The next block of meetings is set to begin at 1 PM, but you have been so much in the flow that you hardly noticed the time. You can remember when you were regulated by the ticking past of seconds and hours. It is the kind of thought that pops up briefly when there is still the necessary intrusion of synchronized time. Thankfully, you do not have to dwell on those thoughts for long, because your X-TIMELESS gently reminds you to NOURISH. Based on your biometrics, the alert makes recommendations for enhanced gut flora, nutrient densities, and total protein intake. Your favorite midday snack would suffice and regulate the spike in cortisol that the upcoming meetings will no-doubt inspire.

First inspired by Tim Ferris, your X-TIMELESS operates on your needs instead of on what now seem like pointless cultural norms. In 2050, time is layered and rich with possibilities. And the X-TIMELESS, once embedded, is your advisor. It is how you make the most of what you could be. Right before the meeting starts, you are prompted once more. This time, it says, “After the meeting time, don’t forget to DANCE.” See? It even has a sense of humor.

Perhaps a device that allows us to no longer be tied to chronological time may seem a distant reality. What would be the utility of such a product and what relevance might it have for you?

As is the case with many profound and transformative experiences, the answer to that question is in the question itself. This concept and the host of others outlined in the 2050 Human+ catalogue are intended to inspire novelty and breathe new life into your strategic development process. For leaders tasked with developing new plans for how to improve communities, increase profitability, or forge sustainable solutions, the catalogue comes with a Futures Starter Kit to infuse strategy with innovation and make your plans anti-fragile.

Those are bold promises, we realize. But we hope you receive them as an invitation to rethink your approach to planning.

The promise of this outcome is embedded in, of all things, a product catalogue from the future. The intention of these in their curation is a foray into possibility. But rather than diving in with a blank canvas, these speculative artifacts provide you with a scaffolding, a trail map into the kinds of futures we have uncovered.

It is fair to ask, if these are not predictions, then where did these artifacts come from?

Their arrival here in our present day was generated by the community of people like you. Over the course of three virtual workshops, we gathered executives, thinkers, community leaders, futurists, designers to engage in a series of experiences. The series provided an experiential developmental opportunity for the futures-curious to dive into possibility, develop artifacts, and generate novel insights. The wisdom of that development is both what is contained within the starter kit and what it can inspire in your business, community, or organization.

The community that built these speculative artifacts did not receive any special training. There were no subject matter experts nor were there Ray-Kurzweil-esque transhumanists. These were people like you. People who received very simple, but powerful inspiration.

And this is important. Because it gets at why your strategies can be enabled by futures thinking: It is a fundamentally human thing to do.

In our world of annual reviews, quarterly KPIs, and daily to-do’s, the room for futures thinking is reduced to nearly nothing. This reduction seems pragmatic and realistic in business. It is the wisdom of our time to focus on the next thing. Why worry about what may be when we must be concerned with what is?

Any leader who has been in the trenches of strategic planning knows well the four horsemen of assumptions, threats, politics, and uncertainty. You have likely even been humbled by them. All one would need to do is pull up your plan from 2019. See all of those confident, pre-COVID designs? The assertions about the future of work? Our default setting in planning is to believe that the future is a linear continuation of the present moment. That what is happening right now will continue. However, the pandemic was only one of numerous cultural, technological, geopolitical, and environmental disruptions that have increased the general feeling of uncertainty in the business world. If you are feeling this way, you are not alone.

Visionary firms are increasingly becoming more curious about the practice of possibility exploration. Over the past three years, Google searches for “strategic foresight” and “foresight” have increased by 404%. More firms and more people what are seeking to create influence are looking to incorporate foresight and futures thinking into their strategy creation.

This catalogue, therefore, is not a catalogue at all. It is evidence that speculation about futures is possible and necessary if we hope to have strategies that are antifragile. This catalogue is your invitation. It is asking you to join in with the true visionaries pursuing their preferred futures in the face of unknowns.

One of the most well-thought-out arguments against incorporating futures insights into your strategy is an economic one. There is a notion that if you parse out time to dwell in possibility, you run the risk of a few outcomes:

These are valid and true arguments. And those truths are baked into what we are presenting to you, because the following is also true:

What appears to exist in board rooms is an assumption that there is something binary. It may seem like you can only choose to approach strategy from a practical perspective or from a foresight perspective. This is simply not the case. That deep reality that visionary firms are embracing is that the incorporation of possibility into planning is bimodal in nature.

“No possibilities” means you are operating only out of assumptions. “Only possibilities” means you never make a deliberate decision. The proposed approach is one that embraces consistent curiosity over time.

Even an incremental increase in possibility exploration will net improved strategic efficacies. This catalogue is a set of pre-baked goodness for your next strategy conversation, team huddle, or leadership retreat. And if you act now, we will throw in a set of lab-grown steak knives.