The spark before the shift
Strategic and transformational foresight for organizations, governments, and communities facing change.
Lead futurist, UNDP Pasifika Futures Report — winner of the Dubai Future Foundation’s 2025 Foresight Changemakers Award
Foresight with, not for.
Insight changes things only when the people facing the future can see their thinking and values in it. Embr Futures pairs rigorous research with the cultural and institutional context that makes it credible, so your team arrives at the conclusions rather than receiving them. The result is agency: the confidence and coherence to stop reacting to change and start steering again.
What We Do
In a world of noise, we help you hear the signal.
Embr Futures’ award-winning work combines rigorous futures and foresight methodologies with innovative approaches customized for your unique global and institutional context, as well as conditions of increasing volatility. We help leaders navigate uncertainty, see hidden patterns, identify opportunity, build adaptive capacity, and craft agile strategies that can remain resilient across multiple possible futures.
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
I’m Lavonne Leong, founder and principal of Embr Futures.
My 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.
I work 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, I have 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. My approach combines rigorous foresight methods with a broad perspective on the many systems and ways of knowing shaping our shared future.
UNDP’s Pasifika Futures Report, for which I served as lead futurist, received the Dubai Future Foundation’s 2025 Foresight Changemakers Award.
I hold 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 became fully human when we learned to use fire.
The name Embr stands for continuity within continual transformation; embers hold the last energy of the 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 tiny or ambiguous… before reconfiguring entire systems.
Foresight begins with catching those sparks early, while what they become is still up to us.
Connect Here
If you need to better understand emerging trends, explore possible futures, or build long-term strategic resilience, we’re here to help. Complete the form with a few details about your organization and its needs. We’ll review your message and get back to you as soon as possible.