Institute for the Future

What if boards were filled with visionary futurists who thought beyond the present-day confines of daily operations? In this webinar recorded August 5, 2026, IFTF's Andrew Hawn talks with Becky Cooperman, Principal Consultant at White Knuckle Futures, diving into how she successfully integrated foresight as a framework into the board of her neighborhood school.

Why did 20+ foresight practitioners across a dozen countries feel compelled by an off-the-cuff Whatsapp message to eventually get together in Singapore to produce ten rigorous, coherent forecasts on the transformation of the global landscape?

This one-of-a-kind course is designed to help individuals and organizations develop their skills in the art and science of foresight. You’ll learn to make sense of the constant stream of news and information; transform urgent foresight into actionable insights; disrupt short-termism; and develop and test your own experiments in future-making.

Whether it's AI, a national policy, a religious leader, or your own futures thinking practice, it's a worth question worth asking.

OCTOBER 20–21, 2026 PALO ALTO, CA Day 1 — 5:00 - 7:00 pm Day 2 — 8:30 am - 4:00 pm As we live through a decade in which truth is precarious, AI is remaking how we work and learn, climate pressure is crossing lines we once could not imagine, and the global order is being redrawn in real time. It's easy to feel that the future is happening to us. It isn't. The future will be made by what we choose next — and IFTF’s Ten-Year Forecast is designed to see ahead and prepare you to choose well.

What if reimagining our systems required new kinds of collaboration across sectors, borders, and ways of knowing?

IFTF Research Director Andrew Hawn's new essay, "Army of One: The rise of the HI-C," examines what happens when companies reorganize around the High-Impact Individual Contributor, or HI-C: one person who delivers a complete project, end-to-end, alone. Fewer people per project, but also burnout, surveillance, and fewer paths to management. Who will decide what this arrangement looks like — the workers taking on that role, or the leadership and capital restructuring around them?

Over the first few months of 2026, a new worker archetype has emerged in tech companies as they reorganize around AI. It's the High-Impact Individual Contributor — or the "HI-C," a term coined by Elena Verna, head of growth at Lovable, a software development platform.

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Making good choices about what we do next is the purpose of foresight. In this issue, Jane McGonigal's Lumisphere essay shows how an immersive futures-thinking experience produced measurable shifts in mental flexibility, realistic hope, agency, and openness to possibility. This October's IFTF Ten-Year Forecast Summit is titled, "What We Choose Next." We will explore ten high-probability futures, from the loneliness business to a world reorganized around extreme heat.