Welcome back. In the last video, we talked about the importance of being willing to consider ridiculous at first ideas and why futurist always try to keep an open mind about seemingly unchangeable facts. In this video, I'll go over the rules for the game 100 ways. Anything could be different in the future. And then I'll do a live play test demo for you. So let's get started. Here's how you play 100 ways Anything could be different in the future. First, you pick a topic. Like the future of work, or the future of food, or the future of learning. Then you list 100 things that are true about it today. Then you imagine a future in which any of these facts is no longer true. Let's try it together. For this demo, let's choose a topic that we all have lots of experience with. Shoes. What ridiculous at first ideas can we imagine for the future of shoes. Now that we've chosen a topic, our goal is to list 100 things that are true about it. True about shoes today. Now these facts don't have to be 100% true for every person everywhere in the world. Generally true in most cases for the specific community you're thinking about, it's fine. And there's no fact too obvious or too simple to list. So let's start listing facts about shoes. Fact, shoes aren't free. People have to buy them. Fact. Most people own more than one pair of shoes, different types of shoes for different occasions. Fact. People take their shoes off when they go to sleep at night, right? We don't usually sleep with our shoes on. So that's the three facts about shoes. Only 97 more to go. Now we won't do all 100 facts together right now, but you get the idea. Now here comes the fun part. You're going to take all these facts and flip them upside down. One at a time, you will rewrite them to be the opposite of what they are today. Or you'll offer some strange new alternative. Think of this as creating your own upside down world, where everything you know is suddenly different. So let's flip the first three facts we came up with about shoes. 10 years in the future, shoes are free. 10 years from now, most people only own one pair of shoes. 10 years from now, many people sleep with their shoes on. The important thing during this part of the game, is to not worry about making sense yet. Even if the flipped version of the facts seems ridiculous at first, go for it. Flip every fact until you have a list of up to 100 alternatives to how things are today. Now the challenging part. Pick any of your new flipped facts and try to make sense of it. How does this new reality work exactly? And why did this change happen? Why are shoes free now? Why are people sleeping with their shoes on? In this part of the game, we go into our imagination and try to explore the strange ideas as if they were a virtual reality world. We could already visit and look around and see. What would I be excited about in the future? What would I be worried about in this future? How would I try to help others in this future? So, why would shoes be free in the future? Well, looking around today, there is already a trend towards services and products being discounted or free in return for customers providing data that the companies can monetize or make use of. Think of platforms like Facebook or how Fitbit provided free fitness trackers to citizens in Singapore for use in their public health program. And there are plenty of smart shoes being developed with sensors that can track location, physical activity, weight and gay social proximity. Who are you standing or walking near. So perhaps in the future, governments or health insurance companies who want this kind of data would just give away smart shoes for free. It seems like a possible future to me. Especially in a post pandemic age where we're considering lots of new surveillance technologies to prevent and control future outbreaks. Let's try another one. Why in the future would most people only own one pair of shoes? Well, maybe over the next 10 years, we'll see a huge downward shifting consumption, whether due to economic realities, are we heading into a global post pandemic depression or maybe as a part of global climate action. This past year we saw a significant trend in Sweden called flight shaming, where people are shamed out of taking unnecessary air travel due to the heavy carbon and climate impacts. Maybe this will move beyond the carbon impact of travel to the carbon impact of consumer goods. So in the future, if you own a bunch of shoes that you don't need and where every day, you get shoe shamed and it becomes a signal of climate commitment to only own one pair of shoes that you wear everywhere. Now, shortly after I started thinking about the future of shoes, I found another signal of change relevant to this ridiculous at first idea that we might all own just one pair in the future. Here are a couple of tweets from early in our covid 19 world. The first one took me a minute to fully grasp the meeting of, it says simply, remember shoes. Because, of course, if you're not leaving the house, are you still wearing shoes? It seems most people not as much. Or this tweet. Things that don't matter right now. Clothes, shoes, etcetera. What's the new status symbol during a lockdown? And this led to a fascinating discussion with more than 2000 suggestions, and I learned so much about the future of status involved from this conversation and I might not have spotted the signal of change if I weren't already playing around with 100 ways. Shoes could be different in the future, but that's my favorite thing about this game. You play it for 20 minutes and you will start to see the signals of change everywhere. In fact, I'm still Tuesday seeing fresh signals of change on this topic. I will be forever thinking about the future of shoes. Just a couple of weeks ago, I noticed that we are still having this conversation on Twitter. Once again, someone asks, Remember shoes? I do remember shoes. I miss shoes. Okay, One last flipped fact. 10 years from now, why might people sleep with their shoes on? Well, actually lived through one signal of change that could inspire an explanation. During the wildfire outbreaks in California this year, I personally was advised by an evacuation and rescue expert at the Red Cross to either sleep with my shoes right next to my bed or to actually wear them while I sleep. Because it turns out people panic and lose precious time looking for shoes when they have to escape quickly spreading fire and for those of us in California, and also we saw in Australia. The wildfires recently have been extremely traumatic. Even if you didn't lose your home or a loved one, there was just always this growing sense of dread for the future and what might happen. So maybe in some parts of the world where extreme weather and climate risk continues to escalate in the future, some of us live with a kind of climate related PTSD, and just in case we sleep with our shoes on, this is a small detail of one possible future. But it opens up important conversations about the long term collective, emotional and psychological consequences of crises we're experiencing today. So that's how you play. You pick a topic with 100 things that are true about it today. And imagine a future in which any of these facts is no longer true. We've done just a quick demo of the game today, but when you play, what you really want to do is spend some time immersing yourself in a few of the most provocative possibility. So pick a few of your favorite flipped futures and ask yourself some deeper questions. If you woke up in this world, what would the biggest risk be to you, to your family, to your company, your school or organization? If you woke up in this world, what ways could you think to help others? You know what actions could you take to make this world better? At the end of this week's videos, you're going to get a chance to play this game yourself. Flipping some facts about any future topic of your choice is going to be your peer reviewed assignment for the week and again, you'll be able to play this game for any topic you want. The future of food, the future of travel, the future of live entertainment. It's up to you, before you play. I'm going to give you just three more quick tips. These are the three most important professional habits of a futurist, and these are going to not only make you better at the game, they're going to make you better at anticipating what's coming next so that you can be more prepared and start to take advantage of opportunities as soon as you see them. So in the next video, I'll teach you the first habit, which is how to track driving forces. I will see you there. [MUSIC]
