In 2022, we outlined four possible futures for the war in Ukraine. Now, three years later, as new geopolitical realities emerge, it’s time to reassess which scenarios still hold and what the latest developments mean for Ukraine, Russia, and the West.

Foresight is a vital practice for all organisations today, but it's not always easy. Foresight practitioners encounter common challenges that can obscure their view of what lies ahead.

Futures Platform’s Lead Futurist Dr Tuomo Kuosa analyses the war in Ukraine in relation to the periodic shifts in the zeitgeist, and discusses whether we may be on the cusp of major societal disruption.

Futures Table is a powerful scenario planning tool that we, at Futures Platform use on a daily basis in our scenario-building work. In this article, we walk you through how to use this tool to build fully-fledged, logical and engaging scenario narratives.

Horizon scanning is the phase of gathering future-related knowledge, which is the first stage of the larger foresight process. It is about being vigilant concerning the changes in one’s environment. The main focus in this category of Futures intelligence is on discontinuities, emerging issues, and weak signals of change.

What is the right time to go to an emerging market? If you are too early, the markets are not ready, and you end up losing time and money. If you are late, someone else will grasp the lion´s share of the growing market, and you end up to be just a follower. Hence, how to know when the trend is real and the market is ready?

Do we start to see cities becoming more independent from the national states? Self-reliant cities could potentially produce up to 30% of the energy, food, water and good it consumes. Can cities provide for itself and become less dependent on the states?

In the fight against the Coronavirus outbreak, Big Tech and corporations are joining forces to take the lead, whereas the role of national authorities has dwindled.

Intelligence amplification (IA) refers to an attempt to enhance human capabilities with intelligent technologies. This type of concept gives a new point of view to the more common description of artificial intelligence (AI), which pursuits a full-scope replication of human intelligence for the computer or robot to be fully atomised.

The Futures Triangle is a foresight method developed by Professor Sohail Inayatullah with the end goal of mapping the overall game situation before a transformative foresight process may begin.

How can you identify reliable knowledge sources and trustworthy experts? What types of knowledge or information need to be memorised, learnt, comprehended, and mastered? How is reliable knowledge created, how should we access it, and what kind of knowledge should be saved?

Many futurists believe that a good way to better understand people´s future-oriented beliefs, behaviour and decisions, is to use their world views as a starting point. Hence, following this logic, the key to better understanding our future-oriented reasoning is to know our world views, that constitute the lenses that we use.