IFTF: 2011 Ten-Year Forecast

2011 Ten-Year Forecast

2011 Ten-Year Forecast: Rebalancing the World

Stepping into the second decade of the 21st century, we encounter a world that is out of balance—and the growing awareness that the task ahead is one of rebalancing everything from wealth and health to our urban and rural landscapes. We look ahead to a decade of unprecedented reinvention as we work across the globe to achieve a new balance—and build a new kind of social resilience for the century to come.

2011 Map of the Decade

The 2011 Map of the Decade is all about balancing acts. From the strategic balances at the bottom to the resilient households at the top, it is both a snapshot of the decade ahead and a guide to the task of rebalancing the world. It’s a starting place for exploring the social innovations that will create an entirely new strategic toolkit for addressing the world’s imbalances while securing the daily lives of individuals, households, corporations, and communities.

Perspectives: In Search of Social Resilience

Imbalance, if left unattended, leads to collapse. And in the coming decade, the world will grapple with basic resources like money, land, and time to remediate these imbalances.
We will give new meanings to our lives with fundamental changes in our legal and linguistic tools, our community markers, and even death itself.
New frameworks for adaptation and evolution, based on new science, will give us new adaptive strategies and guide us in the global balancing act.
The solutions won’t look like the solutions of the past: neither markets nor governments can make adjustments on the scale that will be necessary. Rather we’ll tap a deep reservoir of social innovations that are slowly transforming our ability to rebalance the world in ways that no previous generation could have imagined. Ground zero for these innovations will be the household.