Future Pathways
Many organisations are struggling to envisage what their role needs to be in helping their workforce and customers navigate the risks and systemic challenges that shape financial security and wellbeing across the life course in a world of increasing longevity.
That’s why we developed Future Pathways - an interactive serious game designed to stimulate conversation, insight and action around the implications of longevity and bring these issues to life for businesses, policymakers and politicians.
Based on robust research and expert insight and developed in conjunction with Socialudo and the Standard Life Centre for the Future of Retirement, it presents a new way of engaging people, enabling them to envisage what their role might be – on a professional and personal level.
How work, money and place shape people’s lives across generations
In facilitated sessions, participants step into real-world, multi-layered life scenarios that reveal how decisions about work, saving, caring, housing and health intersect - and how these interconnections shape a person's ability to achieve financial security and wellbeing in later life. By experiencing how structural barriers and resources accumulate - or compound inequalities - over decades, players gain a deeper understanding of what shapes financial and personal wellbeing in later life.
Meet Sally. 30. Graduate. Two careers in. Possibly about to start a third.
She's ambitious, curious, and has more working years ahead of her than anyone else in this series. She's also the one whose choices right now will compound - quietly, invisibly - for the next 35 years.
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£30,000 in student debt, and the cost of retraining sitting on top of it
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Auto-enrolled at the minimum, with a mental note to "sort the pension properly later"
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Resigned from her latest role - uncertain what comes next, but certain she wants something more
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Saving for a house deposit, paying rent on a cold flat, and still trying to actually enjoy being 30
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Every financial decision pulling in a different direction at once
Sally isn't reckless. She's navigating real trade-offs with limited information and limited slack. The pension can wait because it feels like it can wait. The debt feels too big to move. The deposit feels just out of reach.
And in the meantime, compound interest is doing its thing - in all directions.
The decisions that feel small at 30 don't stay small. That's not a threat - it's the thing nobody explains clearly enough, early enough.
Meet Rick. 58. Thirty years in manufacturing. Made redundant. And now sitting on a consequence he doesn't yet know he has.
When the redundancy came, he did what anyone would do. He used part of his pension to clear debt and give himself room to breathe. It was a reasonable decision under real pressure.
What he doesn't know yet is that accessing that pension triggered something called the Money Purchase Annual Allowance - a rule that permanently caps how much he can now contribute to a pension in the future. The window he thought was still open has quietly narrowed
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Three decades of steady, skilled work ended without warning
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A pension accessed under pressure to manage debt and survive the gap
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The MPAA now limits future contributions to £10,000 a year - a fraction of the standard allowance
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Part-time work found, steadier ground reached - but the relief masks what's changed beneath it
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Reskilling on his mind, determination intact, mortgage nearly paid - the foundations are there
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But the full picture of where he now stands hasn't been drawn.
Rick isn't struggling because he was reckless. He's in this position because he was in a crisis and made a human decision. The system penalises that decision long after the crisis has passed, and it does so quietly - in the small print of a rule most people have never heard of.
He deserves to know. And once he does, there are still real options - if someone helps him see them clearly.
A Conversation about the Future
Future Pathways moves beyond incremental thinking to encourage systemic insight into the future of work, wellbeing and finances. A future where:
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Careers are longer and include multiple stages of learning, working, caring and reinvention
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Access to advice and support can significantly alter how futures unfold
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Motivations shift across life stages, reshaping what people want from work
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Workplaces span multiple generations, demanding new thinking about talent and flexibility
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Organisations redesign career paths, with new models of flexible and phased work
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Retirement becomes more varied - less a destination, more a gradual transition
Future Pathways creates a shared space for collective discovery and debate. Through structured prompts and reflective discussion, participants examine their assumptions about ageing, productivity, pensions and career pathways. It brings together people from different stages of life so that diverse perspectives can emerge - transforming complex demographic issues into practical, engaging conversations.
If you’d like to find out more about Future Pathways and how it could help your organisation, please get in touch via Kay@ageirrelevance.com