Category: Resources

Environmental scanning is the lifeblood of Strategic Foresight. You can be a futurist and never make a single scenario, but you can’t be a futurist if you never scan. Scanning helps us to rewire our brains and supports our pattern and sensemaking skills. After weeks of scanning, it’s time to merge research into something tangible. A collection of scan hits and occurrences unveils that something larger is emerging– a trend! Trends deserve names and solid descriptions that include several examples…

Is the power of foresight best expressed in helping us to make meaningful decisions within our present framework, or in uncovering decisions that we didn’t even know we needed to make? (Better yet, ones that we COULD make if we realized our higher-order potential.) In this video, Futurists Sohail Inayatullah (Metafutures) and Frank Spencer (TFSX) discuss the shifting of our decision-matrix through the powerful lens of transformational futures thinking and foresight. https://vimeo.com/786627033

the year of free is over but Our mission remains In 2022 we launched a grand experiment, granting free tuition, access, and inspiration for the entire year. By all measures, the Year of Free was an unbelievable success, with our community growing and more individuals gaining the skills and mindsets to create more equitable futures. But all good things must come to an end, right? As its name declared, the YEAR of Free was always meant to have a specific…

An excerpt from the Guide to the Natural Foresight® Framework According to a recent study, organizations that intentionally plan for the future outperform their peers in terms of profitability and overall valuation (Rohrbeck & Kum, 2018). The result seems intuitive to most, yet “just one in five companies strategically prepares itself for future movements in the market – and just one in 20 companies adjusts its course of action accordingly” (“Corporate Foresight Improves”, 2018, par. 3). The future moves faster…

Do you love or hate surprises? Is your love language an unexpected gift or do you start distributing your prioritized Amazon wish list well in advance of your birthday?   If you enjoy being surprised, you probably embrace uncertainty and are open to considering different possibilities for the future. But if surprises make you cringe, then the future can seem unsettling. We live in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world that will be full of surprises IF we don’t…

In a world that is enamored with short-term actions, incremental innovation, and quantifying everything, it’s important to understand that “forecasting” and “foresight” are not the same thing. They may have the future in common, but that does not make them equals. Forecasting uses quantitative data and trends in an attempt to fill in gaps and extrapolate outcomes. However, data by its very nature is a snapshot of the past (just as trends are the present – you know about them…

If you’re a Wicked Opportunities Podcast listener or a TFS alumni then you probably know that our founder’s favorite holiday is Halloween. Sorry, All-Hallows Eve as Frank would say! This year we celebrate spooky season by walking down the wickedest memory lane. Our podcast hosts looked under society’s bed and found a lot of scary critters- zombies, mad scientists, and aliens! They didn’t destroy these monsters, but they did reframe them into inspiring visions across multiple futures. Get cozy in…

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?

We want to highlight an organization that is focused on equipping educators and administrative leaders with the mindset and resources to empower their students to own and influence the future.