Category: Transform

When it comes to transforming systems, Adam Kahane has had a front row view. As a key scenario facilitator in the Mont Fleur negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa, and “The Future of Colombia” peace negotiations that brought together rebels (National Liberation Army), resistance leaders (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia/FARC), and various paramilitary factions to transform the country, Kahane learned just how crucial it is to have new stories to create a new reality.  In this interview for our…

It begins with a stark and unambiguous assertion: Foresight and Futures Thinking needs an intervention. Founder, Field Catalyst, and Ecosystem Coordinator Michelle Shevin states that much of the futures thinking seen in institutions like intelligence agencies and multinational corporations “starts with a lie”. She argues for de-centering traditional practices where “Warning signs become sites for new business development” and “Urgent issues are recast as terrain for potential industrial complexes”. Instead, she calls for recognizing the centrality of relationship and love…

Democracy’s tenuous viability is in part due to our exponentially changing landscape of technological access, economic precarity, and environmental collapse. What might be called a “polycrisis” of multiple, simultaneous, and convergent “wicked problems” has flung open the door of widespread fear, doubt, and anger about a landscape where many have been left out of the future altogether. (As well as a present that is devoid of visions for a more hopeful future that starts right now.)

At TFSX, we have spent the past two decades establishing the idea and practice of the Inner Futurist, having created a dynamic philosophy of futures thinking as a cooperative evolutionary trait known as Holoptic Foresight that promotes the democratization of futures thinking, and that undergirds the concepts and implementation of our world-renowned framework known as Natural Foresight.

Leadership qualities tend to be timeless. It’s why we look back through history at the esteemed individuals who led successful businesses, governments and social initiatives. The thinking goes that, if we can emulate these trailblazers, we will be successful leaders too.

It was here in Bell Valley that team members from The Futures School gathered in the Fall of 2022 with fourteen brilliant and kind individuals for a truly unique experience based on rethinking, redefining and reframing foresight for broad-based prosperity, emerging consciousness and cocreation of transformational realities. We called this retreat Transformations of Natural Foresight®.

What are the rules and characteristics of this new era, The Age of Opportunity?

Foresight Lessons from Disney’s Encanto Surely by now you’ve watched or at least heard of the new Disney animated film, “Encanto.” Having been quarantined over Christmas with my 14-year old, I had the pleasure of experiencing the tale of the Madrigals, an enchanted family from Colombia, more times than I care to admit. Due to my repeated viewings as I sheltered in-place on the precipice of COVID’s two-year anniversary, I couldn’t help but draw parallels between one of the movie’s…

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…

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).