Are you ready to learn how to think like a futurist? I'm Jane McGonigal. I'm a Research Director at the Institute for the Future here in the heart of Silicon Valley and I am so excited to be your read instructor for this brand new specialization in futures thinking, developed exclusively for Coursera learners like you. In this specialization, you'll learn how to be ready for a changing world. You'll learn the skills and mindsets of the world's top Futurists, so you can anticipate what's coming, discover new creative possibilities, thrive in really uncertain volatile times and seize control of your own future. During this training, you will build your future forecasting skills, learn how to use the Institute for the Future's most powerful foresight tools, designed to help you spot new opportunities for innovation and invention, gain insight into the most important new technologies, global events and big ideas that are already shaping the future, think more creatively and optimistically about what's possible in your future, develop new strategies for creating a future that's better for everyone. Each course will feature stories and forecasts about important emerging technologies like virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, robots, drones, block chain, food Innovation, genetics and we'll look at global future forces like; climate change, space exploration and migration. The five courses in the specialization are; ready, set, future. Introduction to futures thinking. Forecasting skills. How to see the future before it happens. Simulations Skills, this is your brain on the future. Collaborative foresight, how to gain the future. Urgent optimism, how to turn foresight into action. These courses adapt the how to think like a futurist workshops that I teach at Stanford University's continuing studies program and they also include key lessons and tools from the Institute for the Futures, professional certificate program in foresight training. Taking these courses will prepare you to be a leader in future thinking, at work and in your community, and it will also help you start to make positive changes in your own life as you begin to see new possibilities more clearly and start to craft the personal future that you want. I want you to join me in this specialization because I know that futures thinking is the most important skill you can build next here on Coursera. Futures thinking is bigger than any single technology or works skill. The work of the future will require expertise in technologies that haven't been invented yet, platforms that haven't been created yet and skills that nobody knows how to do yet today. So how do you prepare for a world that doesn't yet exist? Well, you can take inspiration from computer scientist and fellow futurists Alan Kay who once famously said, "The best way to predict the future is to invent it". This specialization will give you the skills to become someone who invents the future, someone who actively makes a better future instead of letting the future just happen to you. Specialization is for everyone, it requires no previous expertise or knowledge, so what are you waiting for. Welcome to the Future.