Designing for Uncertainty: The Story behind Indie Horizons

What if travel wasn’t about collecting destinations, but about changing how you see?

That inspiring question became Indie Horizons – and later, emerged as the Travel Coaching methodology. Working at the intersection of strategic foresight, experiential learning, and identity work, I design workshops and journeys that help people navigate uncertainty, challenge assumptions, and imagine different futures.

Through my “Around the World in 80 Trips” framework, the world becomes a set of cultural and systemic learning environments, rather than a collection of map pins. Each journey serves as a structured tool for Futures Thinking and personal transformation: unfamiliar contexts surface blind spots, make patterns visible, and expand what feels possible.

Travel Coaching is not about destinations. It’s about changing how people think, decide, and act under uncertainty, whether you’re leading an organization, envisioning your own path forward, or trying to make sense of a complex world that refuses to stand still.

By combining Futures Literacy, dynamic storytelling, and game-based learning, I help individuals and teams to notice patterns they’ve stopped seeing, explore alternative paths they haven’t considered, and build internal compasses when external maps no longer work.

I describe myself as a sense-making architect, a strategist who enjoys using unconventional laboratories.

I design and facilitate learning experiences, frameworks, and narratives that help people and organisations rethink assumptions, understand complexity, and make better choices under uncertainty.

And the word uncertainty here is key. Uncertainty is no longer an exception to be managed — it is the operating condition. In practice, this means helping people and organisations stop treating change as a disruption to control, and start treating it as a space to be designed.

My work sits at the intersection of strategic foresight, systems thinking, learning design, and identity work. Whether I’m working with executives, institutions, or individuals, the underlying question is always the same: How do you make sense of the world when the old maps no longer work — and how do you move forward without pretending you have certainty?

That question eventually became the foundation of Indie Horizons, and later of Travel Coaching.

I was originally trained as a chemist, which taught me to think in systems, variables, probabilities, and transformations. Later, my MBA gave me the language of organisations, markets, and strategy — understanding them as dynamics systems full of incentives, blind spots, identities, and narratives. Coaching emerged through practical work with real people navigating real transitions, helping them on their personal growth and to cultivate a different mindset. In business, there is little point in trying to change an organisation as a system if you don’t first of all change the minds and habits of the people inside it.

What connects all three domains is sense-making.
Science asks: What is really happening here? (the research question)
Business asks: What do we do with it? (the practical question)
Coaching asks: Who do I need to become in order to act? (the transformative question)

Very early on, I realised that most professional problems are not technical — they are interpretive. People don’t lack information; they lack frameworks that help them orient themselves, and perhaps more importantly the will and imagination to move beyond familiar paths. This is where Futures Thinking becomes critical.

I don’t like providing answers or predictions; I prefer offering questions, which retrain perception and judgment. Strategy, for me, is not about deciding faster, but about deciding better — especially when causality is unclear and the future is plural rather than singular.

Futures Thinking helps people realise that there is more than one possible future; storytelling helps them understand choice, consequence, and causality; coaching helps them notice the assumptions that quietly shape their decisions.

In that sense, everything I do — from foresight workshops to leadership learning experiences — is about the same thing: helping people and organisations re-orient themselves when certainty is no longer available, but choice still is.

That confusion is very common, and understandable. Most people encounter the future through forecasts, trends, and predictions, so they assume foresight is just a more sophisticated version of Risk Management. It isn’t.
Forecasting tries to answer the question: What is most likely to happen, and what can we do about it?
Foresight asks a different one: What could happen, and how can we choose the one we want from all multiple possibilities?

Futures Thinking, and particularly the Futures Literacy framework as developed within UNESCO, goes one step further. It’s not about predicting outcomes at all. It’s about becoming aware of the assumptions we unconsciously use when we think about the future, and learning how to question and redesign them.

I had been working with similar ideas long before I had the vocabulary for them. My fascination with Change Management started in the late 2000s, when I read Kotler’s Chaotics, which addressed how organisations can navigate periods where volatility, uncertainty, and disruption are no longer temporary crises, but permanent conditions. Earlier frameworks like Business Process Reengineering were already pointing in the same direction: when the environment changes fundamentally, optimisation is not enough — you need redesign.

What Futures Thinking adds is a cognitive layer. It acknowledges that most resistance to change is not operational; it’s psychological and interpretive. People struggle not because they can’t change processes, but because they can’t imagine alternatives to the futures they take for granted.

That’s why I don’t treat foresight as a strategic tool alone, but as a learning capability. In my work, futures are not endpoints to be chosen, but lenses that help people see the present differently. Once perception changes, strategy follows.

In that sense, Futures Literacy, Change Management, and strategy are not separate disciplines for me. They are different entry points into the same challenge: how humans and organisations make sense of the unknown — and how they act responsibly within it.

Indie Horizons was a very deliberate design impulse, initially born out of frustration — but also curiosity. I was already travelling extensively, first across Greece and then internationally, and I kept encountering the same pattern: travel was being sold as consumption, not as learning, with emphasis only on leisure and not on the valuable lessons that the world has to offer. People came home with the same mental “suitcase” they had packed before the trip — full, but unchanged.

At the same time, in my consulting work, I saw people attend endless workshops about strategy, leadership, or change — without anything really shifting.

The question that emerged was simple but radical:
What if travel itself could be a structured learning environment?

Not tourism. Not escape. But designed and curated exposure to difference, complexity, and uncertainty.

If Indie Horizons framed travel as a learning environment, the 80 Trips concept was how that idea applied on a global scale. At first glance, 80 Trips might have looked like a travel concept. But in reality, it was strategic foresight in disguise, and reframed experiential systems thinking.

Most travel categorizations are geographical or logistical — countries, cities, itineraries, durations. I approached the world differently: as a set of cultural and systemic contexts. Instead of countries, I broke the world into 80 distinct learning environments — regions that share mental models, rhythms of life, social structures, and ways of making meaning.

The Sahel, for example, functions as one coherent cultural system, even though it spans multiple nations. Southern Italy, on the other hand, is fundamentally different — cognitively, socially, and historically — from Central Europe. Political borders tell you very little about how people think, decide, or relate to uncertainty.

Another key difference is time. None of the trips has a fixed duration. A journey may last a week or a year. The point is not about efficiency — it is about depth. Time, like culture, is contextual. Immersion changes perception; rushing preserves assumptions.

Breaking the world into cultural systems, not political borders, not durations, not itineraries, is pure futures literacy logic

The 80 Trips concept was never designed as a travel product. It is a world literacy framework — an experiential way to teach systems thinking, cultural intelligence, and futures awareness.

At its core, it helps people understand that:

• the world has multiple narratives, not a single dominant one
• depth is a strategic choice, not a luxury
• time behaves differently in different systems
• and immersion changes how meaning is constructed

This is exactly the same cognitive move we apply in organisations, leadership development, and futures work. Different domain — same logic.

The ambition was intentional. Indie Horizons was conceived as an ecosystem — not just journeys, but communities, exchanges, learning experiences, and shared meaning. In that sense, it was designed more like a living system than a business unit.

In retrospect, the scope was too large for a small team to sustain operationally at the time. Some elements, particularly the travel consulting side, struggled commercially. It sat in an uncomfortable middle ground — too unconventional for mass tourism, and too structured for hardcore independent travellers, who often prefer to design everything themselves.

But conceptually, the project worked exactly where it mattered. And what truly succeeded was community. The traveller and expat circles we built became living laboratories of informal learning, cultural exchange, and belonging. People didn’t just attend events; they stayed, contributed, and co-created. That distinction turned out to be crucial.

Through that community work, several foundational ideas emerged — often unintentionally — that later became pillars of my methodology:

• Cultural empathy, not just cultural exchange
• Nature immersion, not simply hiking or outdoor activity
• Urban walkabouts, replacing sightseeing with relational exploration
• Dynamic storytelling, shaped in real time by participants rather than delivered as a script

These weren’t products. They were patterns — signals of how people actually learn, change, and make meaning together. Indie Horizons taught me that transformation doesn’t happen through content alone; it happens through designed contexts where people can safely encounter difference, uncertainty, and themselves.

That is a spot on question. Travel was never the product. It was the context — a means to a higher end.

What people were really responding to was not the itinerary, but the way experiences were framed: the conversations, the reflections, the shared process of meaning-making. Travel simply made underlying patterns visible — habits, assumptions, fears, aspirations.

At some point, it became clear that the real value lay in how people changed through the journey, not where they went.

What mattered was the learning process itself: how orientation, meaning, and even strategy shift when you step outside familiar systems. That realisation quickly pushed Indie Horizons beyond travel and toward a broader methodology for learning, foresight, and transformation.

This insight eventually distilled into Travel Coaching, which uses the world itself as a cognitive training ground, an unconventional laboratory for exploring complexity, difference, and emergence.

Travel Coaching is a learning and development methodology that uses travel — physical or metaphorical — as a structured intervention for change.

It sits at the intersection of coaching, strategic foresight, experiential learning, and narrative and identity work. The journey itself becomes a designed disruption: unfamiliar environments surface blind spots, challenge assumptions, and expand one’s range of possible futures.

In practice, Travel Coaching is about designing perspective-shifting experiences and embedding guided reflection into them. It teaches systems awareness by placing people inside different cultural, social, and spatial logics — and using displacement, both geographical and cultural, as a learning accelerator.

Travel is the best lubricant for the mind, and what travel does exceptionally well is make the invisible visible. Habits, mental models, and default narratives emerge naturally when you step outside familiar systems. Travel Coaching simply turns that exposure into intentional learning.

At its core, Travel Coaching helps people rehearse the future — safely, consciously, and with intention.

Travel Coaching is relevant because the challenges we face today are not primarily technical — they are adaptive, requiring people to learn new ways, change behaviours, and shift values to find a solution. Whether at a personal, organisational, or societal level, the core question is the same: how do we orient ourselves when the future is uncertain, plural, and fast-changing?

In my work, I usually bridge business and personal development, because in practice the separation is artificial. Strategy is shaped by identity. Leadership is shaped by worldview. Decisions are shaped by unexamined assumptions. You cannot design a future — for a company, for yourself, for society in general — without understanding the stories you operate within.

That’s why my entire work (and not just Travel Coaching) always moves across multiple levels: personal, organisational, and societal. The same patterns repeat — only the scale changes.

For individuals, Travel Coaching develops futures literacy at the level where it matters most: identity, perception, and agency. People don’t just ask “What should I do next?” — they ask “Who do I need to become to navigate what’s coming?” By applying foresight tools to the individual level, Travel Coaching turns abstract futures thinking into lived, embodied insight.

For organisations this is where relevance becomes very concrete. Travel Coaching is not about inspiration trips or abstract mindset work. It is about decision-making under uncertainty, systems awareness, and leadership judgment. Managers operate exactly at this interface: translating strategy into action, navigating ambiguity, and holding tension between competing demands. Travel Coaching strengthens those capacities by placing people in unfamiliar systems where quick fixes don’t work, but sense-making does.

At a societal level, the work addresses something even deeper: cultural empathy and narrative literacy. Exposure to different social logics, rhythms, and constraints helps people understand that there is no single “normal” way the world works — only contextual ones. That insight is foundational for resilience, cooperation, and responsible leadership.

Practically, Travel Coaching is not improvised. The learning happens before, during, and after the journey.
Before the trip, participants work with framing questions, foresight tools, and intention-setting.
During the journey, experiences are curated and accompanied by guided reflection — individually and in groups — turning sights into insights.

Afterwards, structured debriefing and integration help translate learning into action.

Methodologically, the work draws explicitly from Strategic Foresight: scenario thinking, systems mapping, narrative futures, and tools such as the Futures Triangle or Causal Layered Analysis — adapted from markets and organisations to the level of personal and leadership development. The innovation lies in both inventing new tools, and in applying rigorous futures methods to how people think, choose, and act.

To give a concrete example: a journey through a region like the Sahel is not about “learning sustainability” as an abstract concept. It is about observing how communities organise life under scarcity, climate pressure, and uncertainty — and reflecting on what that reveals about adaptability, time horizons, and collective intelligence. The insight does not come from the destination itself, but from how attention is directed and meaning is constructed.

In that sense, Travel Coaching is neither tourism nor theory. It is applied futures thinking — experienced, reflected upon, and integrated — where the world becomes the curriculum.

Standard frameworks are useful — but they are usually designed for stable contexts and linear problems. Most of the situations we encounter today are neither. They involve uncertainty, conflicting values, incomplete information, and human behaviour that doesn’t follow rational models. In those conditions, many off-the-shelf tools become too abstract or too polite: they describe complexity, but they don’t engage it.

Designing my own tools is not just an expression of a creative mind. I need learning formats that mirror how complexity actually behaves — and that can be adapted to the specific people and systems in the room. This is also why I prefer working with smaller groups: it allows me to tailor experiences, adjust in real time, and design interventions that respond to participants rather than forcing them into predefined templates.

This is where storytelling and game design become essential.

I’ve long been interested in role-playing games, strategy games, and simulations — not as entertainment, but as cognitive environments. Good games do something very powerful: they force you to make decisions with limited resources, under uncertainty, and witness the consequences, but in a safe, sandbox environment. They make causality tangible, and turn abstract dynamics into lived experience. They help people feel complexity, and the impact of their actions, not just understand it intellectually.

Dynamic Storytelling works in a similar way. Instead of telling people stories, I design narrative spaces where stories emerge through action, choice, and interaction. Participants are not passive listeners; they become protagonists inside a system. Strategy, identity, and values are no longer theoretical — they are tested in motion.

In practice, this means combining:

• scenario logic from futures thinking
• narrative arcs that surface assumptions and values
• game mechanics that introduce constraints, trade-offs, and feedback loops
• and guided reflection that translates experience into insight

What consistently surprises participants is how quickly such tools reveal patterns — not only about organisations or systems, but about themselves: how they decide, what they avoid, and how they behave when certainty disappears.

In the end, the tools are not the point. They are vehicles for something deeper: learning how to think, choose, and act when there is no script — only possibility.

At its core, the contribution is about futures literacy — helping people, teams, and organisations become comfortable with ambiguity, plurality, and the unknown.

We are living in a world where linear planning no longer works, yet improvisation without reflection is equally risky. What we need are better internal compasses, not better predictions.

Indie Horizons and Travel Coaching offer a way to cultivate these compasses. They create structured experiences that allow participants to explore complexity, rethink assumptions, and rehearse different possible futures — whether through travel, immersive workshops, or guided reflection. The goal is not to give answers, but to expand perception, judgment, and adaptability.

If Indie Horizons has stood for anything, it is this principle:

You don’t need certainty to move forward — you need orientation, curiosity, and the courage to learn while moving.

That insight continues to shape my work today. Every workshop, every coaching session, and every strategic foresight exercise is designed to help people step outside familiar systems, notice the patterns that guide their choices, and unlock new possibilities. It’s about empowering individuals and organisations to navigate complexity with awareness, creativity, and resilience — and ultimately, to realise that the journey itself is a tool for transformation