In this video, you're going to learn why you trust the Institute for the Future's track record on forecasting pandemics and their social impacts. You're going to learn why you can feel confident in the skills that you will build in this course. Let me tell you a quick story. Back in early January 2020, when the pandemic was just first starting to be on people's radar, I started to get a lot of interesting text messages and emails. They all said something like this, "Jane, didn't you run a simulation of a respiratory pandemic? What do you think about what's going on? What should we do about this?" These messages weren't just coming from my friends and family, they were coming from top executives, I had some of Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies, from government agencies, from international development officers, and yes, they were right. I did run a simulation of a global pandemic. In 2008, I was the game designer for a six week future forecasting simulation called Superstruct. Our goal was to map out the full range of economic, political, social, and emotional ripple effects of global threats like pandemics. We set the game 11 years in the future in the fall of 2019. During this game, nearly 10,000 people worldwide simulated living through five different threats, including a global outbreak of a fictional virus called REDS, which was short for respiratory distress syndrome. There were no mathematical computations involved in our simulation. Instead, we simply asked people to predict how they personally would feel and what they would do in their own lives during this rapidly spreading outbreak. How would they change through daily habits? What social interactions will they avoid? Could they work from home? Would they choose to self-quarantine, and if so, when, why, for how long? During a government-mandated quarantine, what problems might they experience? What kinds of support and resources would they need? Our simulation was low on algorithms but high on social and emotional intelligence. Our participants told thousands of stories about what they personally would do during a respiratory pandemic. We collected and analyzed these stories online. When the nova corona virus first came to global attention in early 2020, I thought that the most important information to share from our massively multiplayer simulation of pandemics would be the predictions that people made about what they would do. For example, one of my research questions during the simulation was to find out under what circumstances would people resist voluntary quarantine and social distancing? Our data from the game showed that the most likely super spreading risks would be religious services, followed by important professional career and networking opportunities, weddings, and funerals. Also if they were young and single, people still wanted to go out to nightclubs and parties, even if these gatherings were illegal. Based on our findings, early in February 2020, I held an Ask a Futurist public webinar with my institute colleague, Vanessa Mason. We gave our best urgent advice for the newly unfolding pandemic that barely even had a name yet. For example, we said, have you lead a religious congregation or a religious community of any kind, you need to plan now to create a space for virtual religious worship. Data suggests it would be the highly responsible thing to do. We said, if you're planning a wedding or a professional conference or networking event or a party, you should be proactively canceling it now because people will risk their health and go to these things even during a pandemic. Looking at the headlines that have followed in the year plus since, it's clear that this insight from our simulation was both useful and actionable. People did during the real COVID-19 pandemic what our players predicted they would do during our simulation. Holding a large wedding, despite rules against it, going to nightclubs, despite the urgent messaging to stay at home, going to religious services, despite testing positive for COVID-19, attending a university networking event, despite being told to self-isolate. These all turned into common super spreading events. In this February 2020 webinar, I also shared our data on how uncomfortable many people felt about wearing masks. During the Superstruct game, we ask people to actually go out into the real world and practice wearing masks in different social environments. Based on what players self-reported, we found out just how high the social barriers might be to overcome mask resistance. Of course, we saw this problem play out at a much larger scale during the real COVID-19 pandemic later, especially in the United States. We talked about how big a problem we anticipated it would be for working moms if schools closed during the pandemic because moms in our game talked about the impossibility of juggling their jobs with the need to home school if it came to that. Now we see as a result of COVID-19, millions of moms have had to voluntarily leave the workforce to care for children when their schools are closed down. One more bit of research we reported in the webinar was how hard it would be for people to follow public health guidelines and to stay home or self isolate if they weren't given significant economic support. We talked about the need to proactively provide cash payments, and now well over a year into the global COVID-19 response, we see clearly from the data that in places where governments provided continuous cash payments or paycheck protection, people did follow the guidelines more strictly and the spread of the virus was better contained. I do think these predictions matter, and I'm proud of how accurate our forecast turned out to be. But now, looking back at how slow society was to respond to the growing threat and how stuck so many of our leaders were in old ways of thinking and doing things, I think now that the most important results of a simulation like that isn't to accurately predict the future, instead, the most important impact is simply to prepare our minds and to stretch our collective imagination, so we are more flexible, adaptable, agile, and resilient when the unthinkable happens. We have evidence that future games and simulations can have this positive effect. Since early January 2020, I've been receiving text messages and Facebook messages from people who participated in the Institute's Superstruct quarantine simulation. They've said things like, I'm not freaking out, I already worked through the panic and anxiety when we imagined it ten years ago and time to start social distancing, they'd been using that word for a decade, long before most people had heard about it. They wrote me, "Jane, I'm starting to prepare for this now. I remember what it was like in Superstruct." I was getting all of these messages weeks and months before the mainstream consciousness started to adapt. People really started to consider making serious changes to their habits and plans. Our simulation participants kept telling me that pre-filing the future helped them pre-process the anxiety, the overwhelming uncertainty in the sense of helplessness, so they could move more rapidly to adapt and act resiliently when the future actually arrived. The best way to prepare individually and collectively for things that feel unimaginable today is to spend time together deeply imagining a future, and that's what we've all come here together to do on Coursera, right? To start to pre-feel and pre-live through our post pandemic reality. Before we move on, I'll share with you just a little bit about a second future forecasting game that I ran in the year 2010, it was called Evoke and it was developed with the World Bank. This game was set in the year 2020, so10 years in the future, and players were asked to imagine what they might do to help others and to start to solve urgent global crises, that were all happening at the same time, like pandemics and extreme weather from climate change. You can see here some images from the game with the date lines at the top; March 2020, September 2020, December 2020. Players were immersed in a future world that was dealing with multiple crises simultaneously. A global respiratory pandemic that started in China. An outbreak of social media-driven misinformation and conspiracy theories about the pandemic. Complicating efforts for individuals to understand what was really happening and what they needed to do to stay safe. Historic wildfires up and down the western coast of the United States, forcing many to leave their homes at a time when staying safe from the pandemic meant staying at home. The game headlines that we wrote a decade ago, turned out to be pretty much exactly what we saw in the real headlines of 2020. Which explains why in the summer of 2020, I got a phone call from a senior executive at the World Bank. He said, Jane, look at what's going on right now, so much of this is exactly what you predicted in evoke. How exactly did you get so many details, so right? That's a question that I'm going to answer for you in the rest of the videos for this course. I'm going to teach you how to use exactly the same skills that we use at the Institute For The Future to develop our highly accurate, super shocked and evoke forecasts. You can start to see what's coming next too. Now you have a better idea of why the Institute For The Future is a trusted voice in pandemic forecasting. That said, this course is not going to tell you with 100 percent accuracy exactly what life will be like after COVID-19. That's because no one can predict the future with 100 percent certainty, not even professional futurists. Even if you could predict the future with 100 percent certainty, would you want that certainty? What if you have predicted a future that you don't want? Are you just going to be stuck waiting for that future to happen? That's why one of my favorite quotes about future thinking is this. "When it comes to thinking about the future, it's far more important to be imaginative than to be right." Yes, we want to think about the future in ways that are plausible and likely, so our forecasts are helpful. But as my colleague, Sarah Smith once said, "I'd rather be proven wrong by people who look at one of our forecasts and decide to take action today to prevent that crisis and avoid that risk." If we focus on being imaginative in our future's thinking, we can create space to consider new possibilities, to free ourselves of the constraints of what has been true or what has worked in the past. It allows us to think what was previously unthinkable and imagine what was previously unimaginable. If we're lucky, we can use our new foresight and imagination, not just to prepare for the future, but to change it, to be innovators, to be powerful agents of change. We don't want to just be right about the future, we want to make the future. Here's how I plan to expand your thinking and stretch your imagination about what our post pandemic reality might be like. In Week 1, welcome to our post pandemic future. I'll give you the Institute For The Future's official forecasts of what life will be like in the next 3-5 years. In Week 2, make a plan for resilience. I'll share with you a road-map of the biggest risks and challenges ahead, so you can start building resilience for future shocks. In Week 3, you'll learn the three most important habits of Professional futurists. These are few simple and fun ways for you to keep anticipating the next unthinkable and next unimaginable events. In Week 4, you'll complete a final project. Choose your own action for transformation. Your final project will involve using the Institute For The Future's toolkit for transformation. You can start really building the life after COVID-19 you want. By the way, if you like what you learn in this course, there's a whole world of futures thinking for you to explore. This course, Life After COVID-19 is actually part of the Institute For The Future's specialization here on Coursera. When you successfully complete this course, I hope you'll consider joining me for more. Now you know why you can trust the Institute For The Future's post pandemic forecasts. Hopefully you're starting to feel a little bit more confidence about your ability to benefit from learning futures thinking skills yourself. Let's get started building your post pandemic confidence and envisioning the world you want to live in when we're finally on the other side of COVID-19. In the next video, I'm going to show you the four patterns of change that we see during any major period of crisis or a disruption. We'll look at examples of how these patterns of change are starting to play out in the pandemic. I'll see you there.
