FUTURIST + MAKER
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Thoughts from the Near Future
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Leverage a Futures Operating System
With his foresight and forward-thinking, Steve Fisher helps people and organizations envision possible futures and empowers them with resilience and confidence to navigate changes and succeed in a dynamic world. He guides them from inspiration to action with practical advice that recognizes the nature of humanity and realistic rates of change. He uses his mastery and knowledge across various disciplines to help them understand the vision, while providing practical analysis, information, and strategic advice that is grounded in not just what’s ahead, but also what matters right now.
Think Forward Show
Conversations with Futurist and Big Thinkers about what is on the horizon and what it means to be a futurist in today's world.
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Why Engage Steve?
Envision and Build New Worlds Together
Steve will work with your organization to imagine the worlds that it might inhabit and to be responsive to opportunities that arise.
We are at the dawn of a transformative era, where design and foresight will turn imaginative concepts into realms for innovation. The emergence of new coding languages and decentralized networks will revolutionize decision-making and interactions, paving the way for fairer trade and community-building beyond conventional limits. Our collective ingenuity and flexibility will forge a future where technology amplifies human potential, transforming dreams into reality in a more connected, equitable, and innovative world.
Explore Alternative Futures
Exploring the future without context can be abstract, distant, and difficult to envision, let alone navigate. Incorporating alternative futures into the present allows for experiencing them as tangible "what-if" scenarios on a 1:1 scale of reality. By using design thinking and techniques such as speculative design and design fiction, the exploration of future landscapes and trends can enable your organization to turn possibilities into practical solutions and catalyze real change.
Navigate AI and Web3
Hyperscale Your Innovation Efforts
Innovation is crucial for any organization, mirroring the ups and downs of a financial portfolio. By adopting futures thinking, your organization gains the foresight to anticipate trends and disruptions, enabling strategic investments in growth areas and ensuring you stay ahead of the competition. This approach not only positions you to seize new opportunities but also fosters a culture of continuous improvement and resilience, essential for long-term success and adaptability in an uncertain world.
Make Futures Thinking Persuasive
Organizations relentlessly seek growth and prosperity but often become ensnared in short-term thinking, prioritizing immediate results and quarterly earnings over long-term strategies. By embracing futures and foresight as central to their strategy, they can extend their vision, exploring potential futures, spotting emerging trends, and preparing for possible disruptions. This broader outlook allows for the development of resilient strategies, ensuring organizations can navigate future uncertainties securing their position as leaders in an evolving landscape.
How do you leverage the future today?
The rate of change today is exponential. What do you focus on and how do you stay ahead? They are four key ways today to do that:
Knowledge From the Future
Gaining futures literacy and learning how to broaden your perspective is not a task that can be accomplished overnight. At first, wielding the methods, tools, and techniques associated with these skills can be overwhelming. In the quest to democratize the future, constant learning is essential to improvement. There are a number of resources available to make futures literacy commonplace by the end of the decade. For example, Steve leads a think tank that is a major knowledge source for futures thinking and offers courses to certify you as a futurist.
Transform Possible Futures Into Action
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The Center for the Future (CFTF) brings together professionals, scholars, writers, architects, designers and thinkers to shape the envisioned future. It’s possible to break free from shortsightedness by embracing imagination, promoting innovation and fostering resilient mindsets for extraordinary possibilities. CFTF provides the Futures Operating System (FuturesOS), making futures accessible to everyone in a dynamic world. They empower businesses to manifest their desired change and create the future they envision through community, resources and impactful future-oriented thinking. Steve serves as the Chief Futurist where these ideas are explored and tools are shared. CFTF offers a range of labs and projects to help organizations worldwide leverage these tools effectively.
Center for the Future
For practitioners and explorers of design futures, Steve is the curator of DesignFuturist.com, where he and other curators share amazing design futures work from around the world to educate and inspire others about this exciting field. The site collects his perspectives along with those of others in the field to become a single, powerful source for staying informed and futures literate. This helps you push the boundaries of your creativity and imagination, enabling you to excel in curiosity, foresight and the exploration of extraordinary possibilities.
DesignFuturist.com
Futures Training
There are many ways to learn about futures thinking, from short online courses to in-person week-long workshops to entire master's degree programs. Having taken many of these himself, Steve has distilled the best methods and tools for practical application, using the Spectrum Futures Methodology and Framework. These learning opportunities can be in-person, live and online, or on-demand. Some have associated costs, while others are free.
Course: Imagining the Future (ON-DEMAND)
Get immersed in a high-energy, fast-paced program that demonstrates hands-on application of the entire Spectrum Futures Framework. Participants will learn the fundamentals of imagining the future by leveraging signals, trends, future personas, scenarios, and implications. The program also teaches you how to break the cycle of short-sightedness by embracing creativity, fostering innovation, and cultivating resilient mindsets for remarkable prospects. You will also learn how to construct your own FuturesOS to teach others in your organization and promote a futures-fluent culture.
Designing the Future is a course on design futures aimed at futures practitioners who want to communicate the future in a way that allows people to interact with it. The course teaches participants how to create these interactions, learn from them, and apply them to work and life. The curriculum uses a unique Spectrum Futures Framework and covers how to use design futures in a Futures Operating System. It incorporates teachings from award-winning design futurists and covers how to analyze possible futures, build worlds and scenes in those futures, and populate them with compelling artifacts. The course culminates with programs that can be implemented in organizations to transfer knowledge and skills while demonstrating actionable outcomes.
Course: Designing the Future
Navigating the Future focuses on creating a futures program with measurements, outcomes, and metrics that organizations can integrate into their operations. Foresight and futures thinking provide significant value for organizations seeking to future-proof their business. In one longitudinal study, "future-prepared" firms (defined as those with a corporate foresight practice) posted 33% higher profitability than the average company and 200% higher growth.
Most futures training organizations only teach standard tools and methods without practical implementation across the organization. They fail to create scenarios and implement measurement to anticipate change before others. This course shows organizations how to use AI signals and trend engines, spectrum future scenarios, and organizational foresight metrics, along with staffing models, to build a real futures organization that can demonstrate to leadership that the future may be far away, but navigating it will lead to higher growth and profitability now.
Course: Navigating the Future
Here is some stuff I make and things I do...
Steve Fisher is the Chief Futurist of the Revolution Institute's Center for the Future (CFTF), curator of DesignFuturist.com and host of the Think Forward podcast, where he interviews bold and amazing thinkers, innovators, and leaders on the promise of futures thinking.
Steve is a pragmatic design futurist with over 25 years of experience using technology, strategic foresight, and futures thinking to help organizations and individuals envision and understand possible futures while building the path to get there. Steve has worked with government and private organizations of all sizes, all over the world, to spark curiosity, ignite imagination, and explore a better future for all.
Steve co-founded Revolution Factory, a global innovation company that removes barriers to solving complex problems, and The Revolution Institute, an organization collaboratively exploring complex problems and their potential solutions. Steve is also an experienced entrepreneur, filmmaker, and author with a dual MBA from Brown University and Instituto De Impresa. His master's thesis focused on smart cities, industrial IoT, augmented reality, and entrepreneurial innovation models.
As a spiritual follow-up to his bestselling book, “The Startup Equation,” his new book, "Designing the Future: How to Harness Tomorrow, Today" (coming in late 2023), gives organizations and individuals the "Operating System" for futures design, as well as the tools needed to explore the future, imagine what's possible, create a bold vision, build the path to get there, and navigate it successfully.
The Center for the Future or CFTF (CFTF.ORG) is a global collective of thinkers, makers and pioneers working together to explore the future and share knowledge, insights, and tools with organizations around the world.
As a part of the Revolution Institute, the CFTF brings diverse perspectives, experiences and expertise in futures, design, behavioral science, anthropology and engineering to projects that benefit the future of humanity.
The Center for the Future or CFTF (CFTF.ORG) is a global collective of thinkers, makers and pioneers working together to explore the future and share knowledge, insights, and tools with organizations around the world.
As a part of the Revolution Institute, the CFTF brings diverse perspectives, experiences and expertise in futures, design, behavioral science, anthropology and engineering to projects that benefit the future of humanity.
The Center for the Future or CFTF (CFTF.ORG) is a global collective of thinkers, makers and pioneers working together to explore the future and share knowledge, insights, and tools with organizations around the world.
As a part of the Revolution Institute, the CFTF brings diverse perspectives, experiences and expertise in futures, design, behavioral science, anthropology and engineering to projects that benefit the future of humanity.
The Center for the Future or CFTF (CFTF.ORG) is a global collective of thinkers, makers and pioneers working together to explore the future and share knowledge, insights, and tools with organizations around the world.
As a part of the Revolution Institute, the CFTF brings diverse perspectives, experiences and expertise in futures, design, behavioral science, anthropology and engineering to projects that benefit the future of humanity.
The Center for the Future or CFTF (CFTF.ORG) is a global collective of thinkers, makers and pioneers working together to explore the future and share knowledge, insights, and tools with organizations around the world.
As a part of the Revolution Institute, the CFTF brings diverse perspectives, experiences and expertise in futures, design, behavioral science, anthropology and engineering to projects that benefit the future of humanity.
The Center for the Future or CFTF (CFTF.ORG) is a global collective of thinkers, makers and pioneers working together to explore the future and share knowledge, insights, and tools with organizations around the world.
As a part of the Revolution Institute, the CFTF brings diverse perspectives, experiences and expertise in futures, design, behavioral science, anthropology and engineering to projects that benefit the future of humanity.
Here is some stuff I make and things I do...
Leveraging a Breakthrough Approach to Navigating the Future: The Spectrum Futures Method
We live in a spectrum, not a binary world. Too often, we think of the future as if there is only one type for all of us to inhabit. Futures work often attempts to neatly categorize potential futures and set boundaries on the ways we might live. However, we know from our current lives that one person's vision is vastly different from another's. Someone could be living in a positive future, while someone else might be living in the present or even a negative future.
The possible futures we explore could exist simultaneously across a spectrum, where the plurality of the future is more tangible than we imagine. Through over 20 years of applied futures work, Steve has tested and iterated on a futures approach called the "Spectrum Futures Method" (SFM).
This groundbreaking approach presents principles and tasks, which include spectrum scanning for signals and trends, spectrum scenario building, spectrum futures design, and spectrum backcast strategy. It allows you and your organization to navigate a spectrum of potential futures while simultaneously living in many of them.
Foresight and futures thinking has created significant value for organizations as they seek to future- proof their businesses. In one longitudinal study, “future-prepared” firms, defined as those with a corporate foresight practice, posted 33 percent higher profitability than the average company and 200 percent higher growth. Design combined with foresight and futures thinking—bundled into our SFF approach—can help organizations develop a view that goes beyond major trends and reaches for new thinking and solutions.
Steve and his team help you use the SFF to establish a holistic approach and set of methods that establish foresight and futures thinking as an organizational practice that exponentially powers innovation, strategic planning and vision.