Our FutureCast Tool Awarded ‘Ingenuity’ Award By Association Of Professional Futurists

Last year, I wrote here about FutureCast, a very adaptable “game” framework that was designed as a foresight tool, to help explore pathways to change. It was developed by myself and our partner in all things game related, Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play. Randy and I created it in partnership with the United Nations Global Pulse team, as a tool to be used to explore not just possible futures (as in traditional scenario planning), but to figure out ways to spot otherwise unexpected potential risks and opportunities in those future scenarios.

The idea was to go beyond traditional “scenario planning,” to look for more “hidden” areas of blindness, allowing participants to help bubble up future risks and opportunities in a fun, game-like structure. The initial version was designed to be used in the context of an election, but the framework itself is flexible and can be used in all sorts of scenarios.

We were really proud of the work, and how it was being used already, but even more excited to find out that we were recently awarded a prize at the Association of Professional Futurists’ IF Awards. The award for “FutureCast” was in the category of “Ingenuity.”

Anyway, it’s a really cool project, and given that it might be useful to others who are trying to explore potential future scenarios, I figured this was a nice excuse to post about it again. If you want to check out FutureCast, take a look. The whole thing is under a CC BY-NC-SA license, and we’re excited to see how others might make use of it as well.