About the Future Today Institute
Founded in 2006, the Future Today Institute researches, models and prototypes future risk and opportunity. As the leading strategic foresight and futurology management consultants 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.
Our Mission and Values
To empower leaders, organizations, countries, and everyday people to navigate uncertainty and to make informed decisions on the future, today. We do this though deep research, rigorous modeling, creative thinking, teaching others the FTI Way and evangelizing strategic foresight.
Our Values
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Curiosity. We confront our own cherished beliefs continuously and we guide those we work with to do the same.
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Learning. We are always learning, recalibrating, improving.
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Evangelizing. We communicate the value of strategic foresight, engage others in using it, and teach those who want to learn.
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Discipline. We do everything required to conduct excellent research, produce exceptional work and to meet our deadlines.
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Empathy. We work hard to understand our coworkers, people, our clients and their fears, difficulties and desire/ resistance to changing the future.
Our Methodology
The Future Today Institute's strategic forecasting model uses quantitative and qualitative data to identify weak signals and map their trajectories into tech trends. Our seven steps alternate between broad and narrow scopes, which include: hypotheses, scoping and framing; identifying forces and signals; pattern analysis; identifying trends and calculating their trajectories; scenario modeling; and finally, backcasting preferred outcomes.
1. Converge: Determine scope, hypotheses, time horizons and stakeholders.
2. Diverge: Determine forces and identify signals. Make observations and harness information from the broadest possible array of sources and on a wide variety of topics.
3. Converge: Uncover hidden patterns in the previous step. Use FTl's CIPHER framework to identify trends. Look for contradictions, inflections, practices, hacks, extremes and rarities.
4. Diverge: Ask questions to learn how the trends you've identified intersect with your industry and all of its parts.
5. Converge: Calculate the velocity and trajectory of forces, signals and trends that are internal and external to the organization.
6. Diverge: Model scenarios to describe impacts and outcomes in the future.
7. Converge: Backcast preferred outcomes. Define desired futures and then work backwards to identify the strategic actions connecting that future to your present.
Our Founder
Amy Webb, FTI 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.
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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.
