Senior Foresight Strategist

SYNTHESIS IS A CREATIVE DATA CONSULTANCY

We help future-proof business by making sense of the world's data.

We partner with industry leaders like Fonterra, Zespri, PepsiCo, and LEGO to define their audiences and how their needs will evolve over the short and long term.

We do this through our unique synthesis of deep human understanding and robust data science. Our team brings together diverse specialists from computer science, digital anthropology, and engineering, to digital forensics, script writing, and humanities.

WHY SYNTHESIS

Since our launch in 2017, we've been reimagining the world of marketing and strategy. Building deep global partnerships, especially in F&B, and entertainment & sports categories.

We answer complex, future-facing questions by detecting early signals of change and surfacing opportunities to win in new horizons. Our specialised solutions are rooted in strategic foresight and tested in data science to give our partners the confidence to act.

Example challenges we've worked on recently include:

• Uncovering the points of intervention for a global fruit business to lead the story on natural nutrition in 2035
• Redefining the role of breakfast cereals in 2035
• Guiding horizon 2 and 3 investment decisions for dairy categories
• Staying adaptive to changes in how consumers will manage their weight in 2035 amidst the influence of GLP1's
• Building supply-chain resilience against future macro disruptions

SENIOR FUTURES STRATEGIST: SINGAPORE BASED, WORK WITH GLOBAL TEAM

As a Senior Futures Strategist, you will be a natural leader who is concerned with the most significant questions shaping our future: how might demographic changes redefine addressable markets How might we source food differently in a post-climate-change world How might we design cities centred around societal health & happiness rather than economic growth

You will work closely with our multi-disciplinary futures team (data scientists, product developers, strategists, and creatives) in Singapore, as well as our teams in North America and Europe, to deepen relationships with global clients and grow our global offer and team. Alongside our team is our dataset that drives our foresights. You will work closely with our data and proprietary AI-enabled platforms to generate hypotheses before crafting human-led, data-backed plausible future scenarios.

Day to day, the role will be anchored in project delivery, growing client partnerships, and establishing Synthesis Futures at the heart of the global futures community. You will have a hand in boldly stretching our technical and creative outputs to ensure that Synthesis thinking, workflows, and technology are ahead of the curve, differentiated from the competition, and delivering strongly to the sharpest insights and marketing professionals in the region.

YOUR CORE FOCUS

Commercial data-driven storytelling: You will craft persuasive, memorable data-driven narratives and insights. You will have a knack for reframing and digging into client problem statements in order to understand the root cause of their questions and identify appropriate routes to interrogate. The success of your work will hinge on your ability to persuasively communicate your findings and recommendations in clear, compelling narratives that influence the next steps of senior stakeholders.

Impactful workshop designer & facilitator: You will craft and run high-energy, high-stakes workshops (virtual or in-person) that translate futures thinking into belief, alignment, and action. You design sessions that are engaging, provocative, visually memorable, and commercially grounded, and you bring senior cross-functional teams with you, even when the topics are ambiguous, disruptive, or speculative.

Act as a trusted advisor for world-leading clients, serving as the day-to-day lead and decision-maker. Your role will require you to deeply understand our client's business, run projects end-to-end, and have a nose for what's next through foresight and innovation that will be most useful and inspiring for their growth strategy. You will help build a deeper partnership with key partners such as Fonterra, Zespri, Mondelez, & Tetra Pak.

Growing our Futures offer. Working closely with our Head of Futures to shape a market-leading foresight proposition. This includes leading commercial requirements from our clients to the Synthesis team, keeping ahead of the curve on foresight, innovation, and trends approaches, and how these can be leveraged to improve Synthesis proprietary data tools.

Business development: Working with the leadership team, you will play a crucial role in establishing and growing client partnerships, both with existing and new clients. This means writing proposals, pitching, helping design approaches for new and existing clients, and brainstorming cross-sell ideas to grow clients across the business.

ABOUT YOU

You'll have 8+ years of experience working in consulting, foresight, innovation, a

strategy and planning role or related experience.

• Confident with senior clients. You bring presence, clarity, and confidence to senior stakeholder conversations. You influence senior stakeholders by distilling ambiguity into sharp narratives, guiding decision-making in areas filled with uncertainty. You know how to create belief, manage resistance, and challenge thinking with diplomacy and conviction.
• Embedding for impact via workshop design and facilitation. You are adept at designing high-impact workshops (virtual and physical) that help to build belief and buy-in from senior cross-functional client teams, and facilitating difficult conversations with provocative flair, endless charm, and unwavering confidence.
• Nose for foresight. You have a track record of connecting macro-economic drivers of change to tangible business opportunities and effectively cascading and embedding that work with your partner organizations.
• Human + data. You have an unwavering focus on the human behind the data and a passion for looking at data in a new light. For you, is Google Search analysis about keyword volumes, or is it about drivers of curiosity and needs We are looking for candidates who default to the latter. You are comfortable embedding AI-enabled workflows to accelerate analysis, insight generation, and draftingknowing when to trust, validate, and override AI outputs
• Strategic thinker, meticulous executor. You can lead a tight research project, including confidently leading analysis and elevating the quality of thinking and output, whilst also keeping an eye on project management across multiple projects at once.
• Storyteller and vision setter. Futures work can, by its very nature, feel speculative and non-urgent. You help bring nebulous concepts and far-reaching data points together into plausible future scenarios and provocative visions for the future that inspire different paths forward for our client organisations.
• Innovator and experimenter. Systemisation helps us scale, but risks becoming stale. You are passionate about streamlining and keeping things simple, whilst always keeping your eyes open to refine and evolve Synthesis foresight frameworks, workflows, and proprietary tools to ensure the scale across pods and markets. You create safe environments for others in the team to experiment.
• Multidisciplinary team player. Experience working with a team of Data Scientists, Statisticians, or Engineers is an advantage. You'll need to ensure the balance between perspective on scale and analytical complexity, and clarity, explainability, and storytelling power, is ever-present. You will support the growth of junior strategists through coaching, capability-building, and in-the-flow-of-work feedback