A foresight ritual designed to grow futures culture — one Thursday morning at a time — inside one of Canada's top five banks.
As Practice Lead for Design Strategy & Strategic Foresight, embedded within the Customer Experience Group of a top 5 Canadian bank, I was responsible for more than producing futures work — I was responsible for ensuring that the CX, product, and design teams could actually use it. The question wasn't just "what futures might we face?" It was "how do we build an organization that can hold those futures, think in them, and design toward them?"
The barrier wasn't interest — it was infrastructure. There was no shared language for futures work. No ritual for slowing down and thinking long-range. No community that crossed discipline lines to explore uncertainty together. Coffee & Change was designed to build all three.
Coffee & Change was a bi-weekly live engagement held on Thursday mornings, 9:00–10:00, hosted by the Strategic Foresight team and open to all Communities of Practice across the organization. The format was deliberately low-friction: bring your coffee, explore a plausible future situation, and leave with a wider sense of what the world might hold.
Each session used the proprietary Change Matrix tool — developed under my own IP — to intersect bank-relevant foresight areas of focus with four future archetypes. Participants were invited to explore, respond, and generate ideas from within those futures rather than looking at them from the outside. Over three fiscal years, that practice became a culture.
"Change is certain. The future will be different from the present. And the potential ways it could be different are diverse."
Each session was a small deposit into a long-range account. Across three fiscal years, those deposits accumulated into something measurable.
The Change Matrix was the methodological engine of every Coffee & Change session. Developed under my own IP, the tool intersects bank-relevant foresight areas of focus with four future archetypes drawn from strategic foresight theory — producing a structured space for generating plausible future situations. Each session selected a focus area (a topic relevant to the bank's CX, product, or design teams) and ran it through all four archetypes, generating a diverse set of future scenarios in a single hour. The tool was built on a foundation of eight proprietary deep trends developed the prior year, which grounded the focus areas in robust environmental scanning rather than speculation alone.
Proprietary note: The Change Matrix framework — including the intersection methodology and the 8 deep trends that ground each focus area — is original intellectual property developed by Kate Gaffigan. The four archetypal orientations are adapted from established strategic foresight theory.
The session format was designed for a hybrid organization — part in-room, part remote — and evolved over six seasons while holding the same core methodology. Every Thursday morning followed a similar arc: orient participants to the foresight mindset, introduce the session's focus area, run through the Change Matrix archetypes as a group, and close with participant responses and generated ideas. Sessions were recorded and distributed, allowing the community to grow beyond those who could attend live.
The final session of Coffee & Change explored group banking — the emerging reality of people managing finances not as isolated individuals but as squads, collectives, and community networks. Running the topic through all four archetypes produced four distinct and generative futures.
"In 2034 property co-buying platforms are a mainstream option for squads and have started integrating mortgage lending, insurance, and even wealth management."
The Relay Mortgage — take a leg of a 30-year mortgage with a group of others.
Beyond the core community, Coffee & Change created a structure for cross-functional futures conversations with teams who rarely had the space to think long-range about their domains. Partner episodes brought Sustainability, Equity, Accessibility, and Indigenous partnership teams into the foresight practice — expanding the program's reach and signaling that futures thinking was organizational infrastructure, not a design team specialty.
Coffee & Change was the most sustained piece of organizational design I've done. Building a foresight practice inside a large bank meant working against the grain of institutions that are structured around certainty, compliance, and the present tense. The program succeeded not because it was sophisticated — it succeeded because it was consistent.
Showing up every other Thursday, in the same format, with the same invitation to think differently, for three fiscal years — that's what built the culture. Not a single brilliant session. Not a perfect methodology. Ritual. Repetition. Permission to sit with the uncertain.
The partner episodes were the program's most meaningful moments. When the Truth & Reconciliation team joined us to explore what financial services might look like in a genuinely reconciled future, or when the Accessibility team brought their community into a futures conversation for the first time, those sessions proved that foresight is most powerful when it's most inclusive. The future belongs to everyone the present is failing.