on better futures

We are in the early stages of a profound transformation of our global economy and society. To navigate successfully through these changes, we will need to embrace a very different leadership model. We will need to seek out and nurture explorers, rather than experts.

I’ve developed a certain tenderness for the glitch: the riddled, dysfunctional thing that evades the conditions of what might be expected and what might be known, rupturing unfamiliar territories, or maybe a glimpse into a second reality that has been there all along

Innovation in a caring society must not only generate profit but create better outcomes for everyone. This is possible, but it requires care for people and planet to be valued as highly as capital – and for wellbeing to be incentivised as much as shareholder return.

How do we spot ‘glimmers’ of the futures we all dream of? What forms of knowledge, and whose voices do we need to be attuned to, to ensure we are seeing these possibilities for what they are?

“The Emergent Future” instead challenges us to “ think transformationally, act transitionally ” to manifest futures-empowered landscapes of care, empathy, reconciliation, and love in our organizations, governments, and social entities, allowing us to align with much healthier expressions of our biological, psychological, and sacred experiences

‘It is one thing to say ‘Another World Is Possible.’ It’s another thing to experience it, however momentarily.’

poetics and politics can be reshaped. Organizers are aspiring authors and artists, creating elements of stories, in constellations we are often unaware of, with pockets of unseen work happening far and wide. Creating connection, potential, and possibility is creative work. We are in a moment when we must hold prediction and possibility all at once.

We could bemoan the fact that things have come to this, or we could steal the tricks and channel all of that weird energy into something productive, something that makes peoples’ everyday lives better.

At the Institute for the Future we believe that the value of futures thinking is not in predicting the future (something no one can do), but in imagining possibilities of what the future could be. And if there was ever a time we needed such imagination, it is today.