Who We Are
Embr Futures works with organizations shaping long-term outcomes for people, communities, and systems. We focus on helping institutions anticipate change, navigate complexity and potential upheaval, and build internal capabilities to act with clarity in periods of uncertainty.
Our future is shaped both by transformative technologies and the deep cultural and social narratives and values that guide their use.
Effective navigational strategy draws on all resources available: advanced tools, emerging technologies, and diverse forms of knowledge, including insights rooted in cultural and community traditions. This broader perspective enables organizations to identify opportunities, manage risk, and build more resilient systems that are fit for their unique environments.
Our clients include global mission-driven institutions, research organizations, foundations, and consultancies working across public, civic, and commercial sectors. We support leaders seeking to understand what is possible, to prepare for volatility, and to design strategies that contribute to durable, flexible systems.
Meet the Founder
Lavonne Leong is the founder and principal of Embr Futures.
Her work, which has won multiple awards for innovation and excellence in the field, bridges strategic and transformational foresight to help organizations navigate accelerating change and move beyond reactive planning to engage the future with clarity and purpose.
Lavonne works at the intersection of innovation and continuity, exploring how societal infrastructure—such as education, governance, communities, and culture—can become more robust and resilient in a time of rapid change, and how emerging technologies both disrupt old systems and unlock new possibilities for people, markets, and the planet.
Through Embr Futures, she has worked on nearly every continent with leaders who recognize that the world is changing faster than traditional strategy models can keep up—and who want tools made for navigating these new realities. Her approach combines rigorous foresight methods with a broad perspective on the many systems and ways of knowing shaping our shared future.
The UNDP’s Pasifika Futures Report, for which she served as lead futurist, was awarded the 2025 Dubai Foresight Award for advances in foresight methodology.
Lavonne holds a doctorate in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight from the University of Houston.
Why Embr?
They say we began to be human when we learned to use fire.
The name Embr stands for continuity amidst change as well as continual transformation; embers hold the last energy of an old fire and the first spark of the next.
An ember has power. It can start a conflagration, but if channeled with knowledge and imagination, it can keep you warm, feed you, and light your way in the dark.
Most of all, embers are small. In much the same way, gathering signals of change can appear small or ambiguous… before reconfiguring entire systems.
Foresight begins by noticing those sparks while they are still shapeable.