In 2024, at the first live and in-person summit in half a decade, IFTF will host the Ten-Year Forecast to present the Map of the Decade research for IFTF Vantage partners.

Every year, the Institute for the Future’s Map of the Decade offers a ten-year perspective on an urgent futures topic — an issue or set of issues that will have major consequences a decade from now, but that we urgently need to address today to ensure a desirable outcome. This year, we explore relational futures.

Registration will be available to IFTF Vantage partners through Vantage Point soon. Updates to come!

Map of the Decade 2024-2034:
Relational Futures

When we think about the world ten years from now, the challenges are not difficult to see: climate change, institutional distrust, civic polarization, the looming disruptions of generative AI. These macro forces will have a profound impact on the essential human relationships that undergird everything we do: the relationships between companies and workers, between citizens and their governments, between families and the very land they live on.

Our Map of the Decade research will dive deep into this urgent futures topic— centering those core relationships that are being pushed out of balance today, and that might be destroyed entirely—or perhaps transformed for the better—depending on how we shape our responses to new technologies, cultures, and environmental conditions in the next decade.

As we explore domains across technology, work, and daily life through this lens, we will ask:

  • How can we cultivate cohesive and effective workforces that find meaning and purpose in their relationship to work?

  • How can we rethink the role of brands and their relationships with customers in a world of extreme polarization and distrust?

  • How can organizations forge more productive and sustainable relationships with the human communities and planetary systems they rely on?

This year’s Map of the Decade will shine a spotlight on the many-faceted possibilities of these emerging new relationships, to help you and your organization better anticipate and navigate their impacts.