THE NEW CLIMATE FORESIGHT
Strategy in an age of accelerating discontinuity: a briefing. Friday June 26th.
THE NEW CLIMATE FORESIGHT:
A professional briefing on strategy in an age of accelerating discontinuity.
Live Zoom briefing, with discussion. $375 (discount for Workshop alumni). Seats are limited.
Friday June 26th, 12:00 - 3:00 pm Pacific time.
What this is
A single, one-time, top-level briefing for climate foresight practitioners and serious adjacent professionals who sense that something fundamental has shifted in the strategic landscape — and want the conceptual tools to name it, understand it, and work with it.
What has changed
For nearly five decades, the core belief animating climate policy and advocacy has been the pursuit of an orderly transition: collective action on emissions, delivered fast enough to limit damage to a level that could be affordably adapted to, with continuity largely preserved.
That belief shaped climate foresight frameworks. It shaped what questions got asked and which ones didn’t. It set the agenda for climate strategy as a professional practice. The orderly transition, though, is a thing of our past.
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. This is important news—but its meaning hasn’t been widely understood.
Climate anticipation has not become simpler because of this narrowing. Instead, strategic uncertainty has become more urgent. Even relatively successful mitigation now leaves us facing profound disruption, staggering costs, difficult prioritization decisions, and deep impacts across society. The worst-case scenario may no longer be “the end of everything” — but it is still a world in which 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.
This is a new and different problem, with echoing ramifications. It requires different tools.
What’s coming
Most of the popular discussion of what the future looks like — for the economy, for society, for politics — is out of date given the lock-in of a highly discontinuous planetary crisis, bounded by extremely disruptive but non-apocalyptic climate outcomes.
We are entering a period where the strategic substrate is shifting faster than consensus can change. Things are getting demonstrably weirder than many decision-makers feel comfortable discussing openly.
The science is stronger than ever. Multidisciplinary research is illuminating the interconnected complexity and cascading threat potential of living in a society built for a climate we no longer have. Risk discovery is accelerating as a field, and the capacities for measuring risk across multiple dynamics are rapidly improving.
The full force of these innovations, though, will not be felt for years, maybe even a decade or more. What we have today are startup hypotheses, incomplete data sets and evolving models, with assumptions that are defensible by academic standards but questionable for use in strategic frameworks. Today, we know enough to be certain of a large magnitude of discontinuity, without having the tools we need to precisely enumerate its effects. There’s pressure to stick to available orderly approaches until more discontinuous approaches can be quantitatively proven appropriate. Strategically, though, a decade is forever in moments like this.
Meanwhile, billions of people are hurtling towards a collision with their own unreadiness. That collision looks likely to produce nonlinear societal changes: political turmoil, economic turbulence, social decohesion, radical — and often conflicting — responses as people fight to preserve or extend their access to the parts of the economy most likely to survive and grow as the crisis bites deeper.
Leadership and elite consensus remain the structural problem. Institutional decision-makers are still largely operating as if the choice set is: climate change is not yet material OR we can always move faster in an orderly transition to preserve continuity and keep our status quo assumptions workable. This insistence on a non-existent continuity has shaped the institutional frameworks that most of us are operating inside.
The gap — and why it makes this moment dangerous
The delay in recognizing risk (and the transformation it has already set in motion) has left us with outdated ideas about the pace of change — assumptions that transformations we’re seeing now remain in the future. Refusal to price known risks into the value of major assets, systems, and geographies. Predatory delay and intentional political polarization that have produced climate hushing, triangulated climate strategies, and the institutionalization of foresight frameworks that still talk of physical and transition risks as if we were in an orderly transition.
Triangulation — the practice of pairing serious-sounding commitments to big-but-distant goals with incremental and inexpensive near-term steps, held together by arguments that small steps today are “in line” with a future of bold action — has become the dominant professional offering in climate and sustainability work. Its primary deliverable is the claim that its employer is “doing enough.” It is purpose-machined to preserve the value of slow approaches, existing assets, and outdated expertise. By their nature, triangulated approaches demand that a boundary be set and defended — a cap on the pace and extent of change that is “realistic” to consider. Discontinuity must be defined as not relevant for current strategy.
That makes practitioners more secure in their jobs for now, and less prepared for the future. It makes organizations better protected from near-term pressure — in part by being able to claim ESG progress — and worse at strategy. Practitioners who have accepted the triangulated frame as the legitimate limit of serious analysis are doing rigorous work on the wrong questions.
Ironically, climate foresight became institutionalized at exactly the wrong moment. Organizations hired smart people, built effective teams, adopted the frameworks — and now those frameworks are calibrated for a world that’s receding faster than the models predicted. So the professionals who did everything right are now operating with tools that are quietly losing resolution. Every quarter that foresight practitioners and users keep employing frameworks calibrated for managing transition rather than facing discontinuity is a quarter where their advice is quietly degrading in quality. There is real danger in climate foresight practitioners locking in new work based on outdated assumptions at the very moment those assumptions fall apart as guidance for near- and medium-term strategies.
Excelling in uncertainty
Serious climate foresight and strategy need to work in a half-light zone where evidence is available but not conclusive, escalating risks are visible but not predictable, and the best opportunities demand investing in disruptive capacities for thriving in ongoing discontinuity. In other words, we need to be building strategies for the uncertain and fast-changing world we have, not pretending the world is still predictable and orderly so our strategies appear to remain valid.
We don’t yet have good sensemaking rubrics for the parts of climate foresight that must extend beyond the climate science — but this wider view is strategically essential.
This briefing explores the questions serious practitioners need to be asking, the assumptions that need to be interrogated, the emerging approaches that are proving more useful under conditions of accelerating discontinuity.
I’ve spent years focused on better understanding what foresight means in discontinuity. I don’t have all the answers. This is a field report and an invitation to a thoughtful conversation.
You won’t get a precise roadmap for action or a list of actions to take tomorrow. You will leave with a clearer diagnosis of which parts of your current practice may be losing reliability and why. Language for new dynamics your organization may not yet have named. A framework for working with incomplete evidence. And a sharper sense of where the field is heading and what deserves the investment of your time and resources now.
This briefing is a beginning, not a conclusion — but it is a beginning grounded in an up-to-date synthesis of the best tools for understanding the discontinuity most professional discussions are still structured to avoid.
We’ll explore questions like
The state of climate forecasts.
Why the science is only the start.
The declining usefulness of triangulated strategies.
The current gap between risk discovery and strategic needs.
Decision-narrowing under deep uncertainty.
Strategic intuition as a professional response to thin quantifiable analysis.
Moving from physical and transition risks to discontinuity and response upheavals.
Horizon-scanning complex human systems.
History as the secret tool of futurism — and why discontinuity is testing its limits.
Spiky solutions and competitive optionality: what happens when foresight becomes a race for remaining room to maneuver.
A field-scan of emerging approaches.
Who is Alex Steffen?
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. He has deep knowledge of the field, and a front-line perspective on why it’s changing so quickly.
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.
PS: - You can learn how to plan more sensibly and successfully for 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
- Check out my books: Worldchanging (which recently celebrated its 20th anniversary!) and Carbon Zero
- View my TED Global talks on sustainability and cities.