Closing the Assumption Gap
Asking which of your premises just stopped being true
This is a short account of a workshop run in Singapore in April 2026 by 10F contributors Cheryl Chung and Vaughn Tan, where more than ninety government practitioners used the 10F forecasts and elements of the 10F Local Convening Toolkit as a structured way to apply the work to their own sectors. They’re sharing it here as one example of what the forecasts and the toolkit can do together in practice — and what they’d adjust next time.
Earlier this month, futures, foresight, and strategy practitioners from across the Singapore whole-of-government community spent two hours doing something most organisations rarely do: looking directly at what they had taken for granted, and asking whether it still held.
They came from sectors spanning the full range of government functions. In ten groups, they worked through the same structured exercise using the 10F forecasts as a shared analytical frame — ten structural shifts already in motion in geopolitics, technology, migration, money, identity, energy, transparency, democracy, solidarity, and climate. The task: use those forecasts as a lens for examining the assumptions underneath their organisations’ existing approaches. Which ones were the forecasts putting under pressure? Which might no longer hold?
The workshop ran across four blocks. First, an individual vote — before any group discussion — on the forecasts each participant judged most consequential for Singapore as a whole, to surface real differences in judgment before consensus pressure set in. Second, sectoral impact mapping: each group picked the single highest-impact forecast for their own sector and worked out what it breaks, what new norms it creates, and which policies are affected. Third, a futures wheel exercise tracing cascading impacts — within the sector, across sectors, and at the whole-of-government level, with that last category designed to catch consequences that fall between sector mandates. Fourth, a forced-choice start, stop, or change action, one per group, to make prioritisation real.
What participants said they got out of it
The most consistent theme across participant responses was not about any particular forecast. It was about the gap between foresight and action.
One participant named it directly: their takeaway was “to shift my focus from just trying to understand the different trend reports out there to thinking about how to close the translation gap.” Another said the workshop had shown them “the value of forecast exercises and practical ways to use them to inform our policy work more tangibly.” A third put it most concisely: “a great way for us to think deeper about foresights, not just about identifying them but applying them.”
This gap is real and persistent. Organisations that engage seriously with foresight tend to stop at comprehension. They read the reports, understand what is being forecast, circulate the summaries. What they rarely do is draw the line from the forecast to the specific assumption in their own work that it is putting under pressure. The workshop was designed to force that line-drawing.
The second theme was about assumptions themselves — not that they exist, but how invisible they are until something makes them visible. “Make explicit the assumptions made in policy,” one participant wrote, “especially since assumptions are starting to break down.” Another: “To identify just how many assumptions are baked into certain processes and decision-making algorithms.” A third described the discipline as learning “to re-examine assumptions that underpin our approach and thinking, which may no longer be true.”
“May no longer be true” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. The problem is not that organisations make assumptions. Every organisation does. The problem is that assumptions appropriate for one environment persist even when the environment changes so the assumption becomes inappropriate — and this goes unnoticed because no one was watching for the moment the environment changed enough to invalidate them.
Cross-sector exposure was the third thing participants consistently valued. “Getting to know futures-focused colleagues. Hearing different perspectives from colleagues in the same sector” — the value here is not just relationship-building. It is discovering that a forecast you had categorised as relevant to your domain is being read, in a very different way, by someone in a different one. That dissonance is itself diagnostic.
When this kind of workshop is most useful
Three situations make the assumption-interrogation exercise most immediately useful.
The first is a funding phase change: a new source coming in, a renewal to justify, or a reliable source ending. These moments require articulating why your approach is the right one — which means articulating the assumptions underneath it. A forecasts-based workshop done before that articulation surfaces which of those assumptions are currently under pressure, so you are not defending a case built on a premise the funder will immediately question.
The second is an organisational structure phase change: a reorganisation, merger, or new entity. The assumptions that justified the previous structure are suddenly in question. This is the best possible moment to ask which should be carried forward and which left behind — and also the moment when no one asks, because the structural change itself is consuming all available attention.
The third is a policy context phase change: a policy up for review because the environment it was designed for has shifted. The 10F forecasts are useful here because they are concrete about structural shifts, not vague about general trends.
But these three moments are not the whole story. The more durable benefit is the ongoing discipline. Organisations that practise assumption-articulation regularly — outside crisis, outside restructuring, outside funding moments — build institutional muscle memory for the activity. When pressure arrives, they already know how to do the work. They have language for it. The organisations worst-positioned in periods of rapid change are often not the ones with the weakest analysis. They are the ones who have never had occasion to make their assumptions explicit, and so cannot tell which of them have stopped being true.
A note on format
The workshop had real constraints. The group was large, the time short, and the range of organisations in the room — while useful for cross-sector exposure — made sector-specific implications harder to reach. Participants noted the pace: “too rushed,” “not enough time to cross-share,” “more time for reflection would’ve been amazing.”
For a follow-on, a tighter format helps: three hours rather than two, twenty-five to thirty-five participants drawn from a single organisation, five or six groups of five or six, and — most importantly — pre-work requiring all participants to have read the forecasts before arriving. That last point lets the session start at the harder question: not “what does this forecast mean?” but “which of our assumptions does it put most directly under pressure, and what would we do differently if that assumption broke?”
The 10F Local Convening Toolkit is a base, not a recipe. The blocks, timings, group sizes, and sequencing are starting points, built to be adapted to the organisation, the question in front of it, and the time and space available. The April workshop in Singapore was a first run of this practice for this community. The question it leaves open is the one worth carrying forward: not Which forecasts matter for Singapore? but Which things are we currently doing that rest on assumptions one of these forecasts puts under pressure — and do we have a plan for those assumptions breaking down?
If you're running something like this, or thinking about it, we'd like to hear what came up.
Also from 10F
The first episode of 10F One to One is out. Karen K Burns (CEO of Fyma) and Prof. Ariella Helfgott (Director of the SA Futures Agency, University of Adelaide) cover energy systems, climate adaptation, AI infrastructure, and what clear thinking actually requires when the underlying rules are in motion. The format: same questions, no host, no moderation — two contributors working the same problems from different angles.
Listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Episode 2 drops later this week, featuring JD D’Cruz — sustainability strategist leading a multi-stakeholder sustainable agriculture non-profit — and Scott Smith of Changeist, on migrant labour and sovereign corridors, the slow death of multilateralism, performed strategy inside large institutions, and why open-source foresight is neccesary now.
Forecasts in the Wild
Diaspora networks as informal infrastructure. Two signals worth reading together. A Gulf Today report describes the 9-million-strong Indian community in the Gulf as "an ecosystem of mutual aid" during recent regional turbulence — informal networks mobilising faster than formal channels to support stranded and vulnerable workers. Meanwhile, a Policy Options analysis documents how Ethiopian, Somali, and Ghanaian mutual-aid savings practices (equb, hagbad, susu) are flagged by Canadian banks as suspicious, despite functioning as real financial infrastructure.
→ F03 (From Global Solidarity to Localised Solidarity). Proximate and kin-network solidarity is doing essential work during acute disruption — work formal systems aren’t positioned to do and often don’t recognise. The interesting tension: the same networks that stabilise communities in one jurisdiction are criminalised or made illegible in another.
From the Network
Recent work from 10F contributors and the wider network.
Aarathi Krishnan’s team at Raksha Intelligence Futures has just released Geopolitical Fractures Report 2026, which maps four structural breaks — financial clearing, insurance, supply chains, crisis coordination — that the report argues are geopolitics, not background to it. A virtual panel on the report runs 23 April and includes Pedro Conceição (UNDP) and Preet Gill (Lockton).
Ariella Helfgott (with Robyn Green) published “Under the Bonnet” at SA Futures Agency — a structural analysis of Australia’s fuel crisis following the Hormuz closure, working through four scenarios and what to do with the time available.
Igor Schwarzmann’s recent essay, “The Custodian Shift”, asks what humans actually do when AI handles execution, and draws on Mittelstand, shinise, and Aboriginal Australian traditions to reframe the role.
Vaughn Tan's "A better conceptual model for the AI agent" argues the agentic AI field is using the wrong unit of abstraction — agents should be composed of swappable primitives rather than treated as monoliths — with the logic drawn from organisational theory, not AI research.
Lina Srivastava’s latest newsletter from the Center for Transformational Change, “The Mechanics of Liberation”, provides a full recap of her work across the Center, Proximate Press, and 10F around a single idea: liberation as a constellation of practices, not a single act. It’s a resource-rich issue.
Susan Cox-Smith and Scott Smith at Changeist are running Horizon Scanning: Sensing & Sensemaking for a Complex World, a two-day online workshop on 9–10 June, limited to 20 participants. Timings are optimised for North America, but also work for other regions.
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LinkedIn — 10F Consortium — longer-form updates and discussion
Bluesky — @10fconsortium.bsky.social — signal tracking and real-time commentary
Instagram — @10fconsortium — visual summaries and forecast highlights
GitHub — 10F Consortium — full forecast archive with version history and transparency, and new tools as we develop them
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