First published as Futures Platform Blog (January 18, 2019).
This piece is both methodological – how to do futures – and also content-based: what might the future look like?A few years back I was asked by a futures team from the Office of the Prime Minister of a North American nation to provide a report on the futures of Asia; specifically focused on social emerging issues. This report eventually became a book titled, Asia 2038: Ten Disruptions That Will Change Everything.While we touched on scenarios for the futures of Asia, we saw this as an opportunity not just to explore alternatives but to help shape the future, to be active participants even while we did our best to objectively present the emerging issues we identified.I thus began the report with my own narrative, my experience in growing up in Asia. Most salient was a story from high school when I was playing a basketball match in Singapore. After the game, we were offered a range of narcotics – which we refused – and during the match members from the gym stands routinely took younger students to the toilet where they would flush their heads. This would be unimaginable in Singapore and much of Asia today. Using this narrative to create a sense of how the last forty years had changed, we then focused on the next twenty.