Twenty years ago, terms such as "sustainability," "environmentalism," and "health" were virtually unknown in business strategy circles. Today, all of these concepts have evolved broader and more complex definitions and they have moved from the margins to the center of business activity.

The 2008 Ten-Year Forecast Annual Retreat, "The Future is a New View of Life," took place in San Francisco, CA on April 9 & 10. Materials from this meeting are available for download to TYF members, including:

2008 TYF Map of the Decade (SR-1142)

The future is everything we can imagine: the fearsome, the inspiring, the inexplicable, the essential. 40 years ago, our founders imagined a world in which it would be possible to improve human lives and build better institutions by thinking systematically about the future. Today, we call this practice "Foresight to Insight to Action."

This map is a dynamic work-in-progress, and will likely change throughout the year. Stay tuned for updates.

The coming decade is the embarking. Spurred by unavoidable signs of a planet at risk, we begin to look for new ways of living, new ways of measuring and valuing the world around us. What was marginal begins to look mainstream, as people who have been tending the edges of our global culture demand our attention and capture our imagina- tions with unexpected templates for what is possible when the familiar order isn’t quite so orderly.

The future is a passage through worlds we’ve yet to imagine.

Human transitions are accomplished through passages—whether culturally sanctioned personal rites of passage or huge migrations that, only in retrospect, can be seen as movements from one way of life to another. These passages are often stormy, frightening, chaotic. They call on previously untapped human abilities, both personal and cultural, to navigate through worlds that appear to be disintegrating, hopefully to put the pieces back together in a new configuration, a new kind of living.

A decade of shapeshifting. The material and the digital worlds have traditionally struggled against each other, each working to overcome the constraints or mimic the affordances of the other. Now, pervasive technologies are bringing about a partnership between the material and digital, and the relationships among humans, machines, and environments are becoming more tightly interconnected and interdependent.

A group economy threads together past visions of emergence, new kinds of capital, collective action, grassroots economics, and smart networks—and undoes our traditional ideas about economies of scale and the role of large institutions.
Meanwhile, lightweight infrastructures spin complex and creative ecologies out of very small world technologies, individual agency, and smart networks, building grassroots economics into physical structures that bind us together even as we pursue our own ends.

A new capacity for rapid, ad hoc, and distributed decision making is emerging from the intersection of technologies of cooperation and new knowledge about the nature of cooperation and cooperative strategies. This report investigates the challenges, strategies, technologies, and best practices that will shape this new capacity.

The truth is that we humans face tough times ahead—not 50 to 100 years from now, but by the end of this decade. Whether or not we believe that CO2 is a pollutant responsible for global climate change, the truth is that extreme climate events will increasingly threaten crops, ocean-side properties, city infrastructures, and human life within the coming decade. Megacities will sprawl across the developed and developing world alike, their ecological footprints stepping all over one another.

The future is a look around the corner, a different perspective on the place we live right now.

The perspective this year is sober. We humans are fundamentally changing the face of the earth. We are about to become a predominantly urban species, living in megacities of over 20 million inhabitants. We are altering the global climate, creating extreme variations in intensity of natural weather events. We are becoming more extreme in our political and religious views and more dependent on complex, and ultimately vulnerable, technological infrastructures.