Looking back and dreaming forward with Michelle Shevin.

This winter, we had the pleasure of catching up with Michelle Shevin, a Luminary Labs alumna who helps visionary leaders and organizations make sense of and navigate the present moment.

Joining the firm as a senior associate in 2013 and working through 2017 as a research strategist, she supported research and sensemaking across our focus areas. As a skilled researcher, Michelle contributed to the culture of curiosity and research practices that continue to define the firm today — from outreach and network-building to understanding and making sense of complex spaces. During her tenure at Luminary Labs, Michelle played a vital role in the CTE Makeover Challenge, the Mood Challenge for ResearchKit, and the Merck | Heritage Provider Network Innovation Challenge, among others.

After Luminary Labs, Michelle joined the Ford Foundation, where she led a grant-making program focused on digital rights and justice. Today, she works with organizations, foundations, and movement leaders through the Future Preservation Society, a consulting firm she founded in 2025. We spoke to Michelle from her current home base in the woods about her Luminary Labs memories and her work to seed better futures. 

What problems (or projects) did you work on at Luminary Labs?

When I was at Luminary Labs, we were doing a lot of work related to career and technical education and adult learning, as well as mood and mental health. I also worked on public safety problems, like detecting foodborne pathogens and airborne biohazards. We worked on a real breadth of topics with clients across sectors, from pharmaceutical companies to government agencies, foundations, and nonprofits. 

I conducted research to support work across the company: informing our approach to a particular RFP or opportunity; research to find people to serve as judges, mentors, or challenge participants; or just generally supporting challenge design. My special sauce was really sensemaking and horizon-scanning to keep the insight production machine current and cohesive. I facilitated a lot of horizon-scanning activities to help the team be creative and innovative.

What is something you learned at Luminary Labs that you continue to value today?

At Luminary Labs there is a big focus on lateral innovation, or seeing across silos. People tend to bring a scientific, positivist management paradigm to the world; most humans tend to think about things as discrete problems in specific sectors and divide everything into its constituent parts. But I loved that the work we were doing necessitated us to look across those silos. 

I remember preparing a proposal to help NASA speed up computational fluid dynamics — which I knew nothing about, as is always the case at the start of these efforts. NASA was already working with all of the known computational fluid dynamics experts, so we had to figure out who else could help them? We came up with disease epidemiologists. It was really cool to get to think about how expertise in a totally different area could apply to a very specific challenge. In another similar example, we were working on the interplay of mental health and Type 2 diabetes. This work really helped me understand myself as part of what’s now being called the interstitium. I’m really interested in the connective tissue and the relationships between people, ideas, and systems. 

The other thing I’ll just mention quickly is that I really learned how to do client services — the “white glove” service. Little things like always saying “we,” not “I,” in emails to a client to convey the work of the team and not just what I did. Or the importance of actionable headlines — “fighting titles,” as we called them — and clear slides. Luminary Labs is a really good place to build translatable skills and to learn how to work as part of a team to produce real value for clients. Innovation is not easy. You don’t just press a button and innovation comes out. So learning to work collaboratively, providing a high quality of service while also producing novel insights, was really important to me. These skills have served me really well in every context I’ve been in since.

Do you have a favorite Luminary Labs memory?

I mean, so many. One that comes to mind for sure is part of the Mood Challenge for ResearchKit, a program funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that called for proposed studies using Apple’s ResearchKit. We got to take a trip to Apple HQ in Cupertino to learn about all the app device settings that they can enable on a case-by-case basis that allow for data extraction and then insight development. The winning team ended up demonstrating that typing speed and typing patterns can be predictive of oncoming mania or depressive episodes in people who live with bipolar disorder. I knew going into this project that our devices are surveillance and data extraction machines, but this work gave me a better understanding of not just the ubiquity of surveillance infrastructure, but also the power dynamics that determine who has access to that data, the insights it provides, and whether or not that information is used for our benefit or manipulation. Apple was really careful about this, at least when we worked with them, but of course, not every company behaves that way. That trip was a really important learning moment for me, and I thought about it often in my subsequent work on digital rights and justice issues, and surveillance and privacy in particular.

I’ll also just say I love and appreciate that Luminary Labs knows how to party. The annual parties have always been epic. It’s a place that really values its staff and makes team members feel appreciated. 

What are you working on right now?

After Luminary Labs, I spent seven years at the Ford Foundation doing digital rights and justice work. At Luminary Labs, there was a lot of focus on design, innovation, and technology, which prepared me well, but we also had a practice of looking at the margins and the intersections between things. That ended up serving me really well in social justice work.

After finishing my term at the Ford Foundation, I created something called the Future Preservation Society, an LLC where I work directly with organizations that are, as I put it, seeding better futures. This work came out of a realization that built gradually, then all at once: We’ve over-indexed on predicting the future by extrapolating from the present. We are under-indexed on attunement, sensemaking, and meaning-making in community with each other. As a result, we do a lot of data analysis and problem-solving across sectors, but we’re not always investing enough resources and energy in relational infrastructure for transformation. As a side effect of this, the future — in popular conception — has become something to prevent. Dystopia is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed, to paraphrase William Gibson.

The Future Preservation Society is really a vehicle to be playful and experimental with other organizations and individuals who are seeking meaning and relational infrastructure while also meeting the gravity of the moment. I work in a few core areas. The first is organizational resilience and network-hardening. I help organizations, foundations, and movement leaders think about and enhance their physical, legal, and digital security. The second area is focused on ecosystem cultivation and resource mobilization. A lot of people would describe that as fundraising, but for me, it’s really about partnership, connectivity, and through lines across work that people are doing in different sectors or through different organizational outfits. And then the third area is really a continuation of what I did a lot of at Luminary Labs: research and insight generation for clients working at interesting intersections. I have one client that is working on AI and democracy and I have another client focused on music and social change. I am also doing some work on climate and mental health. 

What’s the most exciting thing about your current work organization?

The scientific management and problem-solving paradigm is collapsing, and yet all of our systems, all of our structures, and all of our sectors are fully bought into that paradigm. This paradigm insists that we understand things at the level of their individual, constituent parts, that we dissect and atomize them to figure out linear cause and effect. Like, if we do this thing here, that other thing happens. But it just feels to me like that paradigm has actually fallen out underneath us and that we’re actually like Wile E. Coyote, already off the cliff but still spinning our legs. 

This used to really freak me out, but now I think it’s really cool that we’re out over a chasm, propelled only by our own momentum. I think it’s a really cool opportunity at this point, even if we’re going to have to live in it for a while before we see all of its contours. Part of what I see my work as doing is bringing attention and amplification to the fact that we’ve actually already experienced and continue to experience that fundamental shift in context. 

What underrated or underhyped issue, trend, or innovation is on your radar, and what do you wish more people were thinking about?

I’m feeling a magnetic pull toward the idea of “right relationship,” which is more of an orientation than a destination. There is plenty of bad news to pay attention to and there are plenty of places where we’re still trying to line up linear cause and effect and trying to establish and reinforce these hard binaries of what good and bad looks like. Often, we continue doing business as usual at the opportunity cost of reorganizing ourselves for what I would describe as adaptive relationality that can hold us through unpredictable change. We need to actually pay attention to where communities are exercising agency and attunement and really orienting themselves toward right relationship.

It isn’t really about figuring out what’s good and bad, what’s right or wrong. It’s really just about figuring out how to be in community with each other and on the planet that we live on. That is a pretty fundamental shift in orientation. My practice is really about learning how to live in many worlds at once. It’s not about shutting down our problem-solving infrastructure, but really about the need for concurrent structures that recognize the centrality of relationships and the importance of reciprocity in all things. And so that feels like a fundamental thing that really drives and orients my work and my practice. It’s not really about throwing off the vestiges of the old world and jumping suddenly to somewhere new.

Is there something you’ve read or seen or listened to lately that you would really want others to know about?

I just started reading a book that was gifted to me by a dear friend. It’s called “Faith, Hope, and Carnage.” It’s essentially a long conversation between Nick Cave, the musician, and a dear friend of his. It’s a series of long conversations about grief and love and creativity, and I’m finding it particularly cathartic that they openly and repeatedly discuss COVID-19. The pandemic was a world-changing phenomenon that is continuing to harm and disable thousands of people in ways that we don’t yet fully understand. For me, COVID-19 was an irreversible awakening regarding how to take better care of myself and my community and the planet.

I haven’t finished the book yet, but I was immediately like, “Oh, thank goodness.” I realized I was missing that and got a lot of catharsis from this book treating the pandemic as a real and central thing.

Tell us about something that brings you joy. 

I love this question. It’s already a long winter, so I’m particularly attuned to small moments of joy right now. They feel revolutionary. 

I put on a record last week, King Con by Alex Winston. There was a particular song that came on, the song “Guts,” and I was irresistibly belting it out and dancing around my living room. I read once that the job of artists is to make the revolution irresistible. I always love those moments when a song makes you dance and sing out loud.

I love that you ended on this question because I think being attuned to joy is a really critical practice among the stress and fear and uncertainty that we’re all facing. Music is just an incredibly powerful technology for personal and social change.