34. Reimagining Impact: Professor Lisa Grocott on hosting Tomorrow Parties to bring future impact to life
Subscribe to the Amplifying Research podcast:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Overcast | Pocketcasts
Episode show notes
Imagine stepping into a future where your research is creating the impact you've always hoped for. That's exactly what happens in a Tomorrow Party – an innovative method where researchers and stakeholders physically experience their desired futures rather than just planning for them. In this episode, Prof Lisa Grocott explains how this approach helps close the "imagination gap" that often prevents meaningful change. By creating spaces where people collectively imagine themselves already living in their preferred futures – speaking, feeling, and celebrating as if those futures are real – Tomorrow Parties generate the emotional connection and collective hope that traditional planning methods rarely achieve.
Lisa is Professor and Co-Director of WonderLab at Monash University and an Honorary Professor of Play at Design School Kolding (DSKD) in Denmark. Born in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Lisa is of Ngāti Kahungunu descent on her mother's side, with whakapapa from the UK on her father's side.
Her approach to designing for impact draws on both her co-design practice and Indigenous knowing, and is centered on creating transformative experiences that shift perspectives and unsettle everyday norms.
"What we realized at the end of the three days together was that almost every good idea we'd come up with had been seeded in that 30 minutes of us goofing around at the beginning... We realized that every time we tried to make it look a bit more like this intentional strategy it took away from something that the guests were telling us was the most important part of it, which was this idea that they never got to practice engaging with the future with their imaginations." -- Lisa Grocott
The Tomorrow Party began as a playful exercise before a funding application and evolved into a formal methodology supported by the Wellcome Foundation Trust. Unlike traditional planning methods that use scenarios or economic models, Tomorrow Parties invite participants to speak and act as if they're already living in futures 1, 3, or 5 years ahead. As Lisa describes it, participants don't just envision these futures cognitively – they actually feel them, creating emotional connections that drive genuine motivation and action.
Whether you're looking to align your research team around impact goals, engage meaningfully with diverse stakeholders, or simply break free from ineffective planning approaches, this episode offers a practical methodology you can start using immediately. Lisa walks us through the three-act structure of a Tomorrow Party and shares powerful stories of transformation – from Aboriginal community leaders finding their voice to cynical academics surprised by their own capacity for hope – demonstrating why this playful yet profound approach might be the missing element in your impact strategy.
Our conversation covers:
How researchers can use imagination to bridge the gap between knowledge and meaningful action
The origins and evolution of the Tomorrow Party methodology
How emotional engagement and "felt experiences" create more memorable and motivating visions for the future
The connection between imagination, hope, and collective action
How to host your own Tomorrow Party to align teams, engage communities, or develop partnerships
Why unsettling established perspectives is critical for transformation
How to transform the feeling of possibility into practical action
Ways to keep the energy and vision of imagined futures alive in daily work
Find Lisa online:
WonderLab (Monash University) -- https://www.monash.edu/mada/research/project/wonderlab
The Tomorrow Party -- https://tomorrowparty.org
Practical tips from this episode:
Create the right atmosphere for imagination:
"I always joke that the most failed tomorrow party we did was one we did in some basement classroom at Monash, and I sort of joked that it was because the furniture had wheels... you just never have a party in a room that things kind of move around, and it was really hard to create the sort of conviviality, right, or the atmospheric, the feeling of that." -- Lisa Grocott
"The DIY boba tea at the beginning that got people talking to each other, or the tea and scones cause it was at 10am in London, like each time, the sense that the party needs to respond to the culture and context and the time of day and all of those things becomes a really big part of it." -- Lisa Grocott
Position participants as "guests" rather than subjects:
"The party gives people permission... We always say you're showing up as yourself, not your nametag. One of the people we spoke to at the climate week party was from Rockefeller and she was like, 'it's the only time a week that people haven't been pitching something to me that I could just be me.'" -- Lisa Grocott
Structure time travel in progressive steps:
"One year out, you don't have to be doing that much differently, right? That's a small imaginative leap. But five years out, people have often come up with things that feel more ambitious, more exciting. And then they just turn around and be like, 'Oh, I could make this happen now,' but you couldn't have thought that one year out." -- Lisa Grocott
Encourage the power of “unsettling” for transformation:
"The boost part is to try to get people to be more specific by kind of throwing at them something... Sometimes it's to get them off script because they're just literally telling you a strategic plan. Oh, now we're doing this. And so when it's like, 'Oh, well, when you won this award' or, 'well, I saw you doing this and you were totally...' you're trying to get them to just be in a bit more of a kind of unsettled space." -- Lisa Grocott
End with toasts to capture collective insights:
"We often invite two or three people to give toasts as we're going. But it's always open where other people can step up... Sometimes that goes on for a really long time with eight or nine people giving toasts from the future. But those toasts often are so indicative of the essence of what was being discussed in the room." -- Lisa Grocott
Look for signs of emotional connection:
"One time I was doing a party and someone way in the distance was crying and I was talking to someone else and I said, 'Oh, you know, it's working when someone's crying.' And the person I was talking to looked horrified. And then I said, 'no, I can tell they're happy tears'... Often people describe that they didn't know until they said something out loud that 'this is what matters to me.'" -- Lisa Grocott
Apply the method at different scales:
"Whenever we often feel stuck with a project, we'll just say, 'let's time travel,' and it's just the most normal and we're not doing a party, we're just going to spend the next 30 minutes time traveling... we've done that at the level of a student's PhD project... Even what do we want for our PhD community, like how might we as an HDR community create a culture where the essence of time travel can be deployed." -- Lisa Grocott
Keep the future alive beyond the party:
"We were tidying up from a party... And there were some people around the corner we still didn't even know was still there. And I found them and I was like, 'Oh, I didn't realize you were still here.' And one of the women said, 'Oh, I'm got so attached to my future. It feels fragile.' And then someone else was like, 'yeah, if we stay here a little longer and we keep with that future, it will just feel more real, more internalized.'" -- Lisa Grocott
Credits:
Host & Producer: Chris Pahlow
Edited by: Laura Carolina Corrigan
Music by: La Boucle and Blue Steel, courtesy of Epidemic Sound
- Public engagement
- Storytelling
- Career development
- Team alignment
- Making your work relatable
- Strategic comms
- Communicating in different formats/mediums
- Your pitch
- Stakeholder/audience mapping
- Community engagement
- Talks and presentations
- Mentorship
- Collaborating with professional staff
- Interdisciplinary collaboration
- Feedback
- Listening
- Playfulness
- Representing your discipline
- DEI
- Co-design
