The FTI Way
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. Our pioneering, data-driven forecasting methodology and tools empower leaders to make better decisions about the future, today.
We are living in an era of tremendous uncertainty. Our anxiety stems from information overload and the onslaught of new technologies. A great wave of disruption—anchored in artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, self-driving cars, genomic editing, cognitive computing, the Internet of Things, and big data—is underway. As these technologies move from the fringe to the mainstream, they promise to forever change our companies, economies and social structures.
This disruption has left many leaders feeling like they’re meandering through a haunted house, lost in the darkness, without a way to clearly see what’s around the next corner. Fearful of the next big scare, they make poor decisions, none at all, or worse—they try to turn back, hoping to recreate the world as it was decades ago.
As futurists, our job is to flip the switch, turn on the lights and illuminate the path forward. Once leaders are able to see and hear what’s up ahead—all of the trap doors, hidden rooms, masks and costumes—that haunted house is transformed into a regular old building that can be navigated without fear or concern. With the lights on, we embolden leaders to realize their own preferred futures.
Our Founder
Amy Webb
Founder and Quantitative Futurist
FTI provides our clients and partners with tangible strategic insights that lead to action. We identify new value flows, model risk, and help executive leadership teams confront uncertainty so that they can anticipate and plan for the future. FTI is a network of world-class researchers, strategists, data scientists and designers led by CEO and Founder Amy Webb.
The story of our logo
Our logo was developed by Emily Caufield, the Institute’s Creative Director, and her idea was to communicate two core concepts: who we are and the mission of the Institute.
Inside the box are a set of circles and rectangles, which might seem interchangeable at first. However, if you look closely starting from the left, you’ll see the letters F T I. Together, those letters form an ideogram representing the notion that the future is very much intertwined with what we are all doing today.
A futurist's work
You may be wondering what, exactly, a futurist is. Don’t worry—you’re not alone.
The term “futurology” comes from the Latin (futurum, or fu-ture) and the Greek suffix -logia (the science of), and it was coined by a German professor named Ossip Flechtheim in 1943, who, along with author H. G. Wells several decades earlier, proposed “futurism” as a new academic discipline. It’s an interdisciplinary field combining mathematics, physics, philosophy, strategy, technology, economics, design, history, geography, biology, theology and anthropology.
Throughout the past century, many noted futurists have contributed significant work to the field. FTI’s methodology, strategic thinking frameworks and tools have been influenced by earlier futurists, including Yujiro Hayashi, Robert Jungk, Olaf Helmer, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Arthur Clark and Alvin Toffler.
As futurists, we don’t make predictions. Our job is not to spread prophecies, but rather to collect data, identify emerging trends, develop strategies, and calculate the probabilities of various scenarios occurring in the future. Our forecasts are used to help leaders, teams, and individuals make better, more informed decisions, even as their organizations face great disruption.
This is the first time in human history when real, fundamental change is taking place within a single generation, and the driving force is technology. Technology is no longer the domain of science and industry alone; it is now inextricably linked to who we are and everything we do. The established silos of communications, business, education, media, government, politics, defense, public health, the arts and activism are morphing into a loopy, interconnected Venn diagram.
Seeing the future is possible, even though the rate of technological advancement has begun to outpace the speed at which many organizations are accustomed to functioning. We must focus on interconnected relationships between one or more technologies and a system, rather than becoming fixated on a single, promising new gadget, app or startup.
We must begin asking ourselves what are the implications of our actions? What will technology mean for our organizations? For society? If we fail to plan in advance (or if we rush in with the wrong strategy) what outcomes will we face?….. as often as we ask what can we do to build the next generation of tools and products?
We at the Institute look forward to helping you navigate the challenging road ahead. Technology will further complicate and disrupt organizations everywhere. Without the right action, an organization might find itself left behind, making catastrophic decisions, or shuttered entirely. Our promise, and the mission of the FTI, is to help leaders make better, more informed decisions, ensuring the vitality of an organization’s future, today.