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Charlie Warwick

Global Foresight, Arup University

Charlie Warwick is the Associate Director for Global Foresight at Arup University.13 She is an experienced strategic foresight and futures practitioner who focuses on building resilience and long-term thinking into planning across various sectors.3

Professional Background

Prior to joining Arup, Charlie held several notable positions:

  1. Head of Futures Advice at the Government Office for Science, where she worked across departments on projects to develop policies and strategies more resilient to future changes and shocks.1

  2. Leader of the Futures practice in a private sector consultancy, helping clients develop long-term ambitions and strategies.1

  3. EMEA head of futures practice at Kantar, where she designed strategic approaches to help clients shape innovation.6

Achievements and Expertise

Charlie Warwick has gained recognition for her work in foresight and futures:

  • She is the 2019 Next Generation Foresight Practitioner Award Winner for Europe, specifically for her work on UK high street regeneration.1
  • As part of her role at Arup, she works with stakeholders across industries to imagine and shape more sustainable futures.4

Education and Affiliations

  • Charlie holds a BA from the University of Oxford.1
  • She is a Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy.3
  • Charlie serves on the Advisory Council for the Centre for Long-Term Resilience (CLTR).24

Charlie Warwick joined Arup as Associate Director for Foresight in March 2023, further strengthening the company's Foresight leadership team.5

Highlights

Jun 24 · linkedin

Finally wrapping my head around the ideas emerging in Trento earlier this month, where Roberto Poli and team assembled quite the Futures Studies crowd.

Headline: addressing non-linear and emergent issues (climate crisis, energy needs, ageing societies, intergenerational justice, geopolitical tensions…) requires unavailable knowledge. The fields humans lean on and look to in the face of complex challenge are primarily past-oriented. Acceptance that we need to explicitly work with futures is step one; we need to generate the possibilities that can be studied and shared, else our range of options will always be limited (btw, who “we” are also needs to be explicitly addressed along the way!).

Then “science itself needs a deep reorganisation” to reverse the decline in new ideas and scientific productivity (relative to investment) that we’ve seen for decades now.

Other nuggets of note (all motivating and super challenging to my own #Foresight practice in Arup University):

🦄 Have we lost the ability to train generalists? Those who are able to reconstruct synthetic models of the world whilst specialists deconstruct and essentialise? This used to be the role of the philosopher…

😖 Worry is the “western tendency” and it underscores all Futures literature and practice… studying futures to increase confidence and certainty for some can lead to defuturing for most Geci Karuri-Sebina

🥐 We are consuming futures (from limited sources) more than we are generating them and this is problematic

🌌 Can we be more creative with our use of time? Could heritage futures (imaginaries of people through history) help us to understand and manage the relationships between present and past societies? Could we become better ancestors as a result? Cornelius Holtorf David Staley

🐒 ‘Agency’ and ‘intelligence’ both rely on projection and anticipation – animals all build systems of expectation which is the basis of their learning, arguably more than experience. Do we have systems of expectation in communities, organisations, governments? Peter Peter Railton

🌱 Are we trying to build a field of Futures Studies, or systems of expectation, or a culture of anticipation? Do we in fact need all three for futures thinking to take hold in meaningful and multiple ways (taking lessons from distributed and resilient plant intelligence Giovanni Emanuele Corazza)?

👁️‍🗨️ Power interferes in the construction and diffusion of alternative futures. For our Futures Studies field to advance, do we need a sociology of ‘no futures’ – understanding the conditions of those who cannot imagine a future, or feel no agency? Richard Tutton

❔ And for all the above... can we cultivate the competency of not knowing, of problem-seeking – a culture of absolute humility? Riel Miller Noah Sobe

…and still chewing over all the stretchy conversations from the margins Jessica Bland Tom Hobson Tanja Hichert Andrew Curry Sirkka Heinonen Pedro de Senna Stefan Bergheim Carlos Lopez Galviz

Jan 19 · linkedin

Water #futures are a hot topic at Arup as we roll into '24. Innovation, scarcity and changing values converge to create radically new conditions and engineering challenges in the longer-term. 'News of the Future' is a playful exercise with profound implications for our global community of water professionals...

⛈ Police attempt to shut down the black market for cloud seeding tech 🐠 Courses in interspecies and water advocacy are oversubscribed ⏳ Day Zero is most downloaded app of 2034 🔧 Locals and their bots boost earnings with ad hoc maintenance gigs 👨‍👧‍👦 New administration promises grants for community abstraction kits

If you're thinking about water futures the Arup #Foresight team would love to hear from you

Creds: Lola Bushnell Ness Lafoy Eoghan Kilroy Vincent Lee and the Global Water Skills Network

PS: Join us... we are hiring for a Foresight trainee based out of Madrid https://lnkd.in/eWr_AjnP

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Charlie Warwick
Charlie Warwick, photo 1
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Location

United Kingdom