Imaginable: How to see the future coming and be ready for anything

Tool #2: How absorbing and immersive is your imagination?

First, EFT is strongly linked with mental well-being.6 People who engage in EFT are more likely to feel optimistic, motivated, and in control of their future. They are less likely to feel anxious or depressed. Researchers believe this is because when you practice EFT, you learn to control your imagination.

Dator’s law is so fundamental to futures thinking that if you visit the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, you will find it painted right on our front windows: “Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”

RULE #5: Turn the World Upside Down. If your imagination feels stuck in the present, then rewrite the facts of today. Make a list of up to one hundred things that are true today, and then flip them upside down so that the opposite is now true. Offer a “ridiculous, at first,” future alternative for each and every example. Spend time mentally immerse

There’s another future scenario lurking underneath this one that is much more likely to happen—in fact, it’s almost inevitable, according to most climate scientists. It’s the possibility that many cities and nations will need to relocate their entire populations over the next fifty years, because of the growing climate crisis. If you change “astero

Make a commitment to spend five minutes each week finding one new signal of change. Pick a day of the week as your clue-finding day. I suggest Tuesday, Clues Day! Or how about Future Friday?

ask everyone to hold up their answers for others to see and then organize themselves in a line—or, more specifically, a timeline. The person who answered with the shortest amount of time goes first in line. The person who answered with the longest amount of time goes last. Everyone else orders themselves from shortest to longest in between.

Here’s the fastest way to turn a signal into a scenario: describe a world in which the signal of change is no longer strange. It’s now widespread and totally normal. Share that description with others. Ask them what they would do, and how they would feel, in this new reality.

The Global Risks Report helped me anticipate the almost unimaginable world of 2019 and 2020 more than a decade in advance, and it can help you see crises years before you have to live through them. So I want you to stop reading right now and, if it’s possible, search online for the latest version of the report. You don’t have to read it now. But go