Institute For The Future

2020 brought profound and unexpected changes to every aspect of life—the deadliest pandemic in a century, Great Depression levels of unemployment and economic strife, global protests for racial justice, the rise of authoritarianism in democratic nations, and the dire circumstances of increasing climate change.

For 2021, IFTF Vantage is dedicating its research to helping foresight professionals inside organizations understand and better prepare for what happens next, by focusing on three critical questions:

• How can organizations anticipate and shape the new foundations of the emerging operational environment?
• How can organizations adapt to a destabilized climate by building a green economy?
• How can organizations use new foresight tools and approaches to turn optimistic visions into pragmatic actions?

Last year we took a deep dive into Future Ready Organizations, empowering professionals to develop and scale the foresight capacity of their businesses, institutions and communities through applied foresight techniques and learnings from peers across every sector. In the process we highlighted four issues critical to our collective future: climate change, equity, data governance and cybersecurity.

The 2020 Ten-Year Forecast was our first ever all-online multi-day summit, and as a futures research organization we were excited to push the boundaries of what was possible in this space at that time. The experience was a transportive journey into future possibilities, leveraging physical artifacts from the future shipped to each attendee, and taking place over two weeks—September 14-25, 2020. Sessions included provocative conversations, digital immersions, and applied working sessions, and built on IFTF Vantage's proprietary digital platforms for signal scanning (IFTF Future Factors) and community engagement (IFTF Vantage Point).

In 1968, IFTF's founders wrote:

We live in a period of rapid and vast change. As change quickens in tempo and widens in sweep, the risks and opportunities that confront us call increasingly for expanded efforts to lead the course of events, rather than be led by them. An awareness of the future has thus become more important to the present than ever before.

For over 50 years, Institute for the Future has helped companies, governments, and individuals think creatively and pragmatically about the future. We achieve this by developing tools and methodologies that guide and accelerate the transformation of long-term foresight into practical, near-term insight.

Partner with IFTF today and join us at our 2020 Annual Ten-Year Forecast Summit on the future of society, economy, work, organizations, and technology and help steer your enterprise, foundation, nonprofit, or agency towards the future it wants, not one that occurs by chance.