future mapping

Vision: A nonprofit startup starts with a vision. There must be some large, intractable problem, for which the solution is hard to capture value from. This must be the animating vision behind the nonprofit, like Stripe’s ‘increasing the GDP of the internet’ or SpaceX’s ‘colonize Mars’. The vision must be sufficiently ambitious to attract talent

Imagining is a rigorous discipline. Imagination is our greatest national resource, one that drives value creation across the sciences, the humanities, the arts, and business. All compelling entrepreneurial ventures, transformative social movements, and technological breakthroughs begin with an inspired sense of possibility.

"The future will have enough robots. Brads will stand out by not being one of them." - Adam Morgan

even as the most popular doll in the world, Mattel looked to confront the way they’d always done things. “We attacked every aspect of the business, from product to communication to content to social mission,” McKnight explained. This helped them ask more upstream questions about their own incumbency – challenging themselves to think about what

There was a widespread recognition that movements were having to react defensively to crises with short-term strategies and that this needed to be balanced with the building of longer-term visions.

challenges to long-held assumptions take place when individuals dive deeper and deeper into anticipatory imagination and provocation, and this opens the door to transformative realities that profoundly change the perspective of the foresight practitioner. Consequently, the possibility of these new worlds become an internal experience that can no

Cultures vary in the degree to which they value openness and tolerate uncertainty. Some cultures lead people to experience anxiety in situations that are ambiguous or unpredictable, and these cultures are structured in ways that make the world seem more stable and predictable through strict rules and laws, shared beliefs, and circumscribed ways of