Based on my more than 10-years of leading future forecasting games with the Institute for the Future, I have come to strongly believe that the most powerful simulations of the future aren't based on mathematical models or run by supercomputers. I believe that the most compelling and informative simulations are actually powered by personal predictions that they are generated through our own collective intelligence and our collective imagination by the games and simulations that we all play together, instead of outsourcing them to a machine. But if you're going to invite hundreds, or thousands or tens of thousands, or even a million people to play a future forecasting game together, you need some tools or techniques so that everybody can share their imagination in the same form so that you can collect it, and analyze it, and store it, and come back to it. So I want to talk to you today about one of the most effective and efficient techniques that we have for collecting that imagination, for running a game, and that technique is called a future wheel. A future wheel it's very structured way to brainstorm potential consequences of a future scenario. If this happened, what might happen next? If that happened, what would happen? If that happened, what would happened next? A future wheel is structured like a chess game, or like a board game or any kind of a game. If one player makes this move, what might another player do? What might the response be? It's really about building a chain of events, a sequence of consequences. So you're not just thinking about what might happen first, but you can take the story, you can take the scenario many, many further moves out. So the future wheel helps you game out the future not just at the first-order, but many orders of possible moves, and strategies, and consequences. The future wheel was first submitted in the year 1971 by a researcher named Jerome Glenn, and it's really become a popular tool to use in any kind of a group setting to get a lot of that collective creativity out. To give you an example of how it works, actually really wanted to use a little more collective imagination here than just me. I wanted to introduce you to the person who's been directing this entire Coursera course specialization. Barry, would you mind coming from out behind the camera, and let me introduce you to all of our amazing students. Everyone, this is Barry Pousman, and he has been directing all of the videos for this course behind the camera. Thank you Barry for all of the amazing work you've done to make this course. I wanted to make sure everybody got a chance to meet you, and also to tap your creativity a little bit. How do you feel about playing a futures wheel game together? I'm very excited. Okay, good. Now, we've never played this game together before, you have no idea what I'm about to ask you. No. Part of what I wanted to do is to show how great this tool is for helping people even when they're put right on the spot with no preparation, it's a really powerful tool for people just to start sparking ideas and sparking imagination. We're going to do a very fantastical scenario. Whenever I teach this wheel, this is the first one I do because I think it's important for people to feel like they can be imaginative and they don't have to be constrained by every day mundane realities. So we start with something totally fantastical before we get to the real future stuff. So first question for the future wheel. We're going to think of a scenario to put at the center of a future wheel. So to figure out what that scenario will be I have to ask you, what is your favorite superpower like X-ray vision, I can be invisible, I can fly, superhuman strength, I can regenerate other people with the healing touch. What's your favorite fantastic superhero or superpower? I think flying, probably is. Yeah. Okay. So flying like superman flying. Flying like superman. Okay. So what we're going to put at the center of our future wheel is a hypothetical scenario. What if everybody woke up tomorrow with your favorite superpower? What if every person on the planet woke up suddenly with the ability to fly? So we put that at the center of that future wheel, and now we have all these empty circles around it for us to fill in by simply asking the question, what's one thing that might happen in this future? So it's the first day everyone just woke up with their superpower. What's one thing that happens? Traffic jams. Air track jams. Air traffic jams. So suddenly everybody is in the air collisions. Okay. That's one thing that might happen. Let's file that away, and what's another thing that might happen, everybody wakes up and they can fly? Total chaos. A lack of structure. A lack of structure. Yeah. Because what I'm thinking is if everybody woke up a can fly, would anybody do the ordinary routine? Like nobody goes to work, nobody goes to school, everybody's like out there having this extraordinary experience. Yeah. So we can fill that in. So first of all, crazy traffic jams in the sky, and a second consequence is nobody's following routine, everybody is adventuring. So you would fill in the first wheels, the first wheel around the scenario, which is the first things that pop into your mind. Then what you do with the future wheel is you go back to all the things you thought of, and then you ask the question, "Well, if that happened what might happen next?" So everybody's bodies are in the sky at the same time. What's the consequence of that? Well, am I giving a consequence of my first thing. Yeah. So the traffic jam, for example, a consequence would be that people would like jump to help maybe. There would be a whole growing ecosystem of helpers. "My God, you're caught in the," some people are realizing they need to become traffic wardens maybe. So overnight, you have a community forming to solve the problem of movement in space. So this is like it's a good thing. It's now, it's a calling that people have. Yeah. Okay, great. So that's a possible consequence. How about another consequence of everybody stopped what they're doing and they're just flying. So like a everyday business, everyday life would ground to a halt. So what might be the consequences? Power will go out, just no one's running grid no one's churning, everything would stop, production would stop. Right, productions stop. I mean it's very interesting we're suddenly free. What do people do with themselves? Would you think that with everybody, disability people just go wherever they want in the world? I mean suddenly you might have massive movement and nobody knows where anybody is. I mean, everybody's gone to a different country. Borders have become completely- Irrelevant. Irrelevant. There's no password information about where anyone is. I mean this could be a monumental day for migration on the planet. It could change forever where people live, people might just fly somewhere else and never leave. So what would happen in a world where there was freedom of movement, and this is where you can take a hypothetical fantastical scenario and start to think about really interesting things. What if there were a day with no borders, and people could go wherever they wanted as an urgent response to climate change maybe, and we allowed people to freely flee, and how would that change? So anyway, you could play this out for hours or days. You could take your future wheel and you could send it to a dozen friends by email and ask them to fill out the circles. You could have them send their circles to other people, and it becomes a living document where just starting with a simple question, what would happen if everybody will got tomorrow with the ability to fly? The more people you share it with, and the more responses they can see to stimulate their own creativity, the more weird and wonderful ideas, and the more weird and wonderful directions that you can take a future. So Barry, thank you for demoing. That's how a future wheel work. What a cool tool. Thanks.
