Futurists are good at gathering information to track trends, but they also must use quantitative models to frame baseline forecasts and alternative scenarios. What will be the long-term impact of concentration of global oil production in the Middle East? Or continuing poverty in Africa? How will a resurgent Russia impact European stability in a global recession? How will new activist social policies in the U.S. impact global change? Without the ability to model patterns, forecast alternatives and develop risk mitigation strategies, futurists cannot help business executives or government officials weigh long-term dynamics against measurable investment choices.

This course demonstrates how to use a public access forecasting tool to map global trends, determine key forces, and develop analytical rigor behind alternative scenarios. Using the International Futures (IFs) computer simulation, participants will gain insight into how the European Commission, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, and the United Nations use this global simulation to evaluate public policy choices.

Who should attend: Policy planners, risk consultants, academics, professional futurists, and global advisors who recognize the need for data-driven tools to measure alternative futures; anyone seeking to learn practical modeling and simulation capabilities of a large-scale integrated global simulation modeling tool for long-term policy analysis.
What you’ll learn: How to: (1) construct strategic framework forecasts, (2) choose the most critical variables in a domain to represent client interests, (3) create a baseline from the historic data set that comes with IFs, (4) generate an alternative scenario with IFs by changing one or more assumptions, run the model, and display impacts of change.
How this new knowledge can be applied: Create long-term global outlooks; provide clients with credible forecasts; offer data-driven scenarios to top management teams; relate your industry-based research to other sectors to inform global decisions. 

Faculty:

 

Jay Gary, assistant professor, School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship and program director of the Master of Arts in Strategic Foresight at Regent University; member, Association of Professional Futurists, Norfolk, Virginia
 

 

Thomas Ferleman, associate, Booz Allen Hamilton; general editor of the Global Futures forum; advisor to the defense and intelligence communities; member of International Studies Association, Gaithersburg, Maryland

$195 members/$245 nonmember 

C-6      Using Cognitive Mapping Techniques for Exploring Future Scenarios   
Thursday, July 16, 2009
1:00–5:00p.m.

This half-day course will introduce cognitive mapping as a technique for creating and exploring future scenarios. It will begin with a brief discussion of existing uses of cognitive mapping, followed by group exercises for hands-on experience of generating and analyzing cognitive maps of future issues of importance to the participants. This course will introduce participants to the use of cognitive mapping techniques for future studies. 

Participants in this course will be introduced to the use of cognitive mapping as a replicable method for the facilitating of messy scenario problems. Through a series of interactive exercises they will learn how to collate, compare, and analyze views of the future of organizational members. The technique enables both analysts and clients to begin to negotiate suitable directions forward. This facilitates the holistic evaluation of the implications of alternative scenarios and enhances the organization’s competitive advantage. 

Who should attend: This pragmatic course is relevant to policy makers, managers, educators, entrepreneurs, and professionals whose work requires collaborative decision-making for the future through understanding and generating shared agendas.                     
What you’ll learn: Participants will learn how to use cognitive mapping for collaborative building of future scenarios, accurately and completely capturing feasibility requirements, and maintaining the richness of data in future studies by managing its complexity.
How this new knowledge can be applied: Participants will be able to use the practical skills from this course for strategy development, future stakeholder analysis, building a corporate memory, resolving conflicts, and encouraging group creativity.

Faculty:

 

Gilly Salmon, professor of E-learning and Learning Technologies, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom
 

 

 

 

Sandra Romenska, research associate, Creating Academic Learning Futures Project, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

$120 members/$170 nonmembers 

C-7  Wiser Futures: Using Futures Tools to Understand and Create the Future
Friday, July 17, 2009
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

The Institute for Alternative Futures offers its popular workshop introducing its world-class approach to aspirational futures techniques in communities, organizations, governments, and corporations around the world. IAF will take you through the four dimensions of aspirational futures to help people and organizations learn about the future, discover their aspirations, choose a preferred future, and lead change. You will get practical advice on when and how to use powerful futures methods and tools to transform organizations and create preferred futures. IAF will survey participants in advance to select several futures methods to experience in the workshop. Every participant receives a compendium of tools and resources.  

Who should attend: This course is valuable for individuals from organizations and corporations responsible for foresight and strategic planning.
What you’ll learn: Hands-on experience in identifying trends, developing forecasts, creating stimulating scenarios, and discovering powerful visions for an organization. The course provides an introductory overview to the steps the Institute for Alternative Futures considers the core of aspirational futures.
How this new knowledge can be applied: Participants can use the knowledge and skills to wisely apply a range of futures methods to their specific challenges and organizational priorities. Practicing futurists will appreciate this opportunity to benchmark their tools and approaches against a leading futurist organization.

Faculty:

Craig Bettles, futurist and researcher, Institute for Alternative Futures, Seattle, Washington

Clement Bezold, founder and chairman of the board, Institute for Alternative Futures; contributing editor, THE FUTURIST magazine; member, Association of Professional Futurists,  Alexandria, Virginia
 

 

Eric Meade, associate, Institute for Alternative Futures; Alexandria, Virginia

$200 members/$250 nonmembers 

C-8 Application of Systems Thinking to Organizational Creativity
Friday, July 17, 2008
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. 

Many organizations attempting to compete in the twenty-first-century economy are genuinely puzzled when they find that the innovative solutions that worked so well for them in the last century are found to fail miserably when attempted in this century.  The answer to this dilemma is that the time of mechanistic innovation is over.  We are now living and working in the systems creativity age. 

It is now clear that professional and personal success in the twenty-first century will largely depend on the development of an in-depth understanding of the principles of the systems approach to creative thinking. Contrary to popular belief, creative thinking is a skill that can be learned. Many highly intelligent people are actually poor innovators because of inefficient, obsolete, mechanistic thinking patterns.

This course will present an unusually broad range of subjects and will cover material unavailable in any other course. The most important topics will be explored in significant depth and numerous case studies will be presented to reinforce the course material. Participants will be able to look at the problems of concern to them in a new way and will acquire the ability to produce innovative solutions to these problems at will. 

Who should attend: This course is designed for all those who must be creative and innovative to survive in the ruthlessly competitive world of work in the twenty-first-century economy. This course will benefit everyone from senior CEOs, corporate managers, and technical professionals to concerned citizens.  What you’ll learn: It is the aim of this course to provide professionals with the knowledge and skills necessary to think creatively about a broad spectrum of difficult problems using a systems approach. By the end of the course, participants will be able to understand the principles of systems inspired creative thinking and apply them to the solutions of the most difficult problems that they face in their daily lives.
How this new knowledge can be applied:  Participants will understand the systemic barriers to organizational innovation and will learn how to overcome them; how to harness the creative use of play; the efficient use of random chance; the application of intuition in decision making; the efficient generation, testing, development, and deployment of innovative ideas; the art of seeking unorthodox and illogical solutions; and how to optimize the structure of the modern corporation for innovation.

Faculty:

Paul D. Tinari , director, Pacific Institute for Advanced Study, Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada. Tinari has designed and taught courses in systems thinking and applied creativity at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and at the University of Toronto. 

$195 members/$245 nonmembers 

C-9 Scenario Planning: How to Build and Use Scenarios
Friday, July 17, 2009
9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

Nobody can predict the future, but proven tools help us illuminate the path ahead so we are able to make better decisions about opportunities and threats in an uncertain future. The most comprehensive of these tools is scenario planning, a storytelling technique that allows managers to explore different “plausible model worlds,” each based on alternative resolution of the most important pending technological, societal, or regulatory uncertainties facing them.

Scenario planning has been adapted for both corporate and for nonprofit/government situations, and there are fundamental differences in these two approaches. In this course we will investigate both types of scenario planning, with a focus ultimately on policy-oriented, public-interest scenario planning.

Following an overview and elaboration of past examples, attendees will get a chance to make and test scenarios in small groups.

The program will also teach participants best practices in extracting the value from scenarios—how to use scenarios to test and improve decision making and how to distil from competing scenarios the optimal decisions a specific organization in a particular sector at a given time should make.

The program is part of an MBA course, “Industry Foresight and Strategic Innovation,” taught by the presenter at various prominent business schools worldwide.  

Who should attend: This course is relevant both to futures professionals who seek the tools to work more closely and deeply with client companies and to managers who seek to be better able to develop future insights and apply them in their daily work. It will be relevant to participants from business, nonprofit, and government sectors, with a particular emphasis on executives in public policy and governmental organizations that are required to negotiate, determine, and communicate robust initiatives for managing the future under conditions of external uncertainty.
What you’ll learn: Participants will emerge knowing how to build scenarios and with an integrated method for getting from scenarios to strategic decision making and innovation. The course selects the best materials from both academic and business sources, including many past examples, good and bad. It is pragmatic in style and approach.
How this new knowledge can be applied: Attendees will have the opportunity on the day to apply the tools learned to their topic area and to work up scenarios that are directly relevant to their situation. Over the longer term, participants will be able to use the tools learned to develop scenarios of the future in their topic area and use them to challenge their own or others’ future thinking and future preparedness, or utilize this as a basis for fundraising or media exposure or other initiatives to positively influence the future.

Faculty:

 

Adam Gordon, director, The Future Studio, a consulting and executive education firm specializing in industry foresight, scenario planning, and innovation for business and public-sector organizations; Cardiff, UK; instructor, INSEAD, Monash, Australia; author, Future Savvy, Amacom Press, 2009. http://www.futuresavvy.net.

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$205 members/$255 nonmembers   

C-10 Jumpstarting the Future
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Section 1
8:30–11:30 a.m.
11:30 a.m.–12:00 noon: discussion
Section 2
1:30–4:30 p.m.           
4:30–5:00 p.m.: discussion

Quick, budget, fast start, lots of information, intense, project boost, jumpstart are all words to describe how organizations want their dose of the future. It has to fit with other projects, be available just-in-time, and convey lots of information and insight in a brief space. This half-day course, offered twice in one day, will be fast-moving.

A broad overview will be presented on the future with a global scope, ways in which your groups can be engaged in the future, a review of tools and techniques groups can use to expand their thinking on the future, and ideas for products and services that you can develop to deliver the future to your organization, or to your clients. The content of the course is based on the more than 20 years of experience the three members of the faculty each have as professional futurists working with large and small organizations.  

Who should attend: Anyone who needs to inject a solid dose of the future into their workdays and who likes fast-paced learning. This course will help leaders in all organizations recognize the importance of assessing the future.
What you’ll learn: Participants will learn (1) new ideas about how to apply futures and foresight within an organization, (2) ways in which to expand their own thinking and engagement with the future, (3) takeaway of some basic tools to use in applying foresight in their own thinking and influence the thinking of their colleagues, and (4) an opportunity to discuss and exchange ideas with their peers.
How this new knowledge can be applied: Futures thinking and foresight are usually seen as fresh input into organizational processes. These include strategy, new product innovation, new applications of products, branding, marketing, new skills and needs forecasting, and human resources. Futures skills and knowledge are applied to exploring the emerging external environment for a business, industry, government agency or an association’s membership.   

Faculty:

 

Jennifer Jarratt, partner, Leading Futurists LLC, Washington, D.C.; co-author or author of many futures studies books; founding member and former chair of the Association of Professional Futurists; and a professional member of the World Future Society.
 

 

 

John B. Mahaffie, is the author of dozens of futures studies and coauthor of four books; Future Work (Jossey Bass, 1990), Managing Your Future as an Association (American Society of Association Executives, 1994), The Future of the Apartment Industry (National Multi-Housing Council, 1995), and 2025: Scenarios of U.S. and Global Society, Reshaped by Science and Technology (Oakhill Press, 1997).
 

Riel Miller, currently a sitting member of the Boards of the World Futures Studies Federation, the European College of Regional Foresight, and the Association of Professional Futurists; global consultant in the design and operationalization of strategic anticipation; author; faculty member, Institut d'études politiques; Paris, France

$125 members/$175 nonmembers (per section) You may go to the morning or the afternoon session.