In a way every one of us is a futurist, with a lower case ‘f,’ because we’re all constantly thinking about the future and trying to figure out how best to navigate it and improve it for ourselves. In fact, not only is it estimated that we spend up to 40% of our mental musings thinking about the future, with most of it being about the near future (78%) versus the deep future (22%), but there are experts who say that thinking about the future is a uniquely human trait and that our brains are literally built, by “natures design,” to “perform mental time travel.” After all, we all dream and imagine, and through the power of story telling we are all able to take advantage of other people’s experiences, imaginings, and reflections to prudently guide our own future behaviours and develop futures scenarios in our minds.

Look around you and no matter where you live or your circumstances you don’t have to look very far to see how the world around you is changing. Today though, the changes we are seeing are without precedent in Human history, and very different to those our ancestors and ancient ancestors witnessed. Today’s change is multi-dimensional, taking place simultaneously in the digital, physical, and virtual worlds. It’s more complicated, complex, and confusing. It’s more disruptive and pervasive, at the global and local level. And, most of all, the pace of change has accelerated exponentially, with that pace of acceleration itself accelerating, so much so that today we can change the whole world in just a single day.

From its origins in the early 20th Century Futurism has long captivated humanity’s imagination. It represents a forward-looking approach to understanding and shaping tomorrow’s world, and rooted in art, literature, philosophy, and science it transcends disciplinary boundaries, giving us all a lens through which we can envision possibilities, confront challenges, and innovate for the future. Originally seen by companies as an optional benefit today Futurism, it can easily be argued, is no longer an option – it’s a necessity.

In a world where increasingly powerful sci-fi like technologies challenge what it is to be human on a daily basis, in a world where global industries can be disrupted in days, not years, and where markets can get wiped out in hours, and in a world where geopolitical actions and movements all too often seem to be a pretext for the Butterfly Effect, where chaos ensues and follows, it’s no surprise that business leaders, individuals, and politicians everywhere are struggling to make sense of the world we live in today – let alone the future. But, as the world around us increasingly seems to have more in common with a Hollywood movie than reality as we knew it, as we see Human-level Artificial General Intelligence (AI) emerging on the horizon, witness thousands of trends change the world even the best of us may be under estimating just how “wild” the future is going to be, which means that Futurism – the bridge between today and tomorrow – and the ability to envision and explore the myriad of futures we have in front of us, so that we can “avoid surprise” is now more crucial than ever.