Category: Resources

On this episode of Creating Foresight-Fueled Action, Yvette Montero Salvatico speaks with Director of Slalom Strategy [S2] and TFS Alumna, Tamarah Usher to discuss a variety of topics around how to make foresight stick for yourself and in an organization.

For Rainer Rilke, poet and novelist, the future wasn’t a distant and nonexistent concept that could be flippantly disconnected from the present. Rather, the seeds of the future were contained within the present, and those seeds were waiting to grow and blossom. To extend the analogy, the human race is the fertile ground for the seeds of the future, and that soil is the key to the ultimate manifestation and expression of what is waiting to emerge. In order to…

In an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, we can cling to our vision and mission, but we have no hope of clinging to strategy.

For many of us, the question of how to prepare our organizations for the future usually centers on current trends. We consume “Top Trends of 20YY” content with gusto, and shell out hundreds of dollars for annual industry trend reports. After all, they give us a warm, fuzzy feeling of being “in the know,” and may even spur exciting conversation about new initiatives. But the confidence inspired by some expert’s interpretation of the tea leaves is fleeting in today’s VUCA…

Have you ever wondered if NASA has made alien contact?  Well, I know firsthand that they have, because I had the honor of being NASA’s alien visitor! In August 2017, I was asked to serve as the speaker for the NASA iTech Speaker Series at the Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. The room was filled with brilliant individuals who go to work every day to create ideas and innovations around space travel and exploration, private and commercial flight, and…

On this episode of Creating Foresight-Fueled Action, Frank Spencer met with Change Consulting Co-Founder Andrès Valenica to discuss Strategic Innovation in Latin America.

I had no idea that what I was doing in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s cultivate a passion in my heart for “artifacting the future” – creating the landscapes, devices, utilities and materials that would both define provocative images of the future and be born out of them.

TFS: How do you establish a regular scanning practice? There’s so much information out there, and only so many hours in the day. I want to be efficient, but I also want to make sure that I’m not missing anything when I look for trends and emerging issues. Can you give me some suggestions? – Sincerely, Feeling Overwhelmed!

Zan Chandler, Craig Mellott, and Adam Wilson discussed using design for racial and social equality as well as the convergence of design and foresight practices. Since design is about creating and influencing the future, the panel was in agreeance that design is also a great avenue through which we can democratize the future!

We will never be successful in navigating our way through uncertainty by only extrapolating historical data or exploring the possibilities that exist within our dominant narratives — our world is much too complex for such simple ways of thinking; we must move beyond adaptation or resilience as our response to the future, and begin cultivating a mindset of transformational change.