Futures Workshops

Our custom forecasting workshops are experiential and productive deep-dives into the future.

 

Using our unique convening framework, we bring together your staff with futurists for custom workshops. They are typically held on-site, within an organization's meeting spaces, to accommodate the schedules of busy teams and executives. We also facilitate futures workshops at off-sites and company retreats. Shorter workshops can be incorporated into conference agendas.

Futures workshop deliverables include:

• Pre-workshop reading materials

• Custom research

• Printed and digital workbooks

• Foresight tools

• A set of actionable steps that can be taken once the workshop concludes

Workshops range from half-day sessions to multi-day intensives. We work with clients to custom-build the best workshop for each team and project.

 

THINKING LIKE A FUTURIST

This course offers a practical, hands-on learning experience for organizations who want to develop their capacity for strategic foresight. Teams learn the most essential tools of futurists and how to apply them within their organizations.

The workshop is based on The Signals Are Talking: Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream, Amy Webb's bestselling book that details FTI's six-step forecasting methodology. In advance of the session, participants receive hard copies of course materials, a copy of Signals, and a short assignment.

Participants learn all six of the forecasting and risk assessment frameworks. They also learn how to build actionable business strategies for the future and how to pressure-test them in the present

SCENARIO MAPPING

Scenario mapping workshops use data from an organization and adjacent industries, as well as trend insights, to build narratives describing plausible futures. Participants learn how to map scenarios to develop new product and service ideas--and how to understand the likely implications that could arise. Scenario workshops are also used to test theories for strategic change within organizations, industries and on the geopolitical stage.

This workshop isn't like other scenario mapping activities. Participants learn the Future Today Institute's unique, proven methods for creating data-driven probable, plausible and possible scenarios across different emotive framings. As a last step, they apply a probabilistic model to help them make decisions. This workshop can be replicated within organizations by participants, to help develop internal capacity going forward.

SURFACING EMERGING TRENDS

In this workshop, participants take a deep dive and learn the critically important first two steps of FTI's forecasting methodology: listening for weak signals at the fringe, and applying the CIPHER pattern recognition tool to surface emerging trends.

Participants learn how to recognize cognitive biases within themselves and their teams; they gain an immediate understanding of where to look for the most important information; and they learn a formula for asking the right questions when thinking about trends.

This intensive session produces a list of emerging trends that the organization should be monitoring in the near-future.

FUTURES WORLDBUILDING

In this hands-on workshop, participants build narratives for a time many years into the future. The purpose of this workshop is to help organizations have detailed 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 are working on long-range projects––those having to do with artificial intelligence, climate change, warfare, global population shifts, agriculture––a worldbuilding workshop offers rich insights into how to think about plausible economic, social and political implications of our actions.

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.

RISK AND THREAT MAPPING

This hands-on workshop teaches participants how to understand plausible risks and threats using data-driven frameworks.

The learning activities in this workshop are meant to be practiced and replicated. As a result, organizations build their internal capacity for seeing likely complications in the future using proven techniques and frameworks.

During the workshop, we introduce a series of tools to help an organization identify plausible future risks and threats, as well as how to assess their seriousness. Participants learn how to make decisions given the associated risks, and to take incremental actions.

NEW BUSINESS ASSESSMENT

During this intensive, hands-on workshop, participants learn how to use emerging trends to develop ideas for new verticals, business centers and growth.

We take a deep dive into identifying and analyzing new business opportunities, calculating their likely demand in the marketplace, and determining potential risks.

Through this workshop, organizations develop their internal capacity for faster, data-driven thinking, as well as their ability to assess new business ideas using a strategic growth mindset.

Advisory Services

We advise executive leadership, management teams, boards of directors and and researchers working in R&D.

 

Working With Your Team

FTI advises executive leadership and management teams in a number of settings. We facilitate and participate in powerful conversations about key strategic issues your organization should be thinking about now. We support clients in a number of ways, including:

• Emerging trend briefings for senior leadership

• Strategic foresight analysis and futures guidance during meetings 

• Guidance on an organization's longer-term planning

• Assessment of a new or planned technology product, service or policy

• Assistance writing an organization's strategic plan

• Developing custom forecasts/ research

We offer stand-alone engagements as well as monthly and yearly retainers for our advisory services.

 

The Foresight Program

This is the Institute’s flagship offering. Started in 2008, the Foresight Program is a yearlong collaboration between the Institute’s futurists and an organization’s staff. If you are in any position of leadership—whether you’re the CEO of a large corporation, a media executive, an investor, a chief marketing officer, a government administrator, part of an R&D team, a program director within a nonprofit, or the manager of a division within a sprawling company—you must continuously and strategically monitor trends and plan for the future. The Foresight Program is uniquely designed to ensure that you, your team and your organization are positioned to create your own preferred futures.

 

Benefits of the Foresight Program

Each participating organization receives:

• Quarterly in-person workshops (at your office)

• Custom tech trends research

• On-demand access to collaborate and brainstorm with the Institute’s staff

• Invitations to our events

• Printed sets of our annual Tech Trends reports

In-person workshops are both inspiring and pragmatic: by the end of each one, participants have an action plan and next steps.

Typical Participants

Foresight Program members include Fortune 500 companies across a variety of industry sectors, including media, retail, technology, financial services, hospitality and transportation.

Departments that typically send staff to the program include strategy and planning, R&D, technology-specific groups (autonomous driving, platforms), marketing, customer insights/ research, investment divisions and senior leadership groups.