Institute for the Future to Teach Nation’s Mayors How to Envision Brighter Futures for their Cities

 

Futurists hold panel at the 86th Annual Meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors to teach the nation’s mayors how to apply futures thinking to issues relevant to the future of their cities.

Boston, June 7, 2018 — Institute for the Future (IFTF) will join the nation’s mayors at the 86th Annual Meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors June 8-10 to help city leaders better embrace futures thinking and creatively envision brighter futures for their cities.

Mayors are often the visionaries of a city and their decisions can have a very noticeable and immediate impact on people’s lives. IFTF’s workshop, “Mayors as Futurists: A Hands-on Workshop,” will give mayors hands-on experience in applying futures-thinking techniques to issues relevant to the futures of their cities, and in imagining artifacts from their cities decades in the future.

These artifacts—an imagined object used in everyday life in the future that helps us envision the world in which they would exist—will serve as concrete starting points for creative discussions helping leaders prepare for the future by addressing today’s challenges.

“If mayors are truly in charge of the future, then they must expand their capacity for thinking usefully about the future,” said Jake Dunagan, director of the Governance Futures Lab at IFTF, who will lead the workshop. “Mayors have already shown great enthusiasm for this type of thinking, which is a signal of what may be a growing movement of ‘futurist mayors’.”

 

The workshop will introduce mayors to a range of essential practices for improving foresight. The future is not completely predictable, but neither is it completely unknowable. What exists is a space of multiple possibilities that can be systematically identified and understood. Participants will be introduced to core theories, methods and tools of effective foresight. Dunagan and other world-renowned foresight practitioners will introduce core concepts in futures thinking and lead participants through a series of exercises to get hands-on experience with the tools.

Mayors will leave the workshop with suggestions on how to incorporate foresight methods into their daily activities.

“We are now a mostly urban country, and mostly urban planet,” Dunagan said. “Mayors will be critical as future-oriented leaders and these foresight skills and communication techniques will be essential.”

The workshop will be held Sunday, June 10 from 4-5pm. For more information, contact Erin Musgrave at [email protected] or (530) 864-7014.

 

 

About Institute for the Future

Institute for the Future (IFTF) is celebrating its 50th anniversary as the world’s leading non-profit strategic futures organization. The core of our work is identifying emerging discontinuities that will transform global society and the global marketplace. We provide organizations with insights into business strategy, design process, innovation, and social dilemmas. Our research spans a broad territory of deeply transformative trends, from health and health care to technology, the workplace, and human identity. IFTF is based in Palo Alto, California. For more, visit www.iftf.org.

 

 

Media Contacts:

Erin Musgrave
(530) 864-7014
[email protected]

Jean Hagan
(650)740-1386
[email protected]