We support executive leadership teams.
The Future Today Institute works closely with executive leadership and management teams to transform their strategic thinking on the future. Advisory services include: signal mapping, trend identification, scenario development, risk modeling, visioning and strategic planning.
Visioning and long-term planning
Helping executives develop a long-term position for their organization; informing investment strategies; advising boards of directors. Developing scenarios; backcasting preferred futures back to the present day for action.
Strategic scenarios development
Supporting executive leaders in building models for future growth, opportunity and risk; prioritizing near-term action to address those models.
Speculative scenarios development
Developing creative scenarios for use in marketing campaigns, for thought leadership, or to set bold visions (for a company's next 100 years).
Trends development
Audit of current signals and trends databases, monitoring processes; exploring white spaces; enabling teams to gain action on trends; applying trends to near-term decisioning, product roadmaps, investments.
Near-term strategic planning
Helping executives develop their strategic plans to account for emerging trends, shifts in macro trends, and deep uncertainty in areas outside of their industry for near-term decisioning and 1-3 year strategic planning.
Deep futures
For organizations that require very long-term planning, FTI develops informed deep-futures scenarios. Typically used by governments developing long-range national plans, or industries that require long-term planning (space, healthcare, energy).
Workshops
Our custom forecasting workshops facilitate a practical, short-form exploration of your futures.
Using our unique convening framework, we bring together your organizaton with our futurists for custom workshops. We are able to accommodate the schedules of busy teams and executives. Workshops range from two hours to a full day. We work with clients to custom-build the best workshop for each team and project. Shorter workshops can be incorporated into conference agendas. All participants receive pre-workshop reading materials, custom researcn and a foresight toolkit.
The Axes of Uncertainty is a fast-paced, rapid prototyping session designed to deliver immediate insights about your future.
We tend to under-predict or over-predict change. The reason: imagining plausible outcomes forces us to confront our expectations and cherished beliefs. The Axes result in short stories that tell us something about your futures. The session can be practical, to give actionable insights, or it can be more theoretical, to stretch your team's thinking as they confront deep uncertainty.
This is one of FTI's most popular workshop offerings. We've developed Axes workshops for teams all over the world, including a successful half-day workshop delivered to 750 participants at once.
What are the unintended uses of your products and services? How might your decisions accidentally result in future harm? This hands-on risk and threat mapping workshop surfaces plausible threats using data-driven frameworks.
Before you can plan for the next disruption, you must radically rethink your approach to risk. Using a transdisciplinary approach, you and your team will consider adjacent and theoretical influences on your organization, find next-order risks, and know when to take action. If you can spot risk early enough, you mitigate it -- or even use it as a catalyst for innovation.
Available as a virtual or in-person half or full-day session. During the workshop, we will introduce a series of strategic foresight tools to help you identify plausible future risks and threats, as well as how to assess their seriousness. Participants will develop a system to make decisions given the associated risks, and to take incremental actions.
Discover what emerging signals and trends will influence your organization in the future. FTI's rigorous, data-driven method for finding, tracking and monitoring signals and trends is used by hundreds of organizations worldwide. We work with your team to surface relevant trends and develop an escalation system so you know when to take actions on them.
In this workshop, we will develop a comprehensive set of disruptive forces, signals and trends that must be tracked by your organization.
Available as a virtual or in-person half or full-day workshop.
What might a post-coronavirus world look like? How will we live, work and do business in the future? Discover multiple future states for your organization. The purpose of this workshop is to help your team have strategic conversations that spark new ideas, potential threats, and generate discussion on topics related to social change, geopolitical shifts, and quality of life.
For organizations that have been directly impacted by the global Covid-19 pandemic, or for teams that are working on longer-range projects––those having to do with artificial intelligence, climate change, warfare, global population shifts, agriculture––a worldbuilding workshop offers rich strategic insights.
Available as a virtual or in-person half or full-day workshop. Organizations learn a set of tools to help them construct a world of the future, so that they can visualize and experience it as a team, in the present.
Explore alternative future states. In this workshop, we will discover plausible futures using FTI's scenario modeling technique. Workshops are custom-built to deliver insights on your future. Whether you are deciding what strategic direction to pursue, what new product to create, what a longer-term vision for your organization might be, what future risks you'll face, or how to transform your organization, we will lead you through a methodical process to find answers. Scenario workshops are also used to test theories for strategic change within organizations, industries and on the geopolitical stage. As a final step, we use a probabilistic model to help teams make informed decisions
Available as a virtual or in-person full-day workshop.
How can you plan for an uncertain future? Futurists use a process called "backcasting," a strategic process leaders can use to reverse-engineer their preferred future states. Participants will use backcasting to offset current challenges like the coronavirus. They will also use backcasting to make critical immediate, near and longer-term decisions.
In this session, we will use key FTI frameworks to analyzing new business opportunities and threats, calculate their likely demand in the marketplace, and determining potential risks.
Available as a virtual or in-person half-day or full-day workshop.
Master Classes
FTI Master Classes will train you and your teams to see the future, today.
The Future Today Institute pioneered a data-driven, applied foresight methodology that is now used within hundreds of organizations worldwide. Our custom strategic foresight Master Classes are designed to teach teams that methodology, including the essential concepts, frameworks, tools and processes necessary to confront the future. Every Master Class is tailored for your organization. We combine our methodology and tech/ science trends research with original case studies we create specifically for your team. The result is an experiential learning session.
For more information on our custom Master Class offerings, download our Master Class brochure.
Speaking
FTI offers custom virtual and in-person keynote speeches to corporate audiences, boards of directors, festivals, and association gatherings around the world.
We have presented on some of the world's most influential stages, including: South By Southwest (SXSW), the World Economic Forum, the Milken Institute Global Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival and TED, and we have addressed teams at hundreds of companies and governmental organizations, including Sony, PayPal, IBM, Microsoft, UnitedHealth Group, Fidelity Investments, the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund and many others.
Foresight Program
Get custom research, trends, scenarios and advisory services for your organization.
Started in 2008, the Foresight Program is a yearlong collaboration between FTI's futurists and your team. The Foresight Program is uniquely designed to ensure that you, your team and your organization are positioned to create your own preferred futures. Every quarter, we will lead your team through foresight exercises to build your organization's internal capacity for strategic foresight while staying ahead of disruptive forces. You and your team will receive:
• Quarterly in-person or virtual workshops
• Access to collaborate and brainstorm with the Institute’s staff
• Custom tech trends research
• On-demand access to collaborate and brainstorm with the Institute’s staff
• Custom toolkits created for your organization
• A keynote presentation for your organization
To learn more about how the Foresight Program will prepare your organization for the future, please contact us.