Programme Outline
THE EMERGING FELLOWS PROGRAMME 2021
We are pleased to announce the launch of our 2021 programme. This year, the theme will be those Wild Card events that we think about, but which we never have the time or resources to prepare for. COVID-19 came as a surprise to many, but the futures community had been talking about the possibility of a pandemic for many years. What was a surprise is that the virus was a SARS based virus and not an Influenza based virus, which many had anticipated. What also came as a surprise to many is that Wild Cards rarely impact one at a time. In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are also experiencing a major supply side shock to the global economy at the same time. Once again, many in the futures community had alerted us to this possibility, but few had adequately prepared for it. It makes you wonder what else there is to be concerned about? What major risk are we missing? What else could knock us off balance? These are going to be the themes of our 2021 Emerging Fellows programme.
Our time horizon is the near future of 5 to 10 years or so. Much of this world will look very familiar to us. We shall assume that current trends play out and that the world will be more or less as we expect it to be. Into this world, we will drop the disruptive elements. We will first consider each disruption on its own. We will then ask what happens if more than one of the disruptions occurred at the same time. Finally, we shall introduce some external disruptive elements as additional factors. By the end of the programme, we should be in a position to give a view on whether or not we ought to be worried about these wild card disruptions.
Each member of the team will publish one piece per month for 2021. These will be published electronically on the APF blog. At the end of 2021, the collected work will be collated and edited into a single print volume.
We hope that you find this exploration of the future both interesting and useful.
Stephen Aguilar-Millan
[email protected]
We are pleased to announce the launch of our 2021 programme. This year, the theme will be those Wild Card events that we think about, but which we never have the time or resources to prepare for. COVID-19 came as a surprise to many, but the futures community had been talking about the possibility of a pandemic for many years. What was a surprise is that the virus was a SARS based virus and not an Influenza based virus, which many had anticipated. What also came as a surprise to many is that Wild Cards rarely impact one at a time. In addition to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are also experiencing a major supply side shock to the global economy at the same time. Once again, many in the futures community had alerted us to this possibility, but few had adequately prepared for it. It makes you wonder what else there is to be concerned about? What major risk are we missing? What else could knock us off balance? These are going to be the themes of our 2021 Emerging Fellows programme.
Our time horizon is the near future of 5 to 10 years or so. Much of this world will look very familiar to us. We shall assume that current trends play out and that the world will be more or less as we expect it to be. Into this world, we will drop the disruptive elements. We will first consider each disruption on its own. We will then ask what happens if more than one of the disruptions occurred at the same time. Finally, we shall introduce some external disruptive elements as additional factors. By the end of the programme, we should be in a position to give a view on whether or not we ought to be worried about these wild card disruptions.
Each member of the team will publish one piece per month for 2021. These will be published electronically on the APF blog. At the end of 2021, the collected work will be collated and edited into a single print volume.
We hope that you find this exploration of the future both interesting and useful.
Stephen Aguilar-Millan
[email protected]