Urgent Optimism: How to Turn Foresight into Action

When you get better at thinking about the future, you get better at changing the future.

This course will help you take all of the foresight skills you’ve developed so far and apply them to making real positive change in your life, in your work, and in the world around you. You’ll learn how to create and share “preferred futures”, which are highly persuasive, compelling visions of the changes you want to make real. You’ll use your preferred future to identify obstacles, recruit allies, collect resources, and plan action to make your vision real. You’ll also practice making “artifacts” from the future, which are creative representations of how everyday life might be different in the future. Artifacts can inspire others to join you in your quest to make a preferred future real. Leading futurists from the Institute for the Future will share with you their favorite future artifacts – and walk you through the entire creative process it took to make them. Every action we take today changes the future. This course will help you identify and take the actions that make the BIGGEST, most strategic impacts on the most urgent challenges you and society face. Many thanks to the Enlight Foundation and the Enlight Collaborative, which provided a grant to support the creation of this course.