In the first lesson, I’ll tell you about Strategic Futurism, what it is and why you should care. This whole course is based on something I call Strategic Futurism, which is an entire toolbox full of unusual methodologies that we’ve been developing at the DaVinci Institute. Each one will give you a different lens for your mind to look through for gaining insights into the future.

This lesson is all about the Mindsets you need to Adopt and Mindsets you need to Kill in order to be an effective futurist. I’ll explain how the laws of time are different than the laws of the future, and how the future itself is a definable force of nature. You'll learn key mindsets that will help you better relate to the future and how changing your perspective can open up a whole new way of thinking.

Lesson #3 takes you through a series of processes for working with our Inner Vision to leverage our own intuitive wisdom. In this video I will show you examples of how your inner vision affects your daily decisions and how to become intimately familiar with how it operates. If we change someone’s vision of the future, we change the way they make decisions today.

In this lesson I will show you how to reprogram your mind to spot signs of the future, and in doing so, you will reprogram your inner vision to adopt this new perspective. This video is all about fine tuning your inner vision to spot specific signs of the future. In this context, signs are to futurists what words are to writers, or paint is to painters, or food is to chefs, or computer code is to programmers.

In lesson #5 you will learn what a trajectory timeline is and how to build one, as well as how to interpret the results. We can’t understand the future without understanding the past. Once you’ve spotted a notable signpost of change, one of the first steps will be to build a historical timeline. Historical timelines are important because they help us understand significant data points along the way. Trajectories help us understand the path of their momentum.

In this video I will demonstrate how to use a simple Checkerboard Tool for brainstorming use cases, models, patterns, and viable examples of future uses for emerging technology. I'll walk you through an example using flying drones, and show you how to apply this technique to literally thousands of different future technologies. Knowing what will be possible with future technologies helps us understand what things are likely to be developed once we have the ability.

Question Mapping is an unusual tool that I’ve developed for finding answers by asking more and more questions. Using this technique, you will learn how to dissect the question, apply journalism techniques, chronology perspectives, taxonomy systems, and inflection point analysis to build out the interlocking question map you’ll need to find an answer. This lesson will walk you through the various ways of applying question mapping to the question: "Will reading and writing still be important in 2050?"

Unlike forecasting, which tries to predict where we are headed under current conditions, Backcasting is a technique that starts in the future and works backwards. The clarity of our future vision is directly related to the number of idea fragments we manage to piece together. In this lesson I will show you how to apply Backcasting to eight different scenarios.

Every new technology opens the door for a number of Firsts. After all, few of us remember the second person to set foot on the moon, the second person to design and fly an airplane, or the second person to run a mile in under four minutes. In this video I will show you how to apply the use of Firsts to build out your understanding of emerging technology.

Much like dropping a rock into still water and watching the ripples form in every direction, Situational Futuring begins with a central idea, and grows into a series of rippling thoughts, issues, and questions expanding in every direction. Unlike the study of macro or megatrends, Situational Futuring is a micro-futuring process that begins with a single invention, tiny idea, or what-if condition and expands from there. In lesson #10 I'll show you how to apply Situational Futuring to an autonomous transportation scenario to illustrate the kind of results you can expect.

Lesson #11 will introduce you to an amazing, and until now, secret tool I use. I call it - Attractionary Futuristics. It is an emerging science that we’ve been developing at the DaVinci Institute. It’s based on the science of attractors. This new field explores what effects known future events will have on present-day activities. In this course we will look at how attractors are created and step you through the process of creating a new attractor from scratch. In addition, I’ll show you how to leverage the power of known attractors to your advantage.

This lesson is all about Systems. Our ability to understand the future requires that we analyze our current systems and think through how they will evolve and change in the years ahead. In this video we will look at how the Systems Thinking lens can be used to do both an inflection point study and a failure point analysis for individual technologies as well as businesses and entire industries.

Knowing when an industry or a product has reached its peak is vitally important when it comes to strategically planning your future. Peak X is an important tool for monitoring critical turning points for businesses, governments, and even our personal lives. In lesson #13 you will learn how to map out particular trend-lines leading to Peak X moments, and how to interpret their impact.

In the 14th and final lesson, we’ll review what we’ve covered and put it all together. During the previous lessons, you will have learned how to use the Checkerboard Tool, along with various ways to use Strategic Futuring techniques like Question Mapping, Backcasting, and Firsts, to help you bring clarity to your vision of the future. You learned about Situational Futuring which laid the groundwork for several other anticipatory thinking protocols including Attractionary Futuristics, and Peak X. Each tool will serve as an additional lens through which you can begin to understand the world ahead in ways that few others can.