Let’s anticipate possible futures so that we and our organizations can prepare and adapt. Research shows that future-prepared organizations are much more profitable than the average. Not only do they do better in the possible futures, but also in the present. Boost your own and your organization’s leadership, culture, change skills, future-preparedness, resilience and agility. Here’s update 1 with content from other researchers, futurists, bloggers, entrepreneurs and other professionals.
- Keep your mind open!
- Discuss these updates with your colleagues.
- What if…?
- What next…?
Four economic scenarios
How scary is this? Beneath the resilient surface of the global economy lie structural challenges that could threaten its stability. Here’s what could unfold in the event of a global economic collapse.
Check out the scenarios that the Futures Platform created. Which of these seem plausible to you?
Scenario 1: Hyperinflation leads to global famine
Scenario 2: Deregulation leads to an asset bubble, culminating in a global financial crisis
Scenario 3: Demographic crisis leads to permanent economic stagnation
Scenario 4: Global economic volatility leads to widespread stagflation
The systemic shift
Ready for a deep dive? Here’s Nafeez M Ahmed’s (director of the Unitas Futures Lab) essay about the planetary phase shift framework: (1) modern civilization is facing a constellation of crises that are systemic in nature and portend the end of the current order; (2) these crises are interdependent and synergistic, requiring holistic analysis; (3) the trajectory of these crises points toward an imminent transition (a “post-carbon revolution”) as industrial civilization becomes unsustainable; and (4) such transitions have historical precedent in the cyclic rise and fall of societies, implying that collapse and renewal are two sides of a civilizational life-cycle
So, how might the transition play out, especially with regard to energy and political stability?
What will this look like? A renewable-based energy system, circular economy, relocalized production with global information sharing, a culture shift towards well-being over consumption, political structures that are more participatory and aligned with ecological realities. The framework encourages foresight exercises that imagine such futures and chart pathways to them.
In essence, we need to see the connections: how a drought, an uprising, an oil price spike, a financial crisis, a heatwave, a misinformation campaign, and a new technology invention might all be related within one giant transition.
And we need to take anticipatory action: rather than dreading each crisis as it comes, recognize the trajectory and steer it. Foresight and collective intelligence are about using our knowledge of complex systems to guide the phase shift toward the opportunity side of the spectrum.”
This approach allows us to apply systemic foresight – the practice of anticipating future developments in a holistic, systems-aware way – and to improve collective intelligence – to society’s ability to understand and respond to complex challenges.
Why America reinvents itself every 80 years
The three main drivers are the arrival of transformative technologies, the looming potential for vast economic growth, plus the right alignment of certain generations. We have them all right now, says Peter Leyden.
“From the very start of The Great Progression series, I have been making the case that we are watching the arrival of three world-historic, general-purpose technologies. The first and by far the most important is artificial intelligence, the opening up of the age of intelligent machines. But we also have two other big ones in the form of clean energy technologies and bioengineering.
Artificial intelligence and clean energy technologies have been through Perez’s installation phase and The Gilded Age part. They are now about to cross into the deployment phase and enter The Golden Age. Bioengineering and synthetic biology will not be far behind.
America now has the transformative new technologies for its fourth reinvention, and the timing of their arrival is pretty much perfect.”
- Interesting, as other thought leaders predict decline or collapse. This underlines again that no one can predict the future(s)!
What do you think?
The Drucker Memo
Want to get better at foresight? Monitor your expectations, discover your blind spots and learn from your prior decisions with “The Drucker Memo”. Check this post by Daniel Pink on improving your decision-making.
Water availability
We can’t live without it – nor can we produce anything. Water is relevant for all people and organizations.
Five essential strategies – holistic water valuation, fit-for-purpose financing, basin-level partnerships, adaptive governance and a policy-innovation nexus – can help ensure long-term water security. Read the post by the World Economic Forum here.
- Is your organization taking this into account? Include access to water in your scenarios!
Adaptation to global warming
Research shows people are adapting their habits, jobs as the world warms. Worldwide, extreme heat is increasingly affecting workers and, alongside threats to human health, is projected to cause $2.4 trillion in productivity losses annually by 2030.
- What do you do to stay healthy? What is your organization doing for your co-workers?
Cognitive dissonance
Do you exist in two worlds at once? While systems are cracking, many people go on as if nothing is happening. It’s the Survival Paradox when you’re trapped between fear of other people’s opinions and an existential fear about the future.
- Will others think that you have gone mad…? Everyone seems to be going along with business-as-usual. But what if we are approaching systemic collapse?
Here’s an analysis of this response to this intense era by Rob Harrison-Plastow.
Will we run out of ideas? (And of people?)
New ideas drive economic growth — we innovate, and those innovations open up economic opportunities. Between 1870 and 1970, the world innovated at an unprecedented rate — we got everything from the automobile to the electric grid — but over the past 50 years, the pace has slowed to a crawl. In the Techno-Humanist Manifesto, Jason Crawford explores why we aren’t innovating like we used to — and what it might take to stave off stagnation. This is a fascinating read for exploring possible futures – so I have added a few paragraphs from the article below.
By Jason Crawford:
“Ideas can be replicated at trivial marginal cost and used by everyone simultaneously. The upside of this non-rivalry of ideas is that when an idea is created, everyone can share it. But the downside is that we can’t generate more value by generating the same idea over again year after year, nor can two people or teams generate twice the value by each generating the same idea.
On top of this, we can add the “burden of knowledge.” The more we learn, the longer a researcher has to study in order to reach the frontier, where they can make progress; and the more they have to specialize, which makes it harder to forge connections across disparate fields.
Remember, ideas have been getting harder to find ever since the Stone Age! But today, we already picked the low-hanging fruit and have to venture up higher and further.
The other side of the equation is that as ideas get harder to find, we get better at finding them. As the quantity and quality of the problems we have to solve increases, so does the quantity and quality of the resources we bring to bear on that challenge—more and better-educated researchers, working with more and better-designed tools
Ideas get harder to find, but resources do too, and in both cases our investment in discovery and exploitation ramps up to meet the challenge: just as we continue to extract copper from lower-grade ores, we can continue to solve more difficult problems in science and technology. A particular field of ideas can run out, like an oil field or a mine—but just as we find new deposits of minerals, we also find new fields of innovation that open up the possibility for rapid advancement, such as computing in the 20th century or mRNA technology in the 21st. So just as it’s always been a mistake to call Peak Resources, I think it’s far too early to call Peak Ideas.
If there is truly a vast unexplored space of productive ideas remaining, and all we need to find them is a sufficient number of intelligent people, then our final concern for long-term growth might be: will we run out of people?
A larger population is better for everyone, because a larger population generates more ideas.
Population growth has fallen dramatically in recent decades and shows no signs of bottoming out. We have already passed “peak child.” UN projections show population growth reaching zero by the end of the century, with population leveling out at maybe eleven billion.
The frontier would get harder and harder to push out, and with only a constant base of researchers, progress would get slower and slower. No more acceleration, not even exponential growth, just a gentle plateau.
How to solve this…? Maybe we can automate the production of ideas completely. If AI researchers can advance science and technology on their own, then humans are no longer the bottleneck on progress.”
- What do you think? Until we solve the issue of finding more useful ideas – we can expect stagnation for some time. Or not? I’d love to read your thoughts in the comments!
© curated by Marcella Bremer, 2025
The future doesn’t wait. Start today: explore, anticipate and adapt to possible future scenarios with the Strategic Foresight & Futures Community.