Institute For The Future

Reflections on the 33rd Annual Ten-Year Forecast Retreat

Re-balancing our unsustainable, massively inequitable world seems daunting, but we have no other choice. We see a decade of unprecedented change and re-invention on the horizon. Some of the futures we forecasted point to widespread collapse of existing institutions and infrastructures, others to radical transformation and the emergence of new systems. However, one thing is certain: whichever future we arrive at, the world of 2021 will be very different than the world we know today.

 

Given these forecasts, the challenge we posed to recent TYF retreat attendees, and to everyone else, is clear. We must rebalance everything—from wealth and wellness to our urban and rural landscapes—so we can build a new kind of social resilience for the century to come. Doing so involves imagining a world that seems impossible today—something we’ve been doing at IFTF since our founding. Fortunately, TYF participants—who hail from all kinds of institutions: large global corporations and small entrepreneurial start-ups, long-standing government institutions and novel social networks—were up to the challenge as well.

 

To help them do this, we brought noted practical visionaries—those we identified as innovators who see the future and are working to change the world—as well as researchers from IFTF, probed the future of basic resources like time, land, and money. Panelists explored the meaning of changes in our languages and laws, our communities, and even our rituals of death. (2011 Ten-Year Forecast research materials are now available to sponsors.)

 

 

 

To make this abstract, complex, and sometimes even scary information more accessible, this TYF retreat had more video than any other year. We had interviews with our practical visionaries that included footage of their projects and we also saw excerpts from David Evan Harris’ Global Lives Project. His short documentaries offer a glimpse into the lives of people from every region of the world—old and young, relatively affluent and trapped in crushing poverty. These videos put a human face on the future and its stakeholders.

 

Armed with these insights, we broke into small teams that brought together a few individuals from each group—clients, visionaries, and IFTF staff. We played a game, "Stack-It! Build a Resilient Household," designed to address the essential question of the moment: how can we recreate our global economy from the bottom up, creating a strong foundation of resilient households? The breakout discussions throughout the retreat, and the afternoon of “Stack-It!” gameplay, we worked actively to solve the problems facing us in the next decade, but it will take more than a couple days to devise real solutions. Hopefully, retreat attendees will use the gameboards and cards they took home—as well as the research findings we presented to them—to develop strategies to bring to next year’s retreat. I know we at the Institute will, as we anxiously await seeing everyone again at the 2012 Ten-Year Forecast.