The core idea
Money for Mars puts teams in an environment where every assumption behind familiar tools breaks down. Teams use a structured generative system to build and solve design challenges — combining unfamiliar contexts with the roles and instruments they already know.
Why now
Organisations are increasingly asked to design systems for contexts where existing rules, norms, and infrastructure no longer apply.
Money for Mars makes you question the assumptions, norms, and needs under new conditions.
What space strips away
Space removes all of these. Not hypothetically — practically. In doing so it makes visible what those frameworks were actually doing all along.
Read more about the history of finance, distance, risk and uncertainty
The generative system
Three elements combine to produce a genuine challenge — something that has to be solved, not just discussed.
A location in space chosen for the specific pressures it creates — from near-Earth orbit to deep space, each zone progressively more demanding and further from what Earth systems can support.
A person whose needs and motivations participants already understand — worker, investor, contractor, broker, tourist — now operating somewhere their usual systems don't reach.
A tool or system from Earth — financial, logistical, legal, technical — whose assumptions are now exposed by the context. Participants strip it down and rebuild it for where they've landed.
Example
Mars Settlements + Migrant Worker + Remittances. A worker on Mars sending wages home to family on Earth. The tool assumes near-instant transfer and confirmation. The location means the message confirming a payment left takes up to 24 minutes to arrive — and the one confirming receipt takes another 24. The design challenge: how does the system handle trust, timing, and proof of delivery when the feedback loop is nearly an hour long? Teams typically spend the first ten minutes realising how many assumptions the word confirmation carries.
From near to far
Each zone creates qualitatively different design problems. Near cases show where familiar tools bend. Far cases show where they break.
Most Earth systems still function with modification. Familiar tools bend. Participants encounter friction that is recognisable — and start to see what that friction reveals.
Communication delays measure in minutes to hours. Local rules begin to diverge. Familiar tools start to break rather than bend — new structures become necessary.
Messages take weeks to years. Earth systems cannot reach, let alone enforce. Virtually everything must be reinvented. This is where the exercise is most generative.
What this builds
The ability to name what a system takes for granted — and redesign it when those assumptions change.
Inhabiting unfamiliar roles and conditions surfaces blind spots that familiar framing conceals.
Technical, commercial, strategy, and policy people working the same design challenge — the exercise requires and rewards all of them.
Space conditions are a proxy for real frontier problems. Participants regularly surface near-term opportunities they hadn't previously seen.
In the full workshop, teams go further. After sharing their innovations, they connect them — mapping what each innovation imports, exports, and depends on, then designing the shared infrastructure that would hold them together. A clearing mechanism. A trust network. A governance structure. This is where the most useful strategic insight tends to surface: not in a single innovation, but in what the innovations reveal about each other.
Who this is for
Innovation, strategy, and commercial teams get both the general capability-building and a direct commercial lens — surfacing real gaps in how space-based ventures will handle trust, time, distance, and value exchange.
Format
Half-day (3.5 hrs) or short-form (90 min) · 12–24 participants
Changeist
Strategic foresight consultancy, founded 2007, based in Barcelona.
Managing partner and founder of Changeist. Two decades designing strategic foresight programmes, simulations, and tools for organisations navigating uncertainty. Built and led the Strategic Foresight program at Dubai Future Academy. Fellow, Royal Society of Arts. Visiting Research Fellow, University of South Australia.
Partner and co-founder of Changeist. Two decades as researcher, designer, and creative director across foresight, public engagement, and immersive learning. Led FOREVER and BEGINNINGS exhibitions at MOD. Adelaide. Named one of Forbes's 50 Leading Female Futurists, 2022. Visiting Research Fellow, University of South Australia.
Get in touch
We run a small number of sessions each year — half-day or short-form — for organisations whose teams are working at the edge of what's established. Space sector teams, frontier technology groups, strategy and innovation functions facing genuinely new conditions.
Sessions are designed around your room. We tune the framing, the prompts, and the debrief to what your teams actually need to think through. If this sounds compelling, tell us a little about your team below — a short conversation is all it takes.