Articles

What is futures thinking? Is it the same as Strategic Foresight? What makes someone a futurist? Futures thinking is a mindset that is most commonly associated with creative problem-solving and bold, provoking innovations. Strategic Foresight is a decades-old discipline that allows us to create functional views of alternative futures and possibilities. Through this process,  organizations are better prepared for potential threats and are able to capitalize on hidden opportunities. You can think of Strategic Foresight as a sport, a futurist…

We gathered the Global Foresight Advisory Council and a few alumni to participate in an inspirational discussion with Peachie Dioquino-Valera joining us from the Philippines. Topics included Peachie’s involvement with Climate Works, her focus on inspiring youth to have agency in their futures, the importance of decolonizing the future and regenerative futures, and the power of integrating empathy into futures work.

This webcast was originally recorded on August 20, 2021. Foresight can be considered as a mental technology that expands the user’s perspective across time and space. If employed well, foresight can make us more empathetic, more mindful, and more aware. In short, it can open us to new opportunities and empower us to make better decisions in the present. Creating the future is a spiritual practice. Foresight fosters an awareness of the interconnections between all things across time and space.…

In 2014 I was asked to step out of the day-to-day of the business I helped launch and assume the new role of Chief Strategy Officer. The role was mine to define, but it rose out of the need for our organization, a provider of financial services, to become deliberate in our growth. We had grown from a business plan in 2007 to a balance sheet that experienced 1000% growth and made the Inc. 500 in 2012. I was struggling…

President and CEO of the Orlando Economic Partnership’s Tim Giuliani and Kedge Founder/TFS Co-Founder Frank Spencer discuss how Strategic Foresight is the core to the seven-county region’s Launch to Tomorrow.

The conditions are right for us to find solutions to our long-standing problems if we have the courage to be adaptive, resilient and transformative (ART).

For Rainer Rilke, poet and novelist, the future wasn’t a distant and nonexistent concept that could be flippantly disconnected from the present. Rather, the seeds of the future were contained within the present, and those seeds were waiting to grow and blossom. To extend the analogy, the human race is the fertile ground for the seeds of the future, and that soil is the key to the ultimate manifestation and expression of what is waiting to emerge. In order to…

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, we can cling to our vision and mission, but we have no hope of clinging to strategy.

For many of us, the question of how to prepare our organizations for the future usually centers on current trends. We consume “Top Trends of 20YY” content with gusto, and shell out hundreds of dollars for annual industry trend reports. After all, they give us a warm, fuzzy feeling of being “in the know,” and may even spur exciting conversation about new initiatives. But the confidence inspired by some expert’s interpretation of the tea leaves is fleeting in today’s VUCA…

Have you ever wondered if NASA has made alien contact?  Well, I know firsthand that they have, because I had the honor of being NASA’s alien visitor! In August 2017, I was asked to serve as the speaker for the NASA iTech Speaker Series at the Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. The room was filled with brilliant individuals who go to work every day to create ideas and innovations around space travel and exploration, private and commercial flight, and…