Blending practical advice with big picture thinking, futurist and TED superstar Jane McGonigal explains how imagining the future can help us to adapt to change – and be ready for anything.
How can we be confident about making plans? How might we feel secure despite the future being unknown? How do we learn to feel at peace with the unexpected?
Futurist Jane McGonigal creates games that predict and simulate hard to imagine futures. In 2008 she devised a simulation for the Institute of the Future anticipating an airborne virus. The game was intended to map out the full range of economic, political, social, and emotional ripple effects of global threats like pandemics. She had imagined the very future we’re living now with startling accuracy.
In this livestream event, Jane will teach us to think like futurists and become more resilient to future shocks – both in our personal lives and when we are faced with unfolding global events. She shows us that ‘unimaginable’ events aren’t unimaginable before they happen. It is possible to see them coming and feel ready for anything, even things that seem impossible today.
Jane explains how building an ‘urgent optimism’ mindset helps us to adapt to change. Urgent optimism is a combination of mental flexibility, realistic hope and future power, and it can be learned by engaging with tools, games and ideas that allow us to dive into the future before we live it. Once we can put it into practice, urgent optimism helps us to become better at skills like seeing familiar things in a new light, trying new ways to come up with original ideas, and finding creative ways to resolve conflict and problems.
By learning to think the unthinkable and imagine the unimaginable we can better plan for a future we’d like to see. And by seeing what’s coming faster, we can become more optimistic agents of change.
Praise for Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable:
‘Jane McGonigal is unusually adept at anticipating events that most of us can’t even fathom. In this eye-opening, actionable book, she teaches you how to widen your peripheral vision, extend your imagination farther into the future, and conceive of the inconceivable. – Adam Grant, bestselling author of Think Again
‘A unique and insightful look at how games and simulations can not only teach us about the past but give us a window into our future. Jane McGonigal’s work provides us with a whole new set of tools to make important decisions better, faster, and more transparently.’ – Sid Meier, creator of Civilization
