Social Work Futurist: Strategic Foresight for the Future of Social Work

Social work is built to respond to what’s happening right now, but what if the profession spent more time preparing for what’s coming next?

That’s the work of a social work futurist: using tools from strategic foresight to scan for early signals of change, map out multiple possible futures, and help practitioners and agencies get ready before disruption arrives instead of after.

In this interview, Jimmy A. Young, PhD, MSW, MPA, a social work professor and founding member of the Social Work Futures Lab, makes the case that foresight belongs in social work education and supervision. He also addresses what AI is likely to automate versus what it can’t touch, and shares seven practical habits any social worker can start building today.

TL;DR

• A social work futurist would say that social work is already a futures-oriented profession. Assessment, intervention, and policy practice all involve anticipating what’s ahead; it just doesn’t usually name that skill explicitly.
• AI won’t replace social workers, but it will automate documentation, intake screening, and other administrative tasks. Relational and ethical judgment become only more valuable.
• Foresight tools like signal scanning and the possible/plausible/preferred futures framework help practitioners and agencies avoid getting blindsided by change.
• Social workers are increasingly moving into non-clinical roles such as tech, policy, in-house foresight practitioner because the profession’s core skills transfer directly.
• Building futures-thinking capacity doesn’t require new training or credentials. See the 7 practical starting points in the interview below.

About the interviewee

Jimmy A. Young, PhD, MSW, MPA Professor of Social Work, California State University San Marcos | Founding member, Social Work Futures Lab

Dr. Young works as a social work futurist, exploring how futures thinking, foresight practice, and emerging technologies can shape the future of social work education, practice, and policy. He serves on the CSWE Futures Task Force and as National Impact Fellow for CSUSM’s chapter of Rep4.

What Is a Social Work Futurist?

Q: How do you describe what you do, and how did you end up at the intersection of social work and futures thinking?

As a social work futurist, I anticipate the future using the tools of strategic foresight and futures thinking. Part of this work involves scanning for signals (examples of how the future is changing) and using those signals to come up with imaginative scenarios of the future. Scenarios become a tool for thinking strategically about whether you want that future to happen or not. Then comes the work of preparing for those futures: strategies, a mission statement, or whatever processes will help people and organizations be ready.

My path here started with a podcast. I’m a social work professor who has written for years about technology and digital literacies in social work education and practice. In 2020, while serving as treasurer for the Human Services Information Technology Association (huSITa), I started interviewing authors who’d published in the Journal of Technology in Human Services. My first interview was with Dr. Laura Nissen, who was just launching the Social Work Health Futures Lab, later rebranded the Social Work Futures Lab, and she invited me to apply. I’m so glad I did. I ended up publishing with colleagues from the lab to help establish futures and foresight in the profession. Looking back, it’s rather fortuitous that I’d always been writing and thinking about the future, even before I had a social work futurist lens for it.

Social Work Is Already Futures-Oriented – We Just Don’t Name It

Q: Your recent piece makes the case that social work is already a futures-oriented profession without always naming it that way. What would change if we named it more explicitly?

Every core social work task is already futures-facing. Assessment is a judgment about what’s likely to happen if nothing changes – within a good assessment, we look backwards in a client’s life to better understand their present, and looking backwards to look forwards is a key foresight technique. Intervention and treatment involve strategic choices toward a preferred future. Even policy practice is an attempt to shape conditions years out. We just don’t usually call any of that “futures work.”

For a social work futurist, naming it explicitly matters because it lets practitioners use structured tools instead of relying on intuition alone. The Futures Triangle, for instance, asks us to weigh the past, the push of the present, and the pull of the future – making explicit where a team is relying too heavily on habit versus intentionally working toward a value-driven future. Naming it also moves foresight out of the “nice to have” bucket and into competency frameworks and supervision structures, where it can actually change behavior. Right now futures and foresight are still emerging in social work, but naming it helps people see it’s not just feel-good thinking – it’s the actual discipline a social work futurist practices.

Predicting the Future vs. Preparing for Multiple Futures

Q: You distinguish between predicting the future and developing the capacity to engage with multiple possible futures. For a practitioner in a community mental health center or child welfare agency, what does that distinction actually look like in practice?

First: A social work futurist does not predict the future. No one can, because that would require knowing what will happen. Futures and foresight instead ask what could happen and whether we’re ready for more than one version of it. We talk about “futures,” plural, precisely to distinguish between a certain future and the many possible ones. The core distinction is between possible futures (anything conceivable), plausible futures (what current trends make reasonably likely), and preferred futures (what aligns with our values) – and recognizing several can be taking shape simultaneously rather than betting everything on one.

In practice, that looks like a child welfare agency that doesn’t just plan around “caseloads will probably stay flat,” but actually anticipates what happens if a new predictive-risk algorithm gets mandated by the state, if funding drops 15%, or if a documentation AI tool cuts intake time in half. None of those are certain. All are plausible. An agency that’s only planned for the most likely scenario can get blindsided by the other two. One with foresight capacity has already asked “what would we do if…” – so the actual decision, when it arrives, is faster and less reactive.

The Weak Signals Most Practitioners Are Missing

Q: You write about “weak signals,”  changes beginning to emerge at the edges of our attention. What weak signals in social work right now do you think most practitioners are missing?

Part of working as a social work futurist means watching for weak signals. Signals, as Marina Gorbis from the Institute for the Future puts it, are examples of the future here in the present. A few I’ve spent time discussing: the quiet spread of AI-based tools changing social work education and practice faster than agencies or institutions are updating policy around them; the early emergence of automated AI therapists, life coaches, or digital case managers, still niche but being piloted in exactly the settings you’d expect; changes to teen social media use, including bans for minors under 16 and platform changes tied to a lawsuit settlement across more than 25 U.S. states – all of which shift how clinicians should be assessing technology’s impact on teens’ lives.

Perhaps the signal most relevant here: what’s the value of our profession, and how do we communicate our importance to the public in the age of AI? None of these are dominant yet – that’s the point of a weak signal. It’s not asking “is this the future,” it’s asking “if this trend continued, what would it mean,” while there’s still time to shape the answer instead of just reacting to it.

Building a Futures-Thinking Culture in Supervision and Strategic Planning

Q: What questions should social work organizations and agencies be asking regularly in supervision, strategic planning, or staff meetings, to build a futures-thinking culture?

A social work futurist would frame supervision around these questions:

1. What from our past is still quietly shaping our decisions today, and is it still serving us? (The Futures Triangle helps here.)
2. What current trends or pressures are pushing us toward change, whether we’ve named them or not? Signal scanning should be a core practice for any leader.
3. What future are we actually trying to move toward, and do today’s choices pull us there? Mission statements help, but only if they’re not merely performative.
4. Who hasn’t been heard from on this decision, and what unintended effects might it have beyond its intent?
5. What are the second- and third-order consequences nobody in the room has mentioned yet, and what do we need to prepare for now?

The main stages of strategic foresight are Prepare, Foresight, Insight, and Action. Adopting all four, with the right tools at each stage, builds more certainty in an uncertain world.

What the AI Conversation Should Have Looked Like

Q: You use AI as a live example, noting the profession is now responding to generative AI after it already arrived. With the benefit of hindsight, what should that earlier conversation have looked like, and who should have been having it?

AI isn’t actually new – it’s been around for decades, with limited access. When ChatGPT launched in 2023, the world of AI was off to the races, but the signals were there for years beforehand. Social work is often behind the tech curve, debating ethics, equity, and power – important conversations, but usually reactive. We should have been asking: what’s the trajectory of predictive analytics and natural language tools, and what does the Code of Ethics require us to think through before adoption rather than after? Instead, most of the field’s technology guidance has historically followed public controversy rather than anticipated it.

We don’t have to be tech insiders to ask good anticipatory questions – who trained the algorithm, who profits from the data, and what happens when the tool is used outside its intended purpose.

That conversation should have included practitioners, academics, and client communities from the start, not just administrators and IT departments after a purchasing decision was already made. Social work had access to the right framework well before generative AI became unavoidable. A social work futurist’s honest answer is we had the tools to be proactive and mostly weren’t – not out of blame, since social workers are under-resourced and overworked, but it’s a gap worth naming if we want a better future.

How A Social Work Futurist Sees AI

Q: Will AI replace social workers? And what is the honest answer about which roles are most vulnerable and which are most protected?

As a social work futurist, my short answer is: no, not wholesale – but it will reshape aspects of every social work job, and pretending otherwise isn’t helpful. The most vulnerable functions are administrative and pattern-based: documentation, routine intake screening, some forms of risk-scoring and triage. Those are already being automated in pilot form, and that trend will accelerate.

But AI can enhance what social work already does. This profession is about relationships – building trust with a client in crisis, reading context an algorithm can’t see, exercising practice wisdom in ambiguous situations, advocacy that requires navigating power and politics on someone’s behalf. AI as a documentation assistant can free up time for that relational work, but it can’t substitute for it. There’s also a growing backlash against AI right now, in 2026 – a signal worth watching too. I wouldn’t forecast a future without AI, but as people continue to crave connection and struggle with real challenges, social workers will always be needed. The open question is whether the profession can anticipate the coming changes and respond in ways that ensure a future full of changemakers.

Getting Social Workers a Seat at the AI Design Table

Q: What role should social workers be playing in designing the AI tools being built for their own field, and what would it take to actually get them a seat at that table?

A social work futurist’s ideal is co-design from the start, not just end users handed a finished product. In a preferred future aligned with the profession’s values, social workers, technologists, and the communities being served are in the room together from the start – not brought in for a feedback survey after the architecture is set.

Getting there takes a few concrete things: agencies and vendors building in formal review structures – a standing committee of administrators, practitioners, and client representatives who vet new technologies before adoption, not after a rollout goes wrong; funders and accreditation bodies making participatory design a condition of investment rather than a nice-to-have; and social workers developing enough technical fluency to ask sharp questions in the room, without needing to become engineers. This is a structural problem, not an individual one, and it needs a structural fix. There are people doing this work already – Rachael Dietkus at the intersection of anti-oppressive, futures-focused, trauma-responsive design; Jonathan Singer through his work as a suicidologist and through Social Work Podcasts; Dr. Laura Nissen, who’s helped bring this way of thinking to the profession. Anyone who wants a seat at that table should start networking, build specific skills, and leverage opportunities as they come up.

Building an Equity Lens Into Foresight Work

Q: You make the point that a future can be technologically sophisticated and still be unjust. How do you build an equity lens into foresight work practically?

William Gibson said it best: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” Some people experience the future now, because of status, wealth, or prestige; others don’t get the same benefits until much later, if at all. That’s the digital divide in a different form, and it’s exactly the kind of inequity social workers strive to end.

Start by asking who a given future serves and who or what it costs, every time. A tool that flags high-risk families faster is technologically impressive and can still reproduce the racial and economic disparities already baked into the data it was trained on. Sophistication and justice are separate variables, and foresight work that only tracks the first is incomplete. Futures and foresight work has historically also been used by major industries and governments to preserve the status quo – that’s not the future I’m interested in. Social work values naturally bring the equity lens: running any anticipated technology or policy through a structural lens, not just a functional one – asking not just “does this work” but “who designed it, whose data trained it, who can afford it, and who gets surveilled versus served by it.”  That question belongs at every stage, not tacked on at the end.

What Becomes Obsolete, and What Becomes More Valuable

Q: Which current social work roles or practices do you think will become obsolete in the next decade, and which will become significantly more valuable?

Likely to shrink: manual documentation and note-writing as a core time expenditure – AI can already record a session, generate a compliant note, and produce follow-up action items for clinician and client. Intake screening and some forms of case monitoring are showing similar efficiency gains.

Likely to grow in value: anything requiring navigating ambiguity and competing values, complex ethical decision-making, crisis and relational work, community organizing, and policy advocacy. New roles could emerge for a social worker as an in-house technology ethicist or foresight practitioner – someone whose job is specifically to vet and shape tools before deployment – as well as roles tied to AI relationships and climate migration. The throughline: parts of the job that are pattern-matching or repeatable get automated, while parts requiring judgment, relationship, and values become more visibly the profession’s core value-add.

Non-Traditional Roles Social Workers Are Moving Into

Q: What non-traditional roles are you seeing licensed social workers move into successfully, and what makes them a strong fit for those pivots?

I’ve seen job descriptions at Google for LCSWs – not to provide counseling, but to work on products, applying a trauma-informed lens to ensure users aren’t harmed by what’s being built. I’ve seen alumni from my own program move into tech companies worldwide to lead teams and build processes rooted in empathy and equity, because those companies have seen how much more effective teams are when people feel valued.

Employers are increasingly looking for candidates who can think critically, pivot quickly, and build relationships – and social work’s core competencies (ethical practice, practice-informed research, policy practice, advancing human rights and justice) set candidates up well for a range of jobs. One article years ago called the MSW “the new MBA,” and while I’m biased, I believe it: the systems thinking, assessment, intervention, and evaluation skills social workers bring translate across tech, healthcare, and beyond. Any employer who needs someone to ask “who does this affect, and how?” should be looking at a social worker. This is exactly the kind of pivot a social work futurist would flag as a signal worth watching.

The Single Most Important Curriculum Addition

Q: For a social work educator or program director reading this: what is the single most important thing they could add to their curriculum right now to prepare students for the futures you see emerging?

Whatever foresight tools a program adopts should align with the course’s existing learning objectives – strategic foresight doesn’t require a new course; it can be woven into law and ethics, research, policy, and administration courses alike.

More than any specific tool, the most important thing is cultivating a practice that embraces uncertainty and thrives in complexity – teaching students to hold multiple possible futures at once instead of training them only to respond to the present as it is. Students who’ve practiced imagining plausible alternatives, including ones they may want to actively prevent, enter practice already equipped to adapt and anticipate. That’s the core of what it means to be a social work futurist: not prediction, but readiness.

“Students who graduate only knowing how to react to current conditions will be perpetually behind.”

7 Practical Starting Points for Building Futures-Thinking Capacity

Q: Could you share 5 or 7 practical starting points for social workers who want to develop their own futures-thinking capacity, whether in direct practice, leadership, or education?

1. Practice signal scanning. Once a week, spend 20 minutes noting one small, easy-to-miss change at the edge of your field – a new tool, a policy pilot, a shift in client needs – and ask, “If this grew, what would it mean for us?”
2. Ask about intention and ripple effects. Before adopting any new technology or practice, ask how it was designed to be used, and brainstorm how it could be used outside that intention.
3. Hold three futures at once. For any major decision, sketch the possible, the plausible, and the preferred version of the outcome – don’t plan around only the most likely one.
4. Stay a student of the tools you use. Assume anything you rely on will change, and build in regular time to relearn it rather than assuming your initial training was enough – especially with technology.
5. Interrogate whose future it is. For any plan or tool, explicitly name who benefits, who’s burdened, and whose voice wasn’t in the room when it was designed.
6. Be temporally flexible. Deliberately connect past, present, and future in team conversations: where did this practice come from, what’s pressuring it now, and where is it pulling us?
7. Practice backcasting. Pick a preferred future for your team or program, then work backward – what would have had to happen a year before, and what does that mean for what you do this week?

The Question Worth Asking

Q: What question do you wish someone would ask you about futures thinking in social work, and what’s your answer?

I wish someone would ask me what futures thinking means to me. I used to think it was just a repackaging of other disciplines – and it sort of is, since strategic foresight is a generalist field, but so is social work, and borrowing from other disciplines is part of what makes us strong. But futures thinking isn’t just about making organizations or society better, though I’d argue it does both when done right.

When we anticipate possible, plausible, and preferred futures, we don’t have to get paralyzed by what could be. We think about the future to take action now, in the present. The future is full of hope, even when the signals around us seem dark. Maree Conway is often credited with asking, “What does the future most need from us?” I’d answer: it needs our hope. It needs our action. It needs us to use our creative imagination to unlock what’s possible – and anything is possible.

“Futures thinking in social work is not about being right or predicting what’s about to happen next. It is about shaping us and where we are headed with intention and meaning. The value isn’t prediction. It’s readiness.”

About Jimmy A. Young, PhD, MSW, MPA

Dr. Young is a Professor of Social Work at California State University San Marcos and a founding member of the Social Work Futures Lab. His work explores how futures thinking, foresight practice, and emerging technologies can shape the future of social work education, practice, and policy. He serves on the CSWE Futures Task Force and as National Impact Fellow for CSUSM’s chapter of Rep4. His research spans digital and new media literacies, virtual and augmented reality in learning, and the ethical use of technology in the human services, and he has presented at numerous national and international conferences.

As a speaker, consultant, and educator, he helps universities, nonprofits, and social work programs integrate strategic foresight tools to anticipate change, design future-ready curricula, and strengthen organizational adaptability.

You can find more of his work at Social Work Futurist – including his “Thoughts from the Future” articles and Signals Library, or via his Google Scholar profile (2,000+ citations, h-index 17) and ORCID (0003-0566-1783).

About the Interviewer

Dorlee Michaeli, MBA, LCSW, is the founder of SocialWork.Career, a professional development platform for social workers running since 2009. She is also a certified EMDR therapist in private practice, specializing in high-achieving professionals navigating imposter syndrome, perfectionism, and financial anxiety. Find her at dorleemichaeli.com.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is a social work futurist?

A social work futurist is a social worker who applies strategic foresight and futures thinking to the profession,  scanning for early signals of change, building scenarios around multiple possible futures, and helping people and organizations prepare for what’s coming rather than just reacting to it.

What is strategic foresight, and how is it different from predicting the future?

Strategic foresight isn’t about predicting a single outcome. No one can do that. It’s a discipline for exploring multiple possible, plausible, and preferred futures, then using that exploration to make better decisions today. The goal is readiness, not prediction.

Will AI replace social workers?

A social work futurist would put it: not wholesale, but it will reshape nearly every social work role. Administrative, pattern-based tasks like documentation and intake screening are the most likely to be automated. Relational work including  building trust, exercising practice wisdom, and advocating for someone, is much harder to replace and likely to become more clearly the profession’s core value.

What’s the difference between possible, plausible, and preferred futures?

Possible futures are anything conceivable. Plausible futures are what current trends make reasonably likely. Preferred futures are the ones that align with our values. Foresight work holds all three at once rather than planning around a single expected outcome.

What are “weak signals” in futures thinking?

Weak signals are early, easy-to-miss indicators that something is beginning to change – a new tool, a small policy pilot, a shift in client behavior. They’re not yet dominant trends; the goal is to notice them early enough to help shape what they become.

What non-clinical career paths are social workers moving into?

Social workers are increasingly moving into roles like technology ethics, product design and trust-and-safety work at tech companies, foresight and strategy roles inside agencies, and policy or advocacy positions – often because the profession’s core competencies (systems thinking, ethical judgment, relationship-building) translate directly.

How can a social worker start building futures-thinking skills without more schooling?

Start small: spend 20 minutes a week noticing one emerging change in your field, sketch out more than one possible outcome before a major decision, and ask who benefits and who’s left out of any new tool or policy before adopting it. See the full 7-step list above for more.

Should social work programs teach strategic foresight?

Advocates argue foresight doesn’t need its own course; it can be woven into existing law and ethics, policy, and research courses. The bigger shift is cultural: teaching students to hold multiple possible futures at once, rather than only training them to respond to current conditions.