The idea came from the work I was doing with senior leaders at clients like Yorkshire Water and Transport UK. I was helping leadership teams understand future realities, and it struck me that this was directly relevant to the work we do every day.

WSP’s culture gives us the flexibility and the can-do attitude to take the idea and run with it. We started Future Ready in the UK and showed clients its impact. We then took it to Canada, then to Australia, and we have been rolling it out globally ever since.

We have been running Future Ready for around seven years. The fundamentals remain the same, but we’re constantly learning. The trends have shifted too. For example, we’re now spending more time thinking about how technology and AI will change how our clients use the buildings, hospitals and transport networks we are designing today - something we weren’t talking about seven years ago.

Future Ready projects are more resilient, flexible and fulfil their core purpose better. We’ve been helping to make HS2’s stations more accessible to neurodivergent people. We’re designing water networks in Australia avoiding future wildfires. And because we see the future more clearly on all our projects, we also advise on specialist strategies. From delivering National Highways’ water quality programme to helping Transport UK’s executive team understand future customer needs and develop plans to meet those needs.

These are all examples of how we use the four Future Ready lenses — future climate, society, technology and resources — to help create solutions that are ready for the years ahead. 

Everyone at WSP knows the phrase Future Ready. As our global team continues to grow, there’s always an opportunity to help people understand how to apply it.

We recently launched our Future Ready Changemakers and now have around 600 people signed up. We would welcome more. And of course, we’ll keep researching new trends.

The needs of future users and society is one our clients are especially interested in. We’ve had huge interest in our research on designing for all minds, for non-visible disabilities and for older populations. Bringing that human dimension into projects fits our brand and reflects the fact that everything we design will be used by people.

Curiosity, flexibility and being comfortable with uncertainty will matter most. And being able to communicate ideas with real energy and understand how to make change happen is just as important as knowing what that change should be.

I’m excited to see how our Future Ready Changemakers have impact – it’s inspiring to see the enthusiasm and the passion of our WSP people.

If we look five or ten years ahead, I hope we can look back at hundreds of thousands of WSP projects and see how – together – we’ve used Future Ready thinking to help our clients create prosperous, resilient places one project at a time.