In these companion Q&As, Wyatt CEO Stacey Thomas, and Stavroula Adameitis and Ariella Helfgott from SA Futures Agency, share their thoughts, hopes and success measures for the futures project currently underway.
The project is about to embark on the second of three scheduled workshops which draw upon the knowledge and experience of 40 subject matter experts across multiple fields to determine four scenarios for poverty in 2166.
Q&A with Stacey Thomas, The Wyatt Trust
Q: Most strategic planning looks 3–5 years ahead. Why 140 years and how did you transition the idea into a project plan? Were there any reservations about investing in a timeline that no one alive today will see the impact /outcomes of?
ST: The idea came about after reflecting on reaching our 140-year anniversary and the assumption that our Founder could not have envisaged the world we live in today. So that made me question how we tackle complex problems that are often intergenerational, if we cannot imagine what the future holds.
I had previously participated in work the SA Futures Agency were leading and thought this is the kind of thinking and approach that could really open us up to futures we on our own can’t imagine. The project plan is a staged approach, we are building on the knowledge gained at each step which aligns with how we currently operate. We don’t profess to know all the answers, but we listen and learn and then adapt as we go.
As opposed to government or the corporate sector, why do you think a project like this is suited to philanthropy?
I think this is the answer to the second part of the question above. We are a philanthropic foundation that was established to be perpetual. So, if we have no end game, election cycle, exit strategy etc. we almost have an obligation to be considering the very long-term horizon.
There is immediate need now and we don’t deny the urgency of many issues. Perhaps urgent needs can run parallel to futures thinking for some foundations, or perhaps some philanthropy carves out its niche. Either way, long-term approaches are incredibly well suited to organisations that have a perpetual mindset and mission. We readily acknowledge that for any perpetual foundation we can only be stewards for a moment in time.
Is there anything you hope this project influences about how foundations or philanthropy operate?
This project won’t predict the future but it will help to highlight sliding door moments, a way for us to be more aware of the decisions we are making or practices we are accepting today and where these will ultimately lead. This work could therefore influence not only the timeline that philanthropy operates to, but the way in which it does. Not all philanthropy needs to be doing the same thing or using the same approach, but this work could very well highlight how different foundations and philanthropy are all influencing the same outcomes.
Values shift significantly over time and most philanthropy from 140 years ago (including Wyatt’s) reflected principles we'd now question. How/is this being factored into the project?
When Dr Wyatt established an institution that included making determinations and value judgements about someone’s ‘good moral character’ among other things it may have been fitting for the time, but we needed to go through a parliamentary process to change it. We have definitely learnt from that and know that anything we do today cannot be a certainty in 140 years. The end result needs flexibility and the ability to adapt to whatever the forces are of the day.
Is there a particular future you hope doesn’t eventuate, and one that you're hopeful for?
It is early days, but at the moment there seems to be strong momentum towards a future where poverty and inequality increase and becomes cemented in a way that cannot be reversed. And this future is created by inaction and continuing some of the practices and mindsets we as a society currently have. So I am hopeful that through action being taken and action yet imagined there is a different future that is achievable and within reach.
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Related reading: Past, present, future: 1886-2166
Artwork courtesy of SA Futures Agency
Q&A with Stavroula Adameitis and Professor Ariella Helfgott, SA Futures Agency
Q: What was your reaction when you first heard about taking such an unusually long time horizon, and why was this a project you wanted to be involved in?
SA & AH: Some of the world’s most credible organisations routinely work at century-scale and beyond. For Wyatt, a perpetual charitable institution with an enduring mission to address poverty and marginalisation, thinking at the 140-year scale is not speculative indulgence: it is a form of responsible stewardship. When an organisation like Wyatt asks “what should we do with the next 140 years", that's not a thought experiment; it's a question that demands a long-term vision, clear strategic principles and immediate priorities for action.
When thinking about the future, many organisations look to five or ten years ahead. A 140-year horizon is a 'unicorn' timeframe we rarely
get asked to explore, so we jumped at the chance to work together with Stacey and the Wyatt team. No workshop participants will be alive in
2166, meaning nobody is defending their patch or their job title. People stop asking “what happens to me” and start asking “what kind of
place is South Australia becoming”, which is when the real work begins.
How does working with a philanthropic organisation change your approach compared to corporate or government futures work?
Philanthropy can pose questions that markets and governments find difficult to ask. There's no short-term election cycle to consider, no quarterly results, no shareholders wanting the future to look conveniently like the present. Wyatt asked the question how might poverty end?, which could plausibly include ways that would make Wyatt itself unnecessary. It's not every day we are invited to work with an organisation that is willing to imagine its own obsolescence!
From our first conversations, Stacey framed the scenarios that would come out of these workshops not as a strategy document for one institution, but as shared infrastructure that other trusts, community organisations and agencies working on poverty and inequality can access and use as a reference point for their own planning. SA Futures Agency came to the table as a project partner, because we believe this work has the potential to be genuinely transformative - not just for Wyatt, but for how South Australia thinks about poverty and long-term stewardship.
Nobody on this project will be alive to check the work against reality. How do you tackle this time horizon
without it becoming speculation or science fiction? How do you define and measure a good outcome for work that can never be fact-checked?
There are no facts about the future, at any time horizon. Facts belong to the past and the present; about the future we only ever hold assumptions. That is as true of a five-year corporate plan as it is of a 140-year scenario set. The difference is that a long horizon makes it impossible to pretend otherwise, which is honest and useful.
So scenarios are not predictions waiting to be marked right or wrong. They are structured, evidence-informed containers for having difficult conversations about the present. The rigour lives in how the assumptions are built and tested: each scenario grows from dynamics already visible in the South Australia of 2026, shaped through structured analysis between workshops and sense-checked with subject matter experts and people with lived experience of poverty. Each comes with early signposts for the next decade: specific, observable things that would tell you which road South Australia is heading down. Those signposts can be checked, and will be.
The measure of success is not accuracy in 2166. It is whether the thinking done and the conversations generated change what Wyatt and the wider sector do next: what they fund, what they build, what they refuse to sleepwalk into. If they do, the scenarios have succeeded, however the year 2166 turns out.
Were there any assumptions your team had going into this project that have already been overturned?
The most important assumptions being overturned aren't ones we specifically brought as a team; they’re the assumptions everyone in the room brought as people. We all walk into a workshop space carrying ideas we've internalised as simply the way the world is: meritocracy chief among them. Stretch the timeline across 140 years and those 'facts of life' reveal themselves as settings, not laws - policy choices and system designs made by people at specific moments in time - which also means they can be remade.
People often assume a frightening scenario is a dramatic and cinematic hellscape along the lines of doomsday collapse. As it turns out, the most unsettling of these four scenarios contains no villain and no catastrophe. It's built entirely out of reasonable people making defensible decisions, year after year. This scenario is chilling precisely because it's ordinary: the present uninterrupted, our unexamined assumptions left to run on autopilot.
Watching a room full of accomplished, well-intentioned people catch their own defaults in real time and question them together is the deep work of this project. The scenarios are the tools for cross-examination: narrative-led shovels and picks, if you will. Each workshop excavates a deeper layer that invites further interrogation.
What do you hope someone reads about this project in 140 years’ time?
We hope they read it in a world where poverty is a historical subject: something studied the way we study smallpox, with mild disbelief that it was ever tolerated. We hope the darker scenarios read as quaint: as roads that were clearly visible from 2026, and clearly not taken.
In 2026, forty-odd people taking part in a workshop and seriously reflecting on the wellbeing of people they will never meet is extraordinary. Understanding that someone 140 years away is a neighbour in time, rather than in space, and that the thoughts we hold and the actions we take in the present shape their futures is humbling.
If a single idea survives from this work, we would want it to be this: no part of a system can flourish inside a failing system. Flourishing is something we can only secure for each other. If a reader in 2166 finds that statement so obvious it’s barely worth acknowledging, then everything went right.
