external future forces that will disrupt the ... -...

External Future Forces That Will Disrupt

The Business of Sustainability

A 10-Year Custom Forecast

For GEMI (Global Environmental Management Initiative)

A proposal by the Institute for the Future | November 29, 2017 Contact: Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow | [email protected]

Daria Lamb, Relationships Manager [email protected] | 650.233.9555

201 Hamilton Avenue

Palo Alto, CA 94301 www.iftf.org

INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE | 201 HAMILTON AVE., PALO ALTO, CA 94301 2

ABOUT INSTITUTE FOR THE FUTURE

Institute for the Future (IFTF) is an independent nonprofit think tank that has done long-range

forecasting for nearly 50 years—with remarkable accuracy—and has a very strong track record

in forecasting underlying big-picture trends and disruptions. The core of our work is identifying

emerging discontinuities that will disrupt global society, specific industries, and particular

companies. Institute for the Future is located in the midst of Silicon Valley in downtown Palo

Alto, adjacent to Stanford.

In the images on the front page, you see the cover from a recent IFTF forecast on the future of

networked matter, Bob Johansen’s book The New Leadership Literacies, and a typical IFTF

Foresight to Insight to Action workshop.

© 2017 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved.


executive summary

In 2007, Institute for the Future created a 10-year custom forecast for GEMI focused on external

future forces likely to disrupt sustainability. The custom forecast map that summarized this

forecast is attached to this proposal. The forecast was very accurate and it gave GEMI members

unusual foresight that contributed to their business strategy. Now, IFTF is looking ten years

ahead again at a very different future in a very different world. In this world, it is too late to have

just a sustainability strategy. Now, companies must have a strategy that melds sustainability and

business.

This new custom forecast will point a ten-year lens on external future forces—including both

threats and opportunities—that will disrupt sustainability, with a focus on business choices and

business strategy. The goal is to use foresight to awaken, engage, and drive change in the

present. Urgent future disruptions are looming and this project will provide the grounding to

engage with and win through the most important external future forces.

The Institute’s foresight will reveal new patterns to provoke insight about business strategy,

design, innovation, and social challenges. IFTF research generates the foresight needed to create

insights that lead to action.

In this project, the IFTF core team will include Bob Johansen (a social scientist who leads

custom forecasts across a wide range of industries and focuses on new leadership literacies and

skills), Jeremy Kirshbaum (an economist studying high delta markets around the world), Jamais

Cascio (a global scenario planner focusing on environmental dilemmas), Quinault Childs (a food

futurist), Max Elder (a food and animal ethics futurist), Eri Gentry (an economist and student of

citizen science), and Susanne Forchheimer (an engineer who focuses on new media and blended-

reality futures).

This project will focus on this research question:

What four or five external future forces are most likely to disrupt the business of

sustainability for companies, the industry, and society at large—thinking ten years

ahead? We will focus in particular on the links to digital transformation and the

impacts on the business of sustainability.


Most companies are already attentive to industry and consumer trends (patterns of change from

which people can extrapolate with confidence), but this project will focus on external disruptions

(BREAKS in the patterns of change).

IFTF will work with GEMI and sponsors early in this project to determine just how far ahead the

forecast will focus. For most of our forecasts, ten years allows vision and momentum for

substantive change: beyond the normal planning horizon but close enough in to be practical.

Even though we will be looking a decade ahead, we will circle back to the near-term future to

generate practical insights and possible actions.

This new forecast will help leaders glimpse and understand the future disruptions in the

environment within which they will be required to win. It will help companies heighten their

game, and it will give a rigorous, provocative futures perspective to inform business strategy.

project plan: A custom forecast of external future forces, plus an analysis of future leadership issues and opportunities.

Every winning strategy is based upon compelling insight. Foresight is a great way to provoke

insight. IFTF has been doing ten-year forecasting for 50 years. 60-80% of our forecasted futures

during that period have actually happened and most of these forecasts have involved information

technology in some way. While no one can predict the future, IFTF has demonstrated that it is

possible to think systematically about the future in order to provoke insight and improve

decision-making in the present.

In this custom forecast, IFTF will identify the external future forces that will be most critical for

your leaders to consider. For each future force we will create a headline, a direction of change,

and direct links to strategy. At IFTF, we call this process “Forecaster’s Haiku,” since it involves

considerable art—combined with science and structure—to create headlines and crisp forecasts

that are provocative without turning people off or overwhelming them. A forecast must have a

certain amount of bite in order to be useful.


Surprisingly, it is easier to do ten-year forecasting than it is one- or two-year forecasting. Still, it

will be important to not only provide a great custom forecast, but also to then use the forecast to

provoke practical insights and actions. While our foresight is focused ten years out, the insights

and actions that result will be practical and current. This project will be framed around 5-7

areas of inquiry; the list below includes possible topics to emphasize.

Possible Areas of Emphasis:

• What non-linear global, environmental and societal changes will be most important for

leaders (both today and the next generation) to consider with regard to sustainability—in

order to think ahead and yet draw out practical implications for the present?

• How will digital transformation and analytics be most important to sustainability? How

can these forces shape innovation?

• What combinatorial forces (technologies combining with each other or with social or

organizational forces—such as the blending of physical and virtual experiences) will

disrupt how companies are challenged by and are able to respond to sustainability

challenges?

• How might you apply social innovations from the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex,

and Ambiguous) environment to win in other parts of the world? What divergent future

forces will affect the way that business models play out in high delta (high change)

markets?

• How might companies manage the dilemmas of data-driven advancements in science and

medicine while also ensuring personal data remains private and secure? How will

transparency in industry be impacted by radical sustainability approaches, such as the use

of CRISPR-CAS9 to increase climate resilience?

• How should GEMI members be thinking about and planning for alternative value

exchange media, such as blockchain, crypto currencies, and other platforms for

distributed computing?

• Who will be the new sustainability leaders and global influencers? How and where will

regulatory decisions be made?


• What technology-amplified behavioral changes will affect engagement, talent selection,

hiring, and continuous learning with regard to sustainability? The attitudes of digital

natives, AI natives and next-generation leaders will be an important focus of this effort.

• How will the “Internet of Things” (IFTF’s preferred term is The Age of Networked

Matter) and the Internet of Actions have disruptive impacts on sustainability? How will

the emergence of next-generation sensors disrupt information flows and expertise with

regard to sustainability?

• What tangible experiments (or rapid prototypes) could begin to explore in the short run,

in order to engage with the emerging futures highlighted in the forecast? What are the

innovation zones where investment can have the greatest impact on sustainability?

IFTF Foresight to Insight to Action Framework

At IFTF, we emphasize our own Foresight to Insight to Action process as a basic framework for

applying custom forecasting. We will use IFTF’s foresight to provoke client insights for GEMI

members and other project sponsors.

Ultimately, insights need to be turned into action for businesses in order to have practical

value.

©2017 Institute for the Future. All rights reserved. SR-1908 | www.iftf.org

YOUR ACTION : An agile way forward, expressed with clarity

and ideally, as a story…

Institute for the Future FORESIGHT : Stories from the future: plausible, internally consistent,

provocative—with signals to bring them to life

YOUR INSIGHT: An “aha” that creates a new story, a new pattern of

connections in your brain.

Once you’ve had an insight, you can’t go

back to your old way of thinking

STRATEGY

CUSTOM FORECAST

YOUR HINDSIGHT: Your stories about the past, the present, and the future

HISTORY


IFTF has decades of experience helping organizations anticipate the future in order to make

better decisions in the present. IFTF focuses on foresight and can facilitate Foresight to Insight to

Action conversations with leaders. We can also support you as you translate what you learn

during the process to create specific actions such as building prototypes and running experiments

designed to help explore models of your preferred future.

As part of this custom forecast, IFTF will draw out implications for leaders, so that this work can

feed into leadership and executive development programs.

deliverable

IFTF will develop a new custom forecast map for GEMI participants with a more tightly focused

format than the 2007 version. This will be in pdf form to allow members to focus strategic

conversations on the four or five most important external future forces. The 2007 map was a very

accurate forecast, but as the speed of business has increased, maps like this are just too busy to

engage many top executives. This will depend on formats that are just as content rich, but more

focused and clear.

In addition to the map, IFTF will create an annotated PowerPoint presentation that summarizes

the forecast in a form that can be used easily by the sponsor companies, even when IFTF is not

present.

The IFTF project team will present the custom forecast at a GEMI meeting at the completion of

this project, and will explain the future forces, insights and possible actions.

IFTF will offer presentations of the forecast at sponsor location at a cost depending on which

staff members are involved in that presentation.

The new custom forecast map will be available to GEMI members and other sponsors first, but

then will be public after an agreed upon period. Both IFTF and GEMI could share the content

and promote GEMI as thought leaders in the industry.

cost


The project goal is to raise $200,000, plus $20,000 in expenses. The project will move forward

with a minimum of $150,000, plus $20,000 in expenses, raised. Any amounts raised for the

project beyond $150,000 will be provided to IFTF up to the $200,000 project proposal level.

GEMI, working with IFTF, will immediately package a proposal to go to list of targeted companies to invite them to participate in the project at $15,000 per company. When we receive

commitments from 10 companies, we will kick off the project together. In order for a timely

completion of this project, commitments of at least $150,000 will be secured by January 31,

2018. No participation fee will be requested of active 2018 GEMI members in good standing.

A deposit of $100,000 is required to initiate the project, with a second payment of $50,000 paid

after the first workshop and the balance paid after the delivery of the forecast map and

presentation. If there is not a sufficient response to GEMI’s project solicitation by January 31,

2018, we will work together to be prepared to execute the project in 2019.

project timeline

Dates

January 31, 2018

March 15, 2018

~3 months after kickoff

~ 6 months after kickoff

Milestones

Commitment of at least $150,000 secured by GEMI.

Project kickoff virtual meeting of sponsors with IFTF team to share

the project plan and finalized schedule.

Workshop at IFTF in Palo Alto, to review draft custom forecast (this

workshop will be coordinated with a GEMI meeting date)

Final presentation of the new custom forecast and map at a GEMI

meeting


IFTF project team: Bob Johansen

Bob Johansen is a distinguished fellow with the Institute for the

Future in Silicon Valley. For more than 30 years, Bob has helped

organizations around the world prepare for and shape the future,

including corporations such as P&G, Walmart, McKinsey,

United Rentals, and Syngenta, as well as major universities and

nonprofits.

The author or co-author of ten books, Bob is a frequent keynote

speaker. His best-selling book Get There Early: Sensing the Future to Compete in the Present

was selected as one of the top business books of 2007. His latest book is The New Leadership

Literacies, which focuses on what will be needed for leaders to thrive in the next decade.

Bob holds a B.S. from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University—as

well as a master’s degree that focused on world religions.

Jeremy Kirshbaum

Jeremy brings to IFTF a background in macroeconomic and

currency theory, geopolitics, and international entrepreneurship.

Jeremy focuses on the future of logistics, distribution, and

communications in “high delta markets” (high-volatility

markets). His current work focuses on business models that thrive

in volatility. His work has a broad geographic focus, drawing on

his entrepreneurial and professional experience in West Africa

and China over the past six years. He is passionate about drawing

divergent links between subjects, finding the links between creativity and quantitative analysis,

and creating collaborations of mutual benefit between people of all kinds. Eri Gentry


Eri is an economist-turned-biotech entrepreneur and

a White House Champion for Change in Citizen Science.

She is a Research Manager for the Technology Horizons

Program at IFTF. She is also a co-founder of BioCurious.

She was previously VP of Open Innovation at Scanadu,

Community Manager at Genomera, and CEO, co-founder

of Livly.

Livly, a nonprofit cancer research company, started in a Mountain View, California garage and

soon attracted a community of both amateurs and professional scientists that completely

overwhelmed its capacity to support collaborative work. Hence the need for BioCurious, the

world's first hackerspace model for biotechnology, now one of the largest DIY bio organizations

in the world.

Susanne Forchheimer

Susanne works closely with a wide range of emerging digital

technologies. She is involved in activities, events, and

exhibits taking place in the Future Gallery at IFTF as well as

visiting off sites to collaborate and build relationships with

future-inspired artists, activists and researchers. Besides

engaging the public, Susanne works as a researcher focusing

on the next generation of digital media.

Susanne holds a B.S. and M.S. in Media technology engineering from the Royal Institute of

Technology in Stockholm, Sweden, as well as a M.P.S in Interactive Telecommunications from

New York University.

Jamais Cascio

http://www.iftf.org/future-now/article-detail/white-house-honors-two-iftfrs-as-champions-of-change/

http://www.iftf.org/what-we-do/gallery/


Distinguished Fellow

Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as one of their Top 100

Global Thinkers, IFTF Research Fellow Jamais Cascio writes

about the intersection of emerging technologies, environmental

dilemmas, and cultural transformation, specializing in the design

and creation of plausible scenarios of the future. His work

focuses on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking,

emphasizing the power of openness, transparency and flexibility

as catalysts for building a more resilient society.

In early 2009, he released his first book, Hacking the Earth: Understanding the Consequences of

Geoengineering. Cascio has worked in the field of scenario development for over a decade, and

in 2010 was named a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Future, where he is a primary

contributor to their annual Ten-Year Forecast program. After several years as technology

specialist at scenario planning pioneer Global Business Network, he went on to craft a wide array

of scenarios on topics including energy (for an industry think tank), nuclear proliferation (for a

political research non-profit), and sustainable development (for a multi-client project). Cascio is

also a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

In 2007, his work on calculating the carbon footprint of cheeseburgers went viral, appearing in

dozens of newspapers and magazines, multiple radio programs, hundreds of websites, and even

as part of a museum exhibit. Increasingly, the cheeseburger has become an icon of the surprising

carbon impact of everyday life. In 2003, he co-founded WorldChanging.com, the award-winning

website dedicated to finding and calling attention to models, tools and ideas for building a

"bright green" future. In his time there, Cascio wrote the plurality of the site's content, covering

topics including urban design, climate science, renewable energy, open source models, emerging

technologies, social networks, "leapfrog" global development, and much more.

Quinault Childs

Research Manager


Quinault is a research manager in IFTF's Food Futures Lab. He

comes from a background in food and agriculture entrepreneurship,

which most recently includes co-founding a company that uses

insects to upcycle food waste into animal feed. He is fascinated by

applying systems thinking to explore the interconnected nature of

food and society, using storytelling as education, and encouraging

everyone to become more adventurous eaters.

Quinault holds a B.S. in Human Factors Engineering and an M.S. in

Agriculture, Food, and Environment—both from Tufts University in Boston, MA.

Max Elder

Research Manager

Max comes to IFTF with a background in food ethics, technology,

and philanthropy. He researches the levers that can catalyze systems-

level change and create a more healthy, humane, and sustainable food

future.

Max is also a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, an

international think-tank in Oxford, England that pioneers ethical

perspectives on animals. Thus, he is passionate about how we might

move to a post-animal bioeconomy, and monitors the food-

technology landscape closely to identify signals of such a transition.

Before arriving at IFTF, Max was a Manager performing research, strategy, and communications

at the Markle Foundation's future of work program. Max has published numerous articles and

book chapters on topics ranging from the future of seafood to dietary trends to the nature of evil

and the philosophy of Louis CK. He has studied at both Kenyon College and Oxford University.

external future forces that will disrupt the ... -...

Documents