What Happens Next?
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
This is a moment to think boldly about the future.
If the COVID-19 crisis has taught us anything, it’s that we need to take preparedness to a new level. We need to think longer—not weeks, not months, but years longer.
4 Scenarios
We can start with four alternative scenarios—four very different visions of how the future might unfold in the wake of the crisis. Economic growth. Health constraints. Political collapse. Social transformation.
Download the full map here. >>
Executive Director, Marina Gorbis takes us on a journey through IFTF’s post-Covid alternative scenarios
to identify the leverage points for transformation in the coming decade and beyond.
Exploring the Scenarios
But scanning these possibilities, we quickly recognize that we’re already looking collapse in the eye. As fast as Covid-19 has spread through the world population, a deeper underlying disease is careening through our body politic, revealing the fractures in the systems of our daily lives.
Read Marina Gorbis' essay, Post-Pandemic Transformation: Building a Mutualist Future.
7 System Failures
Just as the novel coronavirus first showed up in the most vulnerable people in our society — the old, the sick, the working poor and racially oppressed — it has also taken aim at the widespread frailties in our social, economic, and political institutions. Our broken health systems. Extraordinary economic inequality. Racial injustice. Brittle supply chains. Political division. A frayed social fabric. And of course, an impending climate emergency.
As these systems fail, however, they also open pathways to something new—to truly bold visions of transformation that reinvent the way we work as a society, as an economy, and as friends and neighbors. At the same time, these system failures call on us to take bold actions today.
With Special Thanks
This work was made possible through the generous support of our partners the Blue Shield of California Foundation, The James Irvine Foundation, and The California Wellness Foundation with the goal of helping communities and organizations think systematically about the future in a post-pandemic world.
Contact Us
For more information on this and other research from Institute for the Future, please email IFTF Executive Producer Jean Hagan | jhagan@iftf.org.