The Future Is Shifting Faster Than the Consensus About the Future Can Change
The New Climate Foresight is about making strategic choices in a world defined by discontinuity.
A one-time professional briefing on strategy in an age of accelerating discontinuity.
Live Zoom briefing, with discussion. Recording available for registered participants.
$375 (discount for Workshop alumni, and for non-profit/independent practitioners -- details below). Seats are limited.
Friday June 26th, 12:00 - 3:00 pm Pacific time.
Tomorrow, I’m doing something I’ve never done before. You might be interested in joining me. I think we’re at an inflection point in how climate foresight and strategy work, and I think we can actually say useful things about how they should work now. I’d like to explore that and discuss it with you.
Until recently, our future seemed neatly divided into two possibilities: one future where pollution was cut rapidly enough to avoid major upheavals (and strategy could assume that life could mostly go on as it has); and one future where delayed action left us spinning into a global collapse of civilization (and strategy was effectively irrelevant). Either the strategies we had would remain more or less valid, or events would be so chaotic and unknowable that strategic planning itself would break.
Now, climate science is narrowing the range of plausible outcomes. The most extreme high-emissions pathways increasingly appear less useful as central planning assumptions, while significant overshoot of 1.5°C is impossible to avoid… and if we’re honest, it’s not looking good for 2ºC, either.
It’s tempting to sum up this situation as something like “a lot worse than we wanted, but nowhere near as bad as it could be.” But this situation is way more nonlinear than a “middling” warming future implies.
Indeed, ending up in a world on its way to a mid-two-degrees-to-low-three-degrees-of-warming future, with today’s particular confluence of economic, geopolitical, technological, and ecological trends now emerging will be far stranger to us than our old orderly-transition-or-apocalypse binary view has prepared us for.
Climate anticipation has not become simpler because of this narrowing. Now, strategic uncertainty has become more central to climate strategy, and climate strategy has become more central to all strategy. That many previous assumptions about the planetary crisis are now wildly out of date does not absolve us of the necessity of looking farther ahead, understanding our uncertain options, and choosing smart paths into the unpredictable.
Even relatively successful mitigation now leaves us facing profound disruption, staggering costs, difficult prioritization decisions, and deep impacts across society. The hard futures ahead may no longer be “the end of everything” — but they still put us in worlds where billions of people, likely living within largely unchanged systems and communities, must navigate escalating and nonlinear challenges.
The greatest uncertainties in climate foresight are migrating. They now increasingly live in human systems: how businesses respond, how assets get repriced, how communities attempt to adapt, and how the people running our most consequential institutions decide to act in the face of accelerating discontinuity. The center of climate foresight is now response: how people decide to act against the unprecedented.
This is a new and different problem, with echoing ramifications. It requires different tools.
As I wrote last week, we are entering a period where the strategic substrate is shifting faster than the consensus can change. Things are getting demonstrably weirder than many decision-makers feel comfortable discussing openly. That makes this “middling” but highly discontinuous future more important for people who need to think clearly about this crisis to imagine and discuss.
If you want to get started, join me and a group of other astute professionals for a one-time-only climate briefing tomorrow, June 26th.
Details:
Friday, June 26th, 12:00–3:00 PM Pacific Time. $375. Seats are limited.
Two 50-minute presentations, followed by a thoughtful group discussion.
All registered participants will receive the full recording, along with a Briefing Memo.
Enrollment closes tonight at 11:00 PM Pacific!
Questions before you sign up? Please email Alison@AlexSteffen.com.
PS: A few folks who are interested in this briefing have asked about a non-profit/independent rate for those whose employers won’t cover professional education.
We’re happy to offer a 40% discount for folks doing good work on limited budgets. Please go to the briefing page, sign up and use this coupon code: SAVE40NCF (enter the code at checkout where it says, “Have a coupon?”).
My bio:
Alex Steffen has spent 35 years developing and continuously revising his climate foresight practice — as co-founder of the influential sustainability solutions publication Worldchanging, as Planetary Futurist in Residence at IDEO, and as the writer behind The Snap Forward. His thinking on discontinuity and the limits of orderly-transition strategies has been profiled in the New York Times Magazine and pressure-tested across years of direct engagement with practitioners navigating a world in upheaval. His personal climate strategy workshops, meanwhile, have helped almost 600 clients chart their own courses through uncertainty.
PPS: - You can learn how to plan more sensibly and successfully for your family’s life in planetary discontinuity. The New York Times recently featured my Personal Climate Strategy Workshop. You can learn more about my other offerings at my climate courses site. The next Workshop will be offered in September 2026. You can also read more about what’s it’s like to take the course from a previous participant, in Alex Steffen’s Personal Climate Strategy Workshop: A Review.
- My podcast, When We Are, is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast and other podcast platforms around the world. Please subscribe, rate and review!
- Need expert guidance for your own climate planning or business strategy? Schedule a private Climate Strategy Consultation.
- Let’s connect on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Facebook or Substack Notes