Introducing the 'Agency'
An agency grown and cultivated from Community
You’ve heard us say it over and over again: the more brains, hands, and resources we can put behind a vision of the future, the more likely we’ll all be to manifest — and benefit from — its fruition. It’s the essence of multiplayer futures: bringing together people, communities, organisations, and brands in all their forms to imagine and build better futures for all of us.
We’ve already seen a glimpse of this future in RADAR. In our three years of building, we’ve explored new ways of organising and collaborating at speed and scale. We’ve run hundreds of workshops, produced 3 futures reports, co-wrote a book, cultivated 17,000 signal discussions, launched digital products and ran events online and IRL. Along that journey, through our ‘Into the Future’ series, we’ve attracted thinkers from some of the world's leading brands, helping them not only to understand emerging, equitable futures, but help shape them.
For months, we’ve been wondering and working on the question: how do we help them do it in more meaningful, multiplayer ways?
Today, we’re proud to announce a new ‘agency’ arm of RADAR intended to bring our community’s energy and spirit to bear on the biggest problems that face brands and businesses building the future today. ‘Agency’ is in air-quotes because our intention is to build something unlike any agency we’ve seen before: one that serves our community and client stakeholders in ways that many of us have been failed in the past.
Our distributed ‘agency’
Over the last 6 months, members of the community have reimagined the ‘agency’ model as something that can live and breathe within the community, in a way that rises to many of the challenges and opportunities that face our industry today.
The agency model as we know it is broken — good work often sits static, collecting dust on client shelves; value is extracted, much more than its exchanged; communal spirit is claimed while old power dynamics remain; and it's far too easy to feel like we’re not doing anything. As a result, waves and waves of brilliant, curious folks have burnt out and left in search of the autonomy to work on their own terms.
At the same time, new models of work and ownership are emerging that unlock boundless opportunity in the face of these challenges.
Remote-first collectives are emerging to bring expert perspectives from diverse backgrounds of all types together to solve the big, hairy, and not-so-linear problems that face our world today. Agility is important, but investment is even more so: with incentives aligned, stakeholders can work collectively to build better futures for consumers and communities, who in turn support the futures they want to see bear fruit.
With these tailwinds in mind, we dreamed up a model that fundamentally reimagines the extractive, bureaucratic, and crumbling legacy approaches of the past. Our Partnership Lead, Alex, calls it ‘the bird-feeder model’: think of it as a definitive step away from the historical approach of acquisition, retention and utilisation of ‘human resources’ (blergh) and a leap towards a ‘cage-free’ approach where talented, curious humans are free to roam outside the confines of outdated corporate structures but can still tap into the security, community, and equitable exchange of value and resources that comes with infrastructure.
It’s a model that thoughtfully distributes attribution and equity to contributors to a project, that aligns incentives behind shared vision and shared pursuit, that is not only better for outcomes, but better for the people working toward them.
What makes it different
Depth & Diversity of Human Perspective: The problems that organisations face today are, at their core, deeply human problems — the kind that won’t be solved by shallow insight. Our community gives us the unique ability to assemble a diverse collection of perspectives to tackle just about anything that arises, no matter how niche, outside the bubble of agency-speak. We’re embedded in cultures and subcultures around the world, which means you won’t find us outsourcing our insights to AI or defaulting to dated, biassed, or otherwise limited perspectives.
Community doesn’t just mean scale, it means chemistry. By rooting our offering in RADAR, the ‘agency’ is supercharged by the collective curiosity and conversation of the community. But there’s a third ‘c’ that makes a difference: camaraderie. As much as traditional agencies want to tout their community feel, the authentic community energy of RADAR creates an environment where truly powerful work can emerge.
Meaningful stakeholders, from day one: Our offering is led by a collection of sensemakers who are, critically, also co-owners of the ‘agency’. Meaningfully incentivized to both support one another and nurture the long-term value of the projects and partners we work with, these experienced members will work directly with clients, earning equity and sharing the value we all create along the way.
It always comes back to accelerating better futures. In building this model, it’s critical to us that it gives back to the community to further the mission of accelerating better futures. 30% of $ will funnel back into a community grant fund that will be distributed to members, activities, events, and operations that actively support the building of better futures.
How we work
For each project, we’ll deploy a curated solution by way of our hydra model: matching one or more sensemakers directly with our client partner, supported by RADAR’s tools, agency support team, community, and broader network.
Our collective of sensemakers allows us to be both inclusive and expansive, connecting the right person to the right need and empowering them to deploy the RADAR vision and resources in ways that suit their talents and the task at hand. Sensemakers are encouraged to bring their own perspective, methodologies, connections, and skills to the table, while leaning on one another and the broader community to solve for gaps.
We know that the very idea of decentralised communities and projects run on Discord can be intimidating to organisations used to working with more traditional entities, which is why we’ve built the infrastructure to ensure that each and every project has a private, secure server for collaboration — with careful adherence to NDAs for any work that reaches into the broader community.
Our Multiplayer Services
Even the best global brands and agencies have cultural blindspots when it comes to futures and innovation work. Strapped for time and resources and steeped in the status quo, your focus can find itself narrowed and trapped in bias. After 3 years of multiplayer experimentation, we’ve found that the really powerful ideas — the ones with the potential to unlock sustainable growth and transformation — only emerge by colliding our way into unexpected visions of the future.
Here’s how we can help you do the same:
Always-on sensemaking
Make more informed decisions with regular access to the collective intelligence of RADAR.
Receive regular briefings from RADAR, customised to your goals: weekly insights, monthly deep dives, or quarterly trend forecasts.
Embed one of our Sensemakers directly into your team to gain an insider’s view on culture, delivered at intervals that make sense for your business.
Influence what the RADAR community works on by sponsoring a topic for one of our monthly campfires.
On-demand insights, ideas, and inspiration
Illuminate blind spots, overcome bias, reveal new opportunities, and stretch your team’s imagination.
Inspire your team with an interactive workshop about RADAR’s multiplayer futures methodologies.
Reveal a glimpse of the future of your audience, topic, or category with a research sprint.
Crowdsource potent visions of your product, brand, or business from our global community.
Deeper dives and co-creation
Unleash the collective intelligence and imagination of our community with our multiplayer methodologies.
Deep dive into the future of your audience with bespoke research from RADAR.
Co-create ideas with stakeholders in highly engaging and participatory workshops
Tap into the time traveller’s perspective with packaged trainings and curated programmes for your team
It’s our belief that Individuals, organisations, and the agencies that work on their behalf — are all citizens of tomorrow, with the ability to build better futures. It’s a choice whether we sit back in the status quo or direct our energy toward building visions of better futures, working together to make them a reality. Want in?