Designing and facilitating a full innovation program — from conceptual framework to ceremony design — that asked employees to imagine financial services in 2042.
The Speculative Innovation Challenge was an internal innovation program I designed, built, and facilitated for the R&D function of a major Canadian digital bank. The challenge asked employees to step twenty years into the future — to 2042 — and use speculative design methods to imagine what banking, belonging, and everyday life might look like.
This wasn't a hackathon. It was a structured creative process grounded in strategic foresight: a curated future scenario, custom facilitation tools, a five-component program ecosystem, and a ceremony to celebrate the teams who went deepest.
"The intent of this challenge is to explore and experiment in a speculative but plausible space twenty years from now. The setting for this challenge is not a prediction of the future but an exploration and a provocation of one of many possible futures."
The program was a fully designed ecosystem — not a single workshop but a suite of interdependent materials, each doing specific work in the participant journey.
We adapted the 5Ss as our evaluation framework — giving judges a consistent, defensible way to score work that lives outside conventional innovation metrics. The 5Ss rewarded depth of future-thinking, not polish of presentation.
The Workbook was designed as a guided journey through speculative thinking — structured enough to hold participants, open enough for genuine discovery. Each phase built on the last, moving teams from situating themselves in 2042 to articulating a speculative artifact, to pitching a new idea provoked by what they made.
Every team worked within the same future world: Transformation 2042. I selected and framed this scenario to give participants a shared orientation — a break from the past significant enough to challenge assumptions, but plausible enough to take seriously.
In the year 2042, the dominant values and principles of society have shifted. Financial services are embedded directly into life moments on digital platforms. Transparency, access, and agency are core values. Models for innovation have shifted from single groups to distributed, networked ecosystems. Regulatory models embody civic action and prioritize both governance and innovation. Purpose and profit are heavily balanced.
Participants chose from eight domains of change to build their situations — each one a provocation into what Transformation 2042 made newly possible, necessary, or obsolete:
The scorecard gave judges a clear, equitable structure for evaluating work that is inherently difficult to compare. Teams weren't judged on presentation quality or feasibility — they were judged on how deeply they inhabited the future.
The Speculative Showdown was the program's closing ceremony — a live event attended by 150+ people where teams were recognized for the quality of their speculative thinking. I designed the ceremony format, the award categories, and the badges. Every team received a custom "Best In-World" recognition tied to what their work did exceptionally well.
The ceremony wasn't just a reveal — it was itself a designed artifact. From the physical event banner to the bespoke prizes, every element was crafted to honor the speculative spirit of the work.
Among the prizes awarded at the Showdown was a custom-designed prize card — modeled after a Magic: The Gathering collectible — that granted the winning team a direct mentorship call with a founder. The card itself was a speculative artifact: a playful, collectable object that extended the program's design language into the physical ceremony space. It was one of many details that made the Showdown feel like an event, not just a meeting.
The SIC was one of the most complete design challenges I've worked on — not because of its scale, but because of its depth of integration. Every component had to hold together: the scenario, the tools, the rubric, the ceremony. If any one element broke the spell, the whole experience would collapse.
Adapting the 5Ss framework for this context was the hardest part. We needed judges to be able to evaluate work that deliberately resists conventional innovation metrics — work that's supposed to be strange, unresolved, and future-facing. The rubric had to honor that strangeness while still being fair to teams.
The biggest lesson was about creative permission structures. The best speculative work came from teams who believed they were allowed to be weird. That belief came from the program design itself: from the tone of the workbook, the way the scenario was framed, the "embrace the ridiculous and absurd" tip on page one. Good facilitation is as much about what you give people permission to feel as what you ask them to do.