Roisin Markham

On building futures worth living into, from exactly where we stand

Let me be direct about the moment we are in… Genocide is live-streamed and has been for over two years. Democracies are backsliding in real time. The human rights frameworks we were taught to treat as bedrock – the Geneva Conventions, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the post-war consensus are being openly eroded, with barely a pause in the news cycle. Fast-moving technology is not disrupting industries; it is disrupting attention, trust, and our collective capacity to discern what is real. It’s doing real harm, human designed tech causing harm at scale – switch the algorithms off. A fossil fuel economy clings on, dragging us toward recession, while the biophysical boundaries of the planet assert themselves with increasing bluntness. The crises are not sequential. They are simultaneous, intersecting, and compounding.

This is the polycrisis. Not approaching. Already here.

“If you are even half-paying attention, you can feel the system straining. The question is not whether to act — it is how to build the capacity to act together, in the middle of all this, rather than waiting for it to pass.”

Roisin Markham March 2026

It will not pass. And that is not a counsel of despair. It is the starting point for the only kind of work that is proportionate to this moment.
It’s been challenging to sit with everything that has been happening in our world but what I’ve learned is the tonic is action, agency and doing the work.

The rooms I’ve been in
Over the last three years, I have found myself in rooms where policy, capital, academia and community experience collide. Senior civil servants wrestling with just transition. Industry leaders trying to move beyond CSRD into something structurally real. Community organisers holding grief, anger, and hope in the same breath, and still showing up despite low or no funding.

I am not a neutral observer in those rooms. I am there as a practitioner. I’ve spent over three decades across strategic design, design research, business strategy & PMO, education, facilitation, and stakeholder engagement with one persistent, practical question: what is the next meaningful move from here?

Not the perfect move. Not the move that requires the system to be different than it is. The move that is possible now, with the people in the room, given what they actually have to work with. That’s a big difference as designer we work within constraints, it’s where my best work happens.

Futures literacy as infrastructure.

UNESCO describes futures literacy as the ability to understand the role of the future in what we see and do now. I think of it differently: as a form of care. A disciplined expansion of the imagination so we are not trapped between inevitable collapse and techno-salvation as the only stories on offer.
Neither of those stories is useful, both foreclose action.
The frame I find more honest and more generative is thrutopia. Not utopia, which asks us to imagine a finished destination. Not dystopia, which asks us to brace for the worst. Thrutopia asks: what does the path through crisis look like, for communities and organisations that are committed to sufficiency, agency, and connection? What does it feel like to live it? What becomes possible when we rehearse it?
Futures work, done well, is not abstract scenario play. It is the practical work of expanding what a group of people believe is possible — and then anchoring that expansion in concrete choices about Monday morning.

Islands of cohesion in a sea of chaos

When I enter a room with groups of people who do not agree on the problem, never mind the solution, I am not searching for perfect consensus. Consensus is a destination that can wait. What I am looking for are islands of cohesion — the small, solid patches of shared purpose or shared concern that a group can actually stand on. From there, the work is to build common language across wildly different stakeholders. To make the invisible systems visible enough that people can locate themselves in the picture — their role, their responsibility, their leverage. To design processes that can hold conflict and grief and deep disagreement without losing the thread of shared work.
This is often dismissed as “soft” facilitation. I have stopped arguing with that framing. Relational design is infrastructure. It is the connective tissue that allows a government department, a local community, and an industry partner to move together rather than pull apart. You cannot do the hard structural work without it. It is not the alternative to serious change — it is the precondition for it.

Scaling capacity, not just projects

A workshop is not a strategy. A report is not a plan. One well-facilitated day is not the same as a transformed organisation.
What I build, alongside and beyond the facilitation and learning itself, is capability.
I’ve been working on a Futures literacy lab and programmes that shift how teams think about time, risk, and responsibility. Training and mentoring so leaders can hold this work themselves, rather than outsourcing it every time. Strategic design that takes genuinely ambitious visions, wellbeing economies, just transition, regenerative business models, and turns them into actionable pathways with named steps, real timelines, and honest acknowledgement of what stands in the way.

The throughline is always the same: help people who need to work together actually figure out how. With clarity, with courage, and with deep respect for the shared potential in the room.

If you already knows the crisis is here — and that your current tools and frames are no longer enough — this is the work I do.
I help groups navigate the polycrisis with more honesty, imagination, and coherence than they thought they were capable of. Not by making the complexity disappear, but by making it navigable. Within real constraints: real budgets, real timelines, real politics.

The futures worth living into is not waiting for the storm to pass. It is built in the middle of the rain and wild wind, from exactly where you stand.

If you’re ready to lean in, I would love to be in that room with you. It is the starting point for the only kind of work that is proportionate to this moment.

Work with Roisin

Futures Literacy Lab and programmes, strategic facilitation, capability building tailored to the scale and complexity of where you are now.