Playing the Future: How Games Can Help Us Prepare for an Uncertain World

Talks on Tuesdays is a live event series bringing big ideas, real experts, and curious minds together - at your favourite local venues. Think thought-provoking lectures, audience questions, and post-talk mingling over drinks and dinner.

This isn’t a uni lecture. It’s a social, intelligent night out.Come alone or with friends, leave with something to talk about.

Event Schedule:

6.30pm Arrival & Doors Open

7pm Lecture Starts

7.45pm Q&A

8pm Talk Concludes

8.30pm Event Closes.

*Please arrive close to 6.30pm

A La Carte menu and full bar available throughout the night - pay as you go.

Your Topic:
Playing the Future: How Games Can Help Us Prepare for an Uncertain World:

We spend enormous amounts of time trying to predict the future. What if we should spend more time playing it?
What if one of the best ways to prepare for the future is to play it?
From ancient board games to military war games and modern simulations, humans have long used play to explore what might happen before the stakes become real. Today, governments, militaries and businesses use scenarios and simulations to rehearse decisions in situations where the rules are shifting and the outcome is uncertain.
In this talk, Prashanth Shanmugan explores the idea of "playing the future": using games, scenarios and structured imagination to test our assumptions, experience uncertainty and make better decisions.
Drawing on examples from geopolitics, business and military history, along with his experience designing strategic scenarios and leading the Pax Ludens war game simulations, Prashanth asks what happens when we stop trying to predict the future and start rehearsing for it instead. Why do simulations reveal things that spreadsheets and forecasts can miss? What can games teach us about power, negotiation and human behaviour? And could making decisions in a fictional crisis actually leave us better prepared for a real one?
A lively and accessible exploration of strategy, uncertainty and our very human instinct to learn through play.

Your Speaker:

Prashanth Shanmugan

Prashanth Shanmugan is a geostrategist and international business advisor working where geopolitics, strategy and global business meet.
He is an adjunct lecturer at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, where he teaches corporate diplomacy and is based at the University's Competence Centre for Mastering the Unknown. Earlier in his career, he was part of Shell's Global Scenarios team, exploring how energy, markets, policy and geopolitics might shape the decades ahead.
Prashanth is President of the Australian Council on Foreign Relations and heads Pax Ludens, a war game initiative for professionals and leaders. Through immersive scenarios and simulations, Pax Ludens helps participants sharpen their strategic thinking and better understand how global power plays out.
He is also an Ambassador for the New Energy Business School in the Netherlands and runs an advisory practice in scenario development, narrative design and public diplomacy. Based in Australia, he works across the Indo-Pacific and Europe.
SOCIAL LINKS
Australian Council on Foreign Relations
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/acfr.au
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/acfr-au/
Prashanth Shanmugan
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pshanmugan/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shanmugan/

Event venue & nearby stays

Kinselas Hotel, 383 Bourke Street, Darlinghurst, Australia

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