Ten years ago, a feisty, snarky group of 55 like-minded souls assembled in San Luis Obispo, CA, to convene a World Cafe workshop about the “Future of Work.” It was pretty successful, and many attendees are still collaborating with each other. Most notably, the Strategic Foresight consultancy. The driver for our snarky group ten years ago… our family, our friends, our community, and you, our readers, are even more important than ever as we face our collective future together.

The tribe even produced a self-published book “Foresight 2025” and a series of web radio broadcasts. But that was then, and this is now. Needless to say, things have changed in the last decade. The COVID-19 pandemic is the most impactful. Coincidently, a spin-off from this group spotted a global pandemic as a futuristic ‘weak signal’ in the Fall of 2019.

The time has come to update the work. However, we will not make a list of predictions and an array of possible scenarios. No, this effort is going to be about strategic doing. What needs to be done? What will it look like? What’s the practical pathway to move from vision to action? We’re going to lay that out initially in a blog series. We may turn this into a portfolio of podcasts, depending on audience feedback. All of this is under the Creative Commons license.

We intend to offer integrated curated thinking, research, and design ideas for others to take and create their own future. The intended outcome is to increase people’s well-being and their community’s support of life-affirming plans, policies, and programs.

The challenge we will address is your/our everyday life in a highly volatile societal system in breakdown and transition to an unknown future. Social inequality, care for a longer-living and growing elderly population, and energy consumption impact on the planet. A tall order, we know – but we have not been sitting idle since the winter of 2012. Off we go.

A hat tip to George Ure of Peoplenomics for giving us an outline of topics to address. Not in any necessary order, we will be talking about;

You can expect a blog link to arrive in your inbox every other week or so. Feedback, questions, and insults are welcome. Please note that this is NOT an academic exercise. Some of us in this tribe have already begun investing our personal wealth, time, and energy into creating this future vision. It’s as much a story of our collective personal journeys as it is about a ‘reporter from the future’s account of things to come. Ultimately, it’s going to be about “we” not “me”.

Imagine, just imagine …