The world in 2036

EYEWITNESS REPORTS FROM THE FUTURE

In 2016, a group of executives asked me if I would write an essay about what their industry would look like two decades in the future.

It was a fun challenge, and once I got started I couldn’t stop. Instead of an essay I ended up writing an entire book, which I conceived of as a compendium of “eyewitness reports” from people living 20 years in the future. Fiction, but with a purpose: get you thinking about future change.

To make this editorial concept work, I invented dozens of business owners, corporate titans, middle managers, experts, journalists, and just ordinary citizens who were supposedly living in the year 2036, and had them tell me something about their lives, their work, and their day-to-day experiences.

Sometimes these observations were profound, sometimes glib, sometimes even funny. Altogether, the book is like a canvas, with each of these eyewitnesses painting a small part of a big picture that reveals how everything has changed—not just for one industry but the whole world. Their stories illuminate shifts in our political, economic, and social landscapes, new technologies that have changed our lives, new ways of doing business, and new attitudes and behaviors. In short: how twenty short years have reshaped the world.

What makes World Review 2036 relevant from a foresight standpoint is that these fictitious citizens of the future don’t merely describe the way things are in 2036; they also look back at 2016 and explain how we got from the way the world was then to the way it is “now,” after we’ve experienced two decades of change—sometimes evolutionary, sometimes revolutionary.

Compared to my “how-to” books on scenario planning, this is a very different publication—much more imaginative (since it’s fiction), but also one that I meant to be more than just instructive. With World Review 2036, I was aiming for thought-provoking and offbeat, hoping you might even laugh out loud at some of the unexpected outcomes that I imagine the future may have in store for us.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

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