This article, written by Jon Cederquist, Anne Gibbon, and Richard Lum, explores some of the pathways that special operations forces may experience as the world moves through the current era of geopolitical transition.

Exploring the futures of maritime security through a set of original scenarios, this report begins an extend examination of trends such as climate change and human migration, as well as emerging issues such as land reclamation and novel security arrangements.

In this article, published on Small Wars Journal, Dr. Richard Lum introduces three of the many potentially critical emerging issues that will shape the futures of conflict and security.

Each year Vision Foresight Strategy (VFS) produces the Emerging Issues for Conflict and Security report (EI4CS), which identifies future issues that may play a role in shaping the nature and conduct of human conflict in the years ahead. A highlights sheet is available to download for free. The full 81 page report is available for purchase.

Each year VFS produces a helpful planning worksheet to jump start your new year.  This year's worksheet features additional guidance taken from 4 Steps to the Future: A Quick and Clean Guide to Creating Foresight.  Please enjoy and we hope your 2017 is a bright and wonderful year!

VFS's short annual exercise, Quick and Clean Conflict Scenarios, explores how current top of mind issues in conflict and security could play out together in the years ahead.

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Using the 4 Steps model for scenario forecasting, our annual QC Scenarios provide some structure for thinking about the patterns and pathways that might emerge from the intersection of these top of mind issues.

This guide is a short, quick read that will help you get into that "strategic thinking" frame of mind.  Fans of Dr. Lum's 4 Steps to the Future book will find this zippy read written in the same easy-to-play-with vein.

Emerging Issues for Conflict and Security, 2015 Report

This report introduces an inventory of emerging issues related to the futures of conflict and security. It is intended to provide input for researchers engaged in foresight projects and offers “building blocks” for larger foresight efforts, such as scenario forecasts. Beyond providing original content, this report highlights the concept of emerging issues and its centrality to rigorous foresight work. Other planners and policy makers will also find the report useful as a source of logical yet provocative thinking about many of the issues that may come to play significant roles in shaping the future.

Scenarios on the Future of Conflict in the Asia-Pacific Region, highlights

This highlight booklet features four scenarios created in support of innovation work undertaken by the US Pacific Fleet. They were developed to showcase alternative possible futures for conflict in Asia-Pacific out to the year 2035. The scenarios were in part intended to pose challenging, yet logical, future contexts in which the US Navy could find itself. In keeping with this intent, the scenarios for the most part featured changes in the region that deviate in many respects from the officially expected future.

Scenarios, Black Swans, and Assumptions

A presentation given to the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in 2015, it introduces a futures approach to anticipating conflict and cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region.

Forecasting the Futures of Higher Education

This presents highlights from a foresight project for Kaua'i Community College.  Working with VFS, the leadership of the College developed a set of original scenarios that explored how community college education on Kaua'i could evolve over the coming years.

Global Security Forecast 2014

The Global Security Forecast was an "intense demonstration project" showcasing how futures studies approaches and methods can be applied to developing foresight about the future security environment and its implications for the United States Department of Defense.

The Infinite Economy

Produced in 2014, The Infinite Economy explores the ways in which long-running trends and powerful historical patterns will enable the creation of a new material and industrial reality for society.  Not a simple forecast, this work calls attention to the reality that for a wondrous new industrial age to occur, we will have to choose to take advantage of these emerging possibilities.

The Third Era: Reframing the Futures of Constitutional Governance

Published in 2013, The Third Era explores the ways in which political governance could evolve in the next couple of decades.  Considering changes on multiple levels and happening across the world, The Third Era outlines challenging scenarios and suggests some of the new models of governance that will emerge.

The Future of Governing in Hawai'i: Distributed Democracy

This original report from VFS explores a number of new concepts and technologies and looks at how they could interact and create a provocative scenario of 21st century government in Hawai'i.  Written in 2009, Distributed Democracy anticipates many of the trends and ideas that would have since become popular notions for transforming government.