Category: Resources

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.

A higher education administrator was at a career crossroads. As she approached the standard retirement age, traditional career mapping suggested a linear path forward.

Strategic Foresight is the key to reframing our outdated, Industrial Age processes that are no longer effective in our Postnormal environment. One such antiquated process is Career Development.

In this volatile environment, people are searching for new ways to explore their options and plan their careers. However, employees must change the way they approach the situation if they are going to successfully move to new opportunities and thrive amidst our changing world. To chart a future-ready career path, there are three skills individuals can adopt: sense, mesh, transform.

Leaders and companies often tell me how much they love design thinking. It provides them a tangible way to “think outside of the box” and create new pathways toward innovative action. However, once they integrate it into their organizational strategy and processes, they also tell me that they feel like a key element is still missing.

Environmental scanning is the most critical practice for all foresight practitioners. But where to begin with sourcing interesting scan hits? The internet is an endless ocean of information, littered with misinformation and distractions. Even if you have a solid grip on how to conduct quality futures intelligence, good scan hits can be hard to come by– that is, until you know where to look. Below is a list of our favorite sources along with our community’s. Use it to kick-start…

We have a tradition at TFS for a few years running- each July we hold “Listmas in July”. Toward the end of each year, futurists typically have a field day with lists. Top 10 Trends for 2022, 20 Major Trends for the Next Decade, Best Tech Trends for Your Company… You spend an afternoon reading through these lists and– voila!– you have everything you need to take your leadership, organizational development and innovation incubator to the next level. See how…

TFS: How do you establish a regular scanning practice? There’s so much information out there, and only so many hours in the day. I want to be efficient, but I also want to make sure that I’m not missing anything when I look for trends and emerging issues. Can you give me some suggestions? – Sincerely, Feeling Overwhelmed!

We often joke that since the pandemic we have not had to advocate for futures thinking to skeptics nearly as strongly as we used to. The disruption proved to be a meaningful shockwave across all disciplines, forcing us all to seriously reevaluate priorities and the antiquated systems that keep us from reaching our higher order potential. Reactionary, short-term, quantitative, and mechanical approaches are ill-equipped to carry humanity into the future, or “what got us here, won’t get us there”. Luckily,…