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.

 

Scenario Planning

Organizations engage the Future Today Institute for scenario planning on a specific topic area in order to enable strategic decisions in the present.

 

Some of FTI’s Scenario Planning engagements include:

 
An auto company asked us to forecast the future of mobility, given the proliferation of autonomous vehicles, the popularity of ride-sharing services and the proclivity of young people to stay at home.
We worked with a financial services company to forecast the future of digital currencies, which involved looking at different populations of consumers (as well as the unbanked).
We modeled the future of communications technologies, artificial intelligence and America’s relationship with Russia for a government agency.

Scenario Planning can range from a few weeks to several months. Because of the sensitive
nature of this work, the majority of our Scenario Planning is done under NDA.

Futures Forecasting Workshops

Our forecasting workshops are a quick but intensive dive into the future of a single topic.

 

Using our unique convening framework, we bring together your staff with futurists and experts from outside your industry for fresh perspective and insights. We typically include a visual scribe, who synthesizes our work together so that it can be distributed within your organization.

Deliverables include:

• Research

• Workbooks

• Practical tools

• Visual notes

• Actionable next steps for the organization to take once the workshop concludes.

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