The Centre for Organisational Futures (COF)

The Centre for Organisational Futures (COF) brings together researchers, businesses, policymakers and communities to examine how organisations, and the societies they inhabit, are being reshaped by accelerating change, and to help shape what comes next. Based in the Management and Organisations Department at Leeds University Business School, the Centre draws on expertise from across the social sciences and beyond. 

At COF, we start from the future. Our research draws on forward-looking social science, which uses theory to open up new possibilities as well as to explain the world as it is. Through future-focused research, we anticipate emerging problems, imagine alternative futures and design responses before challenges fully take shape. Our work is organised around Challenge Spaces, shared problem areas defined with the people facing them, where researchers and partners co-create knowledge that advances scholarship and creates lasting value for organisations and society.

• Create spaces where researchers and practitioners co-create knowledge on shared challenges
• Problematise real-world challenges and imagine and design alternative organisational futures
• Advance translational social science that moves from insight into practice
• Build capacity in prospective and engaged research methods across the research community.

Our research is organised around Challenge Spaces. A Challenge Space is a field of inquiry built around a pressing problem whose future is uncertain and still open to shaping.

Work in each Challenge Space starts by framing a problem that is meaningful, timely and worth solving - one difficult enough to matter and simple enough to tackle. It then moves to envisioning, where desirable futures become an object of study: what should happen, and what stands in the way.

Each Challenge Space is examined collaboratively with business partners, policymakers and boundary-spanning organisations. From there, the task is to develop research-based artefacts and interventions that could help bring desired futures closer.

We then learn what works, for whom, how and why, and feed the lessons back into the space. Challenge Spaces are open by design.

They evolve as projects develop, new partners join and the futures they explore come into clearer view. Details of our Challenge Spaces will follow shortly.

Centre director: Professor Pablo Munoz