Welcome back. I'm excited about today's video, because we're going to start by playing a game, and this is a game you can play by yourself, or in a small group, or in a huge group, the most people I've ever played it with was over 1,000 people all playing together in the same room at the same time. But today, we're going to do a two-player version, just you and me. Here's how it works. I want you to think of one of the features that you chose as your future of x in the first week of this course. Maybe you chose future of healthcare, or future of virtual reality, or future of food, pick just one of those futures and hold it in your mind. So do you know which future you've picked? Okay, let's play. Keeping that specific future in mind, I want you to take a look at the spectrum, when you think about this specific future, do you think right now it's getting better or worse? Are things heading in a better direction or a worse direction? There is no right or wrong way to answer this question and you don't have to give me any specific reasons or explanations, just at a gut level, how do you feel? Are things getting better or worse as you head into this particular future? I want you to touch the screen and put your finger where you would place your answer. Way over on the left side, it means you think things are just falling apart, it's basically the apocalypse. On the right side, things are headed towards a perfect utopia, pick a spot somewhere on the spectrum and I want you to keep your finger there. Now, don't move your finger, we're going to add another dimension to this question. Thinking about the same future, how much power do you personally have to shape or influence this future? At the very bottom of the screen, you feel like you have no power at all. With your influence, literally nothing you do will make a difference, you are just along for the ride. At the very top, you're basically the most powerful person in the world when it comes to this future, you are going to change the course of history, you are large and in charge, and in the middle, maybe you are optimistic, you feel like you might be able to influence it, but you're still looking for those levers to push. Now, the trick here is to keep your finger where it is on the better or worse access, and just move it up or down along the powerful or powerless access. So you wind up in one of the four squares. The way we figured out the results of this game is by figuring out which square you wound up in. Are you in square 1, 2, 3, or 4? Let's do a poll and find out now, just let us know. Before we talk about what your number means, I want to make sure that I get across a really important idea, which is that, the point of future thinking is not to change where you fall on the spectrum of whether you think a particular future is getting better or worse. This is related to objective reality, some futures are getting better and some futures are getting worse, and it's good for you to be in tune with that reality, and nothing about future thinking is designed to change your perception of what direction you're heading. What we want to do with future thinking is change where you fall on the other spectrum of feeling like you have no power at all to influence the future, or feeling like you have all the power in the world to determine how that future turns out. All of the tools that you're going to learn in this course, all of the techniques, and methods, and skills, every single one of them is designed to move you up the spectrum of power, so that after using that tool, you feel you are just a little bit closer to being able to become one of the people who has a big say in how that future turns out. By the way, you might be in a different square depending on the future you're looking at. So you can really hold all four future states of mind at the same time, just depending on which future you're looking at when. What do you do with the results of this game? Well, first of all, since it's really interesting icebreaker or a conversation starter for any kind of meeting where you're going to be planning for the feature or any kind of event where you want to help people come together to think about the future collectively, what we do at the Institute for the Future is we actually have people stand up and answer these questions physically. We have them move to the right and left of the room if they feel it's getting better or worse, or the front and back of the room if they feel they have no power or lots of power, and then we have everybody standing up in different parts of the room, we can look around and see it gives really great image of where people are when they're thinking about a particular future, and then we can talk to outliers. Find the person at the most front of the room, find the person closest to the back of the room, the furthest to the right, the furthest to the left, that really helps tease out different peoples diverse points of view in the future, so that you can really meet each other where you are and understand that people bring different feelings and perspectives to the same future. It's also a really strategic practical tool. Over the course of this specialization, you're going to learn dozens of different techniques and skills for thinking about the future, and depending on which square you fall into when you think about a particular future, a different set of skills or techniques can actually be the most powerful and beneficial for you to use to think about that future where you are. Let me show you what I mean. Here we've mapped the next four courses in this sequence onto the four squares: forecasting skills, simulation skills, collaborative gaming skills, and action skills. In the next video, we'll define each of these four types of skills and how to use them depending on where you land on the future of Foursquare.
