Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Ten-Year Forecast Spring 2009 Retreat
2009 is an extraordinary year for thinking about the future, with an environment of extreme uncertainty and immediate pressures on virtually every organization. We have an equally extraordinary program to help organizations use this transformative time to position themselves for what will undoubtedly be a new era in our economy and our society.
This year the Ten-Year Forecast team has done what we always do. We've scanned the horizon for the most important new innovations and potential disruptions. We've conducted our bi-annual Signals Survey to create a quantitative scan of what we're calling the Pulse of the Decade. We have created Perspectives on five 21st century ideas and a 2009 Map of the Decade.
And we've done much more.
Anticipating a major change in the global institutional landscape, we've conducted the first massively multiplayer forecasting game. We've drawn on the insights, concerns, and strategies of 6000 players to "superstruct" the future.
To Superstruct means building an upward extension above a baseline structure. In the world of bridges and buildings, for example, superstructures are designed to improve seismic performance in earthquakes.
We think society is in the process of building a host of new superstructures that will improve our capacity to survive not only a difficult decade but the unprecedented environmental challenges of this century. The Superstruct game has given us the first glimpses of what these superstructures—and the process of superstructing—might look like.
At the TYF Annual Retreat we will:
• Examine the five superthreats that formed the basis of the game: health, food, energy, security, and global migration.
• Explore five 21st century ideas that challenge our assumptions about governance, society, engineering, cognition, and reality,
• Anticipate the ecology of superstructures that are likely to emerge in the next decade and how they will change the options for your organization.
• Distill the basic lessons of superstructing for success in a world of extreme-scale collaboration—and develop a plan for superstructing your own organization.
• Place today's choices in the context of a guiding set of 50-year scenarios for our global world.
We know it's hard, in times like these, to connect the dots between quarterly pressures to perform and long-distance views of the organizational environment. But it is especially in times like these that we can take advantage of external disruptions to renew, reinvent, and reposition ourselves for what comes next. And what comes next will be very different from what has gone before.
Come join us in April and let us help you connect the dots—and launch the next era of your organization. Our Annual Retreat will be at Cavallo Point
in the Marin Headlands, just north of San Francisco. The meeting will
begin with lunch at noon on Monday, April 20, and conclude with a wine
and cheese reception at 5:00 pm on Tuesday, April 21.