The Future Today Institute helps leaders
and their organizations prepare for deep
uncertainty and complex futures.

Founded in 2006, the Future Today Institute researches, models and prototypes future risk and opportunity. As the leading advisory to executive leadership teams worldwide, FTI's data-driven applied research reveals trends and calculates how they will disrupt business, government and society. Together with our clients and partners, FTI is helping leaders achieve their preferred futures. Learn more about how we can help your organization →

Latest Research

Launching March 15, 2020
FTI's 2020 Tech Trends Report

The Future Today Institute's 13th annual Tech Trends report identifies 400 emerging trends across 31 industries that will begin to enter the mainstream and fundamentally disrupt business, geopolitics and everyday life. We offer analysis, strategic recommendations, business opportunities and detailed risk assessments, as well as 26 futures scenarios. Sign up to receive a digital copy on the day of launch.

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The Four Futures: A simple tool for taking strategic action

The matrix has four quadrants and measures your level of confidence about emerging trends and asks whether your team needs actions or insights. The answers to those two questions reveals what action to take: brainstorm ideas, build capabilities, develop strategy or find future areas of disruption.

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Future Forces Theory

FTI’s Future Forces Theory explains how disruption usually stems from influential sources of macro change. It is a way of understanding where disruption is coming from and where it’s headed next. The sources of macro change represent external uncertainties—factors that broadly affect business, governing and society. They can skew positive, neutral and negative. We use this simple tool to apply the future forces theory to organizations as they are developing strategic thinking on trends.

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How To Do Strategic Planning Like a Futurist

Futurists think about time differently, and company strategists could learn from their approach. For any given uncertainty about the future — whether that’s risk, opportunity, or growth — we tend to think in the short- and long-term simultaneously. To do this, FTI uses a framework that measures certainty and charts actions, rather than simply marking the passage of time as quarters or years. That’s why FTI's timelines aren’t actually lines at all — they are cones.

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Curating a Scenario Planning Team

The duality dilemma is responsible for a lack of forward thinking at many organizations. Overcoming the duality dilemma — and getting full use of your creatives and logicians — in order to track emerging trends and forecast the future is possible. But counterintuitively, it’s a matter of highlighting — rather than discouraging or downplaying — the strengths of each side.