futures triangle is a tool that has been developed by the future Sohail Inayatullah, that's kind of in the middle of the infographic that you can see who was the author, right? And basically we are trying to unpack the complexities of the futures through these kind of three pillars, right? Where you were seeing the push of the present, the pull of the future, and the weight of history. And I'm not going to go through all those bullet points and just give a couple of examples so that your listeners can understand what we mean by that. So the push of the present is basically what are the stories or the ideas that today are shaping these fields, right? In this case, this topic data misorganization. So one of the things that I've noticed and that's the first one that you're going to see there is that the way in which we tell data stories today, is pretty broad. Generally speaking, in the past what we did is we told our stories through charts and that was it, right? Like we would do data through charts, bar charts, pie charts, all kinds of different charts. And then now you can see things that are much more creative, Like scrolling, scrolling telling or these hand drawn visuals. There's so much about how much more you can do about data stories and how data stories...

18:44Yeah.

19:11Have been expanding. So that's an element that you could take into the future and see how would that evolve, right? Then if you think about the pool of the future, it's very, to me that one is very interesting because this relates to something that I did very long ago in my doctorate in applied linguistics, which is this idea of embodied data. And here is basically thinking that in the future, you're going to be able to have data experiences that are moved off the screen. And you're going to be able to touch them like in virtual reality, and you're going to be able to manipulate the data. And when you're able to do that, the richness and the depth of the data analysis, it's much more. And the insights that you get is just much broader, right? That's an example for the pull of And then for the weight of history, here we could talk about many, but I would say the one that I like or that I prefer talking about when I talk about this is the neutrality of visuals. And colleagues of ours that still think that visuals are neutral. Visuals are never neutral.

20:27Yes, no, right.

20:30Individuals are never purely objective. They're always either they're ignoring a data point or they're highlighting a data point or they're not telling us who is missing or they're telling us why something matters more than something else. So that's kind of the weight of history because that is an idea that hinders kind of moving forward, right? That it's a barrier for moving forward. And then you have this fourth kind of column that you have in the infographic where you're trying to make relationships into all these ideas between the push of the present, the pull of the future, and the weight of history. the one that I would like just to go briefly into is this idea of dashboards and how dashboards sometimes they hide root causes and they don't really show what's going on and why things are happening. They show you what is happening with a, again, with a particular view, but not necessarily why things are happening. So then it comes this idea of the, we start doing more embodied data, that definitely will bring more insights into those root causes. So that's one way of kind of, know, making interact all these ideas. Yeah, that's that I'll stop there because there's much more that we can do but this is the one that you saw and and and you like yes

22:03Yes, yes, yes, I loved this because I could see that how you were trying to stretch what the rest of us could really understand about what future data work, you know, could be specifically for visualization. So I wanted to pause here for a moment because if you're listening, you're probably wondering what graphics are we talking about? But I wanted to let you know that the podcast will also be available on YouTube. and on YouTube you will be able to see all of the visualizations and I'm hoping to persuade Viviana to provide me with PDFs and those will be shared also if we can have those. So let's talk a little bit about resources because you are right. Enrolling in these courses, it's expensive. You know I'm really thankful I've had such a

22:41Yeah, of course.

22:54A great experience with the future thinking activities that the AIR Board of Directors has been doing and those would never have been available to me, you know, through, you know, my, the budget that I had at my community college. So let's talk about some resources that our listeners might. use to help them develop foresight and future thinking. So let me start off with my short list and then you have a different list. So you've already mentioned the Institute for the Future. So the Institute for the Future is great and I want our listeners to realize it's not limited to courses. are a lot of materials on their website. So the Institute for the Future. Then we have foresight works at ASAE, the American Society of Association Executives. So this is essentially the Association for Associations. And we began some of our future thinking, the AIR board, with the 50 Drivers of Change. And what I really loved about this is it eliminates the need to try to recreate the wheel. Why struggle with something if you have a whole team of experts who have already done it for you, right? And what I think, what I was not expecting, I knew not all of the drivers would be specifically data related, but I was amazed at how many of the items in the drivers pertained to data work. pertain to the future of our profession, our ability to hire young professionals, and how the work might change. And then Jane McGonigal's book, Imaginable, How to Create a Helpful Future, and her videos where she talks about the transformative power of game mechanics for societal change. Then of course, Richard Lum's book, Steps to the Future, his feed on LinkedIn. and then Ethan Molyk's book, Co-Intelligence. If you want to get your campus talking about AI in a way where it pertains to everyone's area, that is really, I think, a book that will push you. beyond maybe the fears that you have about AI in the classroom or AI in cybersecurity and begin to really think conceptually about AI and where its place is in work. Everyone will like knowing that Ethan Molyk does not see human impact or the humanities go away, but actually sees the need will become even stronger. So how about your list?

25:34Okay, let's look at my list and I want to mention a couple of more things that I didn't include in that list that came up I think before. The first one is a podcast that is called the Think Forward Show, Embedding Futures Thinking into Your Company DNA, a Practical Guide. Anytime I would go into this podcast while I was walking the dog, so it's really easy to find, it's like a 20 to 40 minute thing and I would always get a nugget of something. What I like about this podcast is that it's super practical. There are things that you can put immediately into practice. I am a practitioner rather than an academic person or kind of a theoretical person, so I love that about that podcast. It's like, okay, we have all this theory, but okay, but how do I do this? Right? How do I do it? So these these podcasts, I thought it was very, very nice. So I've listened to quite a bit of those. There's this other post

26:21Can I do?

26:30Podcast that is called the new abnormal by C pilot the genesis. I haven't looked into it very, very in detail, but that's another focus that is related to futures thinking. The other one that I definitely have to promote because I'm part of the California Community Colleges is the future summit. So we have a futures summit that it's in September of this year of 2026. And it's not the first version. I know that they've done it either two or three maybe two or three times before. I mean, have all the, we can then give the link right to, so that people can go. But if you just type future summit California community colleges, you're gonna get there. And this one, I'm just, give me one second here because I lost it for one moment. So I can. I can tell you a little bit about what is it that it comes, what are they gonna be talking about? Oh, this is the 2025. You see, like this is definitely the version. So that the... the theme this year. It's September the 9th and 10th, 2026 in Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. So that's kind of where it is. And their theme this time is human skills in an autonomous world. So just that we are saying, I think it's going to be focused on that. is the role or how do we fit into this world that is full of AI and machines? and we are interacting with these things, right? So I'm just going through the agenda here and see if there's anything else that I can... Yeah, it's not only for educators, that's something else that maybe we can say. It's AI fellows, it's industry innovators. It is from the California Community Colleges, but it's not only for... for educators. really comes spatial AI, agentic AI, emerging technologies, reshaping the learning, learning work, opportunities. So it is very broad. So I definitely recommend that one. Then we have, there's a couple of tool kits that I also found very interesting and theyre from the UK. I'm gonna pull up only, Thank So this one

28:49Going to say there's one I'm familiar with. Do you want to just continue down through your list? And then what we can do is provide the links when we share out the podcast. Okay.

29:00So this one, the toolkit from, and I can see it here, so that's what I was trying to look at it. The toolkit from, this is from the UK. Office of Science. it reads the futures toolkit, a set of tools to help you develop policies and strategies that are robust in the face of an uncertain future. And so you have an intro about what is futures thinking, the futures and policy, including diverse perspectives. And then you have another section that is called the tools. And you have what is changing and you have the three horizons and the horizon scanning. Then you have. So what for or futures and you have visioning the futures wheels. That's another tool. And then you have a now what do we do section where you do all the bad casting and the road mapping. So I thought again, it was very practical and kind of easy to follow. That's why I liked that one. And the last tool that I would highlight is the Erucos Horizon Report from 2025. I'm sure that you are familiar with that one.

30:04Yes.

30:06I'm particularly thinking about the data and analytics edition because there's multiple EDUCOS Horizon reports. think that brings, it kind of talks about how education is being impacted by all these very big global trends, a lot of dramatic global trends in terms of climate change, in terms of wars, in terms of the role of democracy.

30:15Right.

30:33And how that is going to impact basically data analytics and data and analytics in particular. And finally the OECD Trends Shaping Education, that's another one that I thought was interesting, more general but still it's a very good one to see what's going on with education in terms of trends. So for all the emerging signals and that it'll give you a lot of information about that whenever youre in that stage of futures.

31:04Okay, well. This has been really interesting. I told you that at the end, if you wanted, you could share anything about a chapter. You are contributing to Dr. Christina Power's book, Priority Partners, Turning Vendor Spending into Mission Strength. So let's pivot a little bit from future thinking to Viviana Unda, the author, the chapter contributor. want to tell her listeners about a little bit about the book and what you're contributing to it.

31:35Yes, thank you so much Debbie for allowing me to share this. We're super excited. We already finished writing. We're done with the writing. Now it's in editing stage. So Christina is working through all those drafts that she receives. It's a thick book. It has multiple chapters. I just contributed to one. what Christina asked me to write about was how can we use evidence in general, data, evidence very broad.

31:45Yeah.

32:03And planning to establish a better relationships with vendors or with third parties. All higher education institutions work with third parties because not everything can be done at home. And the experience from all these authors that we were working on is we didn't have very good experiences with vendors. So she thought this is a really good space to kind of share what the experiences have been and propose some better ways to relate to those vendors and to get what we need to get. So one of the first ideas that I proposed was, let's look at data so that we can determine some specific questions that we want to answer by going into a vendor and asking a vendor to do some things. it's not, I need a platform for the students to report their homework. It's, what is it that our students need what are our students aspirations and then from there we kind of determine why is it that we need somebody to help us in a particular area to impact a particular need or to fulfill a particular aspiration for our students. So that was one piece, right? How do you determine what exactly you want from a vendor start informed by the data. That's the first thing that you need to do. The second piece was related to to indicators and how we start working with vendors based on some indicators that allow us to know, to determine whether they are impacting our students or not, whether the tools that they're producing impact our students or not. in that area, there's a lot of work to do. I did a very broad review of contracts in higher education, was very difficult to something where you got indicators related to students, right? Not technology indicators, but indicators related to students. So we were proposing a little bit about that and what kind of indicators you could use. We looked a lot at outcomes-based education contracts, but higher education is very complex, so just kind of implementing outcomes-based education contract is a

34:06Right.

34:25It could be a little difficult. But definitely we talk about outcome aware contracting so that you have the sense of, okay, these are the outcomes, let's see how do we go back and we do what we need to do so that we get into completing those outcomes. it was, it's very, at least my chapter, very practical, very much directed to practitioners. It's not a theoretical, you have all kinds of tips and tools that you can use. super happy with what is there. We'll see what the editor does. we are ready to, it's going to come in the summer of this year. So anybody that is interested in exploring more and learning more about how to have great relationships with vendors and really take advantage of those dollars that we're spending in vendors that many times are expensive. So let's just try to do the best work that we can when we're having an interaction, having interactions with them. So that's what it is. Thanks

35:21Well, I know now moving into a role with a vendor, it is definitely a book that I've already decided I need to get a copy. And I have a future podcast guest who also wrote a chapter. So our listeners will be hearing about this book again, because that's what my conversation with him is going to be about, which is managing those third party relationships. And yeah. So, and you know, pretty much that's kind of that great relationship that I had as a customer with Datatelligent is what caused me to, when I decided to move away from higher ed, to move into that vendor role. and why my focus here at Data Telegen is on customer growth. And not really customer growth where we're talking about how much money you're investing in the tools that we build, but what type of growth is your organization able to see? Are you seeing an increased ability to reach students who are at risk, students who are vulnerable? Are you able to provide them with more intrusive advising and help with retention rates and things like that. yes, managing those relationships. So thank you. It was great having you as a guest. I'm really, really happy that I saw that first graphic, that graphic on your LinkedIn feed that just drew me in to think a little more deeply about data visualizations. I haven't been building them as long as you had, but yes, the thoughts that you had about where the future is going almost makes it seem like you think we're going to be able to step inside our visualizations someday. great. And to our listeners, I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. know not everybody gets all giggly about strategic planning or futures thinking like we have been for the last 30 minutes, but I hope you enjoyed our time today. So thank you, Viviana.

37:16Thank you so much, Debbie.

37:17Data Stakes is sponsored by the Data Analytics Alliance for Higher Education. You can visit our website to learn more about our upcoming quarterly meeting. Our next meeting will feature Dr. Brent Drake from the John Gardner Institute for the first year experience. And he is going to talk about something that's on everyone's mind. And you know I'm talking about AI and data analytics. If you have any questions about today's conversation, don't hesitate to reach out to at Dave Phelps at Datatelligent AI. Thanks.