IFTF Social Simulations are a provocative way to pre-experience potential futures, immersing your organization in challenging yet optimistic scenarios. These experiences — preset or custom-built — expand possibilities and challenge assumptions. Participants learn to make agile decisions, assess risks, and understand diverse stakeholder perspectives in complex future landscapes. You'll gain actionable insights for immediate strategy alignment, emerging with a shared vision and concrete steps to shape your preferred future. IFTF Social Simulations don't just anticipate tomorrow — they empower you to shape it today.

Who Is This For?

IFTF Social Simulations empower teams to pre-experience and actively shape their futures, turning uncertainty into strategic clarity.

How it Works:

IFTF social simulations can be an in-person or live online experience, led by an expert IFTF facilitator.

Choose from these formats:

  • a 45-minute interactive keynote presentation (mini simulation)

  • a 90-minute immersive workshop (full simulation)

  • a half-day custom training (explore multiple scenarios)

Participants will:

  • “Pack their bags for the future” - a warm-up imagination exercise that helps us identify the key values, hopes, and assets we each uniquely bring to any future

  • Discover the future scenario through a short immersive video

  • Vote in polls to share their initial reactions to the scenario

  • Tell a collaborative story about what else might happen in this scenario using generative AI, via IFTF’s WhatIfPedia simulation platform*

  • Create a personal journal entry from the future, to explore what they would feel and do to adapt and help others*

  • Collect clues to this future, or real-world signals of change that make the scenario plausible and realistic

  • Collaboratively brainstorm next steps, so each participant is able to Identify and commit to one tiny real-world action that they can take to feel more ready for this future*

*Included in the 90-minute and half-day experiences

Social simulations explore the opportunities and challenges of a future scenario and all social simulations rely on one of our preset scenarios. If you are doing a custom forecast or research project with IFTF, there is also an option for us to create a custom scenario and social simulation for your organization. Ask us how!

2025 Social Simulation Options

Choose your scenario to pre-experience potential futures and their impacts.

  • The Road to Zerophoria:
    Explore a zero-waste future where a vital public service vanishes overnight.

  • Welcome Party:
    Navigate climate-resilient cities and global migration in a collaborative world.

  • The Ten-Year Winter:
    Experience the aftermath of a global vote on risky geoengineering, exploring science communication and public trust.

A future scenario describes the strange new facts of a possible future. It asks us to explore what is happening in this future that, for better or for worse, has never happened before. A mental simulation is an invitation to live, briefly, in that future — to visit that possible world in our minds and have an immersive first-person experience of it. IFTF’s Jane McGonigal From her book "Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything, Even Things that Seem Impossible Today"