How to Think Like a Futurist: A Leader’s Guide to Strategic Foresight and Better Decision Making
Learn how futures thinking helps leaders navigate change with clarity. A senior design futurist shares tools and mindsets to make long-term strategy actionable.
From unprecedented technological acceleration to climate change and political unrest, we are living in precarious times. But with uncertainty comes opportunity for positive change. We believe that through understanding, foresight, and creativity we can create tools that not only allow insight into forces at play but help shape democratic, positive, rewarding futures.
Here is a selection of projects from the Near Future Laboratory, both commercial, organic, and exploratory: workshops, software, product design, design fiction and more.
e-flux was founded by artists in 1999 as an independent platform for contemporary art, culture, and critical thought. Over the past twenty-five years, it has developed into a trusted point of reference for artists, curators, writers, and institutions worldwide.
The Journal of Futures Studies is an open-access, globally-oriented, trans-disciplinary refereed journal. Its mission is to develop high-quality, futures-oriented research and thinking, based on the evolving knowledge base of Futures Studies. The journal features research in areas of foresight, forecasting, long-range planning, visioning and other related areas, from any of the main research frameworks of futures studies – empirical, interpretative, critical and action learning.
Near Future Laboratory works with organizations on commissioned futures strategy, artifact-led prototyping, design fiction, speculative prototyping, workshops tied to active initiatives, and select advisory engagements. The practice brings AI futures, socio-technical systems, STS, and anticipatory research into tangible forms that teams can inspect, debate, and use.
London-based writer and futurist, William James Fox, started Future Timeline back in 2008. It began as a relatively small and obscure website with a brief list of future predictions. Over the years, however, it expanded to form a lengthy and detailed timeline – running from the present day, through the next century and beyond, all the way to the end of the universe itself.
Archaeologies of Indigenous Futurity: American Anthropologist
How can anthropologists use our unique disciplinary tool kit to craft empowering narratives grounded in Indigenous worldviews and futures rather than settler ones? To address this question, we turn to the concepts of “futurity” and “futurism” to frame Indigenous cultures as replete with emergent technologies, geographies, and ontologies. The essays gathered here attend to how Indigenous futures are rendered knowable in archives, land-based practices, and material engagements that both emerge from and intervene in the past and present. Across this collection of case studies, contributors explore how futurity inhabits fields of relation shaped by colonial disruption in the United States and Canada as well through a wider range of actions, including hope, obligation, persistence, creativity, and refusal. These orientations generate practices that sustain communities, rework histories, and unsettle colonial narratives of loss, disappearance, and constraint. By exploring divergent expressions of futurity, this collection emphasizes the generative, relational, and transformative capacities of Indigenous people and communities within ongoing projects of self-determination.
The future of AI is a site of considerable philosophical and cultural anxiety in the West. Given the future of AI is currently only available to publics through literary or fictional tropes, it’s vital that we investigate the historical evolution of these literary or fictional tropes of AI to understand its future direction.
Our work understands and anticipates the social impacts of technologies. Care is the organising principle for everything we do: care for and about people and the planet, combined with a rigorous and diligent approach to investigating uncertainty.
Futures studies is an art and a science with a strong emphasis on imagination and creativity in creating different possible futures. Its main purpose is to discover and master the complex chains of cause and effect through conceptualization, systemic approach, and feedback loops, ultimately providing innovation in the social and technological fields.
A Futures Thinking Engagement Framework is insight & foresight's structured process of 5 components (Signals, Sense-making, Scenarios, Situations, Souvenirs) and 2 enablers (Sparring, Spaces) that helps organisations explore uncertainty, anticipate change and make better decisions.
An online/digital version of the analog card set used by Design Fiction professionals worldwide. Rather than physical cards, this is a browser-based interactive version that allows users to shuffle and draw cards from the various decks: Attributes, Actions, Objects, Archetypes, and Extras. Each card is represented with high-quality images of the original cards, maintaining the visual appeal of the physical set. Users can explore different combinations of cards to inspire their design fiction projects, just like they would with the physical kit. This online edition makes the Work Kit of Design Fiction accessible to a broader audience, allowing designers and storytellers around the world to utilize this creative tool in their work.
Earth 2050 it's an interactive project that provides a fascinating glimpse at a future based on predictions from futurologists, scientists, and Internet users from all corners of the globe.
Resources | Center for Worldbuilding and Storytelling
Human beings have always been storytellers, sharing life experiences in different forms of media for different audiences and different purposes. RIT provides a wide range of classes that broadly explore diverse types of storytelling and worldbuilding.
Institute for the Future has spent over 55 years helping people prepare for what comes next. Asking “what if?” allows us to transcend the limits of short-term thinking, to change course before it’s too late, and to see future possibilities framed in intensely human terms.
IFTF - Drivers and Signals: How Are They Different?
Signals and drivers are two pillars of foresight practice at IFTF, yet many workshop attendees struggle to fully understand the two concepts and how they differ from one another. Understanding the distinct meanings and functions of these two terms as well as understanding the relationship between these two concepts is critical to building a strong forecast.
