Foresight University (4U) is a professional foresight learning and development (L&D) company. We offer affordable, high-quality talks, workshops, and training in adaptive foresight methods and leadership (“Foresight”) and in the creation and communication of better future stories (“Futures”), for individuals, teams, and organizations. Our CEO and founder is John Smart, a 20-year career foresight practitioner, leadership coach, educator, technology analyst, and living systems scholar. Email John if you’d like to connect.

    Good Foresight is John’s weekly newsletter (~5-10 min read). It includes valuable tips on foresight practice and adaptive futures stories for individuals, teams, and firms in today’s volatile, uncertain, complex, and accelerating (VUCA) world.

    Join Us! Tell Us Your Current Foresight Practices and Future Visions.

    Ready to Improve Your Foresight Practice? Read

    Introduction to Foresight, Executive Edition:

    Personal, Team, and Organizational Adaptiveness

    Book 1 of The Foresight Guide. Print version available on Amazon.

    Free online draft version available at ForesightGuide.com

    The Foresight Guide seeks to be the world’s best resource for two vital bodies of knowledge: professional foresight practices (Book 1), and adaptive futures stories and models (Book 2). The first is commonly called “Foresight” and the second “Futures” in our field. Our team wrote the Guide to help you evaluate and explore proven tips and strategies for living better lives, growing stronger teams, and building a more adaptive world. It is guided by exponential-aware, evo-devo, and evidence-based perspectives.

    About Us

    Our team includes academically-trained strategic foresight practitioners, psychology, evo-devo, complexity, and leadership scholars, entrepreneurs, technologists, and creatives. We are a consulting nonprofit, like the Institute for the Future (no affiliation). We help our clients maximize their positive career impact, do better strategy, and appropriately utilize the vital professional foresight and futures communities in their domains of impact. See our Publications page for some of our free books, articles and worksheets. See our Beliefs and Values page for some of the assumptions we make about the nature of our world, and our place in it.

    Want an overview of our approach? Listen to John’s June 2023 podcast (57 mins):

    Mission

    We help individuals, teams and firms:

    • Get affordable, high-quality training in Personal, Team, Organizational, Societal, Global, and Universal (“Full-Spectrum, Six Domain”) foresight and leadership.

    • Realize the incredible power, promise and first-generation disruptions and risks of exponential science and technologies.

    • Become more intelligently optimistic, empowered, empathic, ethical, and evidence-based leaders and self-leaders.

    • Grow their network of high-integrity, practical, future-oriented colleagues, friends, and acquaintances.

    Projects

    We are presently:

    • Offering talks, workshops, and training in effective Foresight methods and adaptive Futures content production.

    • Finishing The Foresight Guide, our two-volume guide to strategic foresight models and practices (Book 1, Intro to Foresight, published 2022) and 21st century futures stories, scenarios, trends, and predictions (Book 2, Big Picture Futures, in process).

    • Planning a Book Club, Good Foresight, and a personal goalsetting retreat, Fusion, to support our community.

    Would you like to help us advance any of these projects? Email us with your background and interests. 

    If you are a creative, innovator, entrepreneur, speaker, forecaster, scholar, consultant, manager, advisor, coach, investor or scout, and you share our values, let’s talk! Working together we can see farther, work smarter, and thrive better than ever before. 

    Foresight is Our Superpower!