LongView Consult

29/03/2026

We have been learning foresight for strategic thinking by doing Development Dynamics strategy. In a world of high-stakes disruption and uncertainty, we spend time and resources on the 'what'. While strategic foresight is like looking at a distant, turbulent coastline from a ship, if the crew is fighting, it doesn’t matter how well the captain can see the storm, they are going to sink. A real differentiator in any organizational foresight is therefore the 'who' and the 'how'. Any future-fit organization must be able to understand its own internal weather, to be able to adequately navigate the external storms. That’s why a core module of our program is dedicated to Clarity4D to enable teams to navigate complex, shifting horizons with both high speed and deep self-awareness.

On Friday we wrapped up an incredible session on how the four-color energies act as the compass for strategic survival. For example, a high achieving team heavy with phlegmatics (blue) might stall in analysis paralysis, while the cholerics (red) might burn out everyone. With color energy clarity, the team stops seeing a colleague’s meticulousness as a delay, and starts seeing it as safety net. They stop seeing boldness as recklessness, and starts seeing it as competitive advantage. the trick is to know when to deploy which energies for optimum results. Understanding the collective color mix significantly decreases tension and the team gains the internal alignment, the shared language, and the collective energy required to ace the future. Development Dynamics it was such privilege to take you through this journey! Katindi Sivi

04/02/2026

I (Katindi Sivi) am a serial mentor because I stand on the shoulders of others. In one of those sessions, Bina Maseno (my friend - USIU Alumni, and my student . President Kenya and Strathmore University Young Leaders Programme) called me for a cup of tea to vent. We discussed everything from the scarcity of elected young women to the frustration that political leadership trainings often lack relevance to Kenyan realities, including the fact that those who have gone before her, like myself, had not left behind a sufficient reference point - leaving her to navigate the same grueling learning cycle.

That pricked my conscience. I proposed that we move beyond ‘tea and talk’ and dive into a focused solution. By helping her team conduct research and mentoring her organization to lead data-backed analysis, Badili Africa would be positioned to generate the reference material others so desperately need. In 2024, a partnership between Futures Foundation and Badili Africa was born. This intergenerational collaboration embarked on a project to document young women’s experiences in the 2017 and 2022 political campaigns. We trained 20 fresh graduates in qualitative research methods and they interviewed 122 young women across 30 counties. By documenting the informal, regressive socio-political realities faced by young women aspirants, this work surfaced a flawed assumption in the democratic space: that the lack of women in leadership is merely a ‘skills gap’ or a ‘lack of willingness to engage’.

The data proves otherwise. The real culprit is the informal, murky, and often predatory and patriarchal ecosystem that dictates political outcomes in Kenya. It is a brutal system that leaves candidates jaded at best and permanently scathed at worst - whether by financial drain, psychological trauma, sexual harassment, severed relationships, or systematic character assassination. Despite their courage, the success rate for young women remains devastatingly low: only 9% were elected in 2017, and 5% in 2022.

Our view in this book is that we must shift from fixing women’ to ‘fixing the systems.’ To move the needle toward true representation, we must focus on supporting the candidate’s entire ecosystem, navigating the informal spaces of voter mobilization, gatekeeping, security risks, etc. and demanding institutional responsibility.

This work is vital in two main ways: (i) It serves as a reference point for women to psychologically prepare for the dirty informal tactics prevalent in political campaigns. (ii) It seeks to bridge the gap between the ‘promise of inclusion’ and the ‘realities of exclusion' by shifting the focus from individual readiness to systemic reform. We provide a basis for targeted, long-term interventions in leadership trainings to ‘upgrade the software’ (the individual) as much as include ‘hardware’ interventions (the political system).

Enjoy reading “A Political Ecosystem Designed to Exclude Young Women in Kenya.” I will provide the ebook link shortly

26/02/2025

I was invited to the "The Future of Science Communication" Global Forum, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Alliance for Science as it embarked on a new chapter of advancing science communication and advocacy globally. We revisited the scenarios work we did two years ago with the community.

21/06/2024

Foresight enables us to anticipate possible changes, to act before rather than after the fact. 14 years ago, I had the privilege of mobilizing over 200 young people countrywide to discuss possibilities of the future because of Kenya's and Africa's youth bulge. The subtitle of one of the publications was "Infinite possibilities or definite disaster?" The work projected 4 scenarios:
1. Just like the ocean covers 70% of the earth, the story was about a leadership that recognizes the power of the majority - the bulging youth population, and adequately invests in them through comprehensive social programs. The country would tap into the demographic dividend, to avert a crisis.
2. Like a tsunami whose destructive power is enormous, this was the story of high inequalities, high unemployment levels, and slow implementation of the Constitution due to bad leadership and a global financial crisis. Being the most disenfranchised, young people formed a revolutionary front. By 2031, a state of emergency was declared.
3. Like stagnant water, the pond scenario was the story of inertia where most youth were pacified by the helplessness they felt and their inability to challenge bad governance, human rights abuses, and impunity. They coped through various addictions, with depression and su***de attempts escalating.
4. Like water falling off a ledge into a steep stretch of river bed, young people intensely demanded change such as the provision of jobs, economic growth etc. Once that was achieved, they retreated from political participation and pursued other interests.

This work influenced different policy changes. Unfortunately, most reforms were tokenist in nature and meant to pacify the youth. The refusal to decisively invest in the necessary structural changes and with the required urgency or resolve is now catching up with us. This last week, millennials and Gen Z's have been on the streets protesting against punitive laws proposed through the Finance Bill, 2024. The political response is typical - the use of unnecessary force to quash freedom of expression, and "the ostrich effect" to pretend that this is not happening and wish it will miraculously disappear. Their usual rhetoric is, "Someone is paying them to be on the streets", or "Let them keep going, the steam will die off sooner rather than later" or "The images are photoshopped, it is a narrative that is being created to bring fear" or " No one is protesting except a few hooligans" etc. What these politicians forget is that the youth are many, they are tired and frustrated, they have reached a point where they have nothing to lose because being alive or dead is the same to them. They are relentlessly demanding justice, transparency, and accountability and their momentum is building. Wake up and smell the coffee! It is not Business as Usual!
See the publication - https://lnkd.in/demRHEr8
Check out this video - https://lnkd.in/dy8ZUwTh

20/06/2024

MP's are still in serious ostrich effect bias. Unfortunately, their denial of what is happening will not make things miraculously disappear!... These young people have nothing to lose. remember their numbers!

22/05/2024

I am thrilled to be a co-founding member of the Global South Futures Community (GSFC), a project we've been passionately working on with other esteemed futurists from around the world! Please join us at the Global Event Launch today - see our social media pages for updates!
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25/03/2024

Feature by Strathmore Business School. Thank you

I sat down with Dr. Katindi Sivi, one of Africa’s top seven female futurists, according to the Ross Dawson’s ranking, to demystify strategic foresight. In the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) world we live in today, having a broad understanding of the disruptions in indu...

23/02/2024

User relationships should not qualify to be called mentor relationships.

21/02/2024

Happy to be a discussant at ALC's Research Seminar 17: Story-Ing the Future: An Adventure into Time. In case you are interested, register here: https://shorturl.at/agmsZ

11/01/2024

Grateful for opportunities to learn and to represent