Seven team members. Two hours in Amsterdam. The brief was to step out of operations and open up to the long view before a strategy day.
Biosphere Solar is a sustainable technology startup developing a circular solar panel that can be upgraded, refurbished, and recycled. Their long-term vision is a global, smart, distributed network of local manufacturing and maintenance hubs supporting a fair, open-source, and circular solar energy industry.
The company operates at the intersection of technology, sustainability, and community. Beyond product innovation, they are committed to knowledge-sharing and collaboration as tools to accelerate the energy transition. The team regularly engages with practitioners and citizens through meetups and exchanges, including collaborations with the BlueCity community in Rotterdam, where they are based.
The session took place at De Ceuvel in Amsterdam in March 2025, a site known for experimental sustainability, circular practices, and community-led innovation. It ran for two hours with seven team members.
The goal was to support team cohesion, shift attention away from short-term operational concerns, and create mental space for long-term visioning ahead of a strategy session. The session combined the standard Timescape card set with custom cards built for Biosphere Solar's context, addressing Solar Punk futures and the future of energy systems.
The flow moved from light ice-breakers to paired conversations, then into speculative exercises imagining futures from the year 2125. The session ended with participants writing their own Timescape cards and exploring them with each other. Lunch followed, then the afternoon strategy session.
Ahead of the session, a preparatory meeting was held with one of the founders to understand the company's values, long-term ambitions, and internal dynamics.
Based on that conversation, 16 custom Timescape cards were developed for the session, covering Solarpunk futures, energy as currency, the future of energy systems, and circular economy models. These complemented the standard deck and kept the exploration close to the company's strategic and cultural context while still opening space for imagination.
Positioned at the start of the strategy day, the Timescaping session helped participants step out of operational thinking and engage with broader questions of direction, responsibility, and possibility.
Participants reported high engagement and a strong sense of shared orientation before entering concrete planning discussions.
'The Timescaping session was a powerful start to our strategy day. It helped us zoom out from the daily grind and shift into long-term thinking. It opened up space for bold ideas and deeper alignment, a perfect primer for the meaningful strategy work that followed.'
- Siemen Brinksma, Co-founder, Biosphere Solar
Feedback from this session confirmed that Timescaping works best when people understand what they are being guided through, not just what they are doing. Several participants noted that explicitly naming the cognitive shift from analytical problem-solving to a more open, associative mode of thinking helped them trust the process more fully.
Later sessions introduced a clearer narrative backbone drawing on neuroscience and flow research, making the direction explicit. Participants are not just imagining futures. They are deliberately opening up their thinking, individually and collectively.
This adjustment has since been applied across contexts, with sessions tuned to be either more playful and science-fiction-driven or more reflective and strategic depending on the group.
