Five hundred years ago, Niccolo Machiavelli, the Second Chancellor of Florence, was asked by the city’s ruling council to investigate why Pandolfo Petrucci, the Lord of neighboring Siena, was so inconstant in his behavior and so prone to intrigue. Machiavelli was deeply impressed by Petrucci’s explanation: “Wishing to make as few mistakes as possible, I conduct my government day by day and arrange my affairs hour by hour, because the times are more powerful than our brains.”

“The times are more powerful than our brains.” The phrase is remarkably resonant today, in these early years of the third millennium. We find ourselves in a period of unprecedented complexity. The world is changing at an astonishing rate. The entire planet is interconnected in ways that it has never been before. It is hard to make sense of what happens in our world in a single day, let alone what it means for tomorrow. Individually and collectively, our uncertainty about the future—indeed, even the present—is mounting. History is truly in motion, unfolding before us at a pace we can barely keep up with, leaving us to wonder and worry about what will come next.

Each month brings new drama and fresh ambiguity. Are we descending down a path toward geopolitical instability and fractured alliances or are we stamping out an era of terror before it takes root? Is the United States fulfilling its role as the lone superpower with humility and judgment that will be applauded in the years ahead, or is it becoming a rogue superpower, increasingly resented across the world? Does the United Nations have a meaningful future in global affairs, or is it slipping into irrelevance? Can China maintain its extraordinary growth as a major global power, or will internal political, social, and economic tensions derail its progress? Is the global economy robust or fragile? Will technology standards globalize and converge or regionalize and fragment? Will global protection of intellectual property rights tighten or loosen? Can free trade prevail over protectionist instincts? Can developed nations continue to generate jobs for their populations as waves of economic progress and success wash over the developing world? Is declining trust and confidence in corporations a passing phase occasioned by disparate scandals or evidence of mounting pushback against the growing power of the global marketplace? Was SARS an isolated incident or a harbinger of new plagues to come? Is global warming “much ado about nothing” or our dreadful legacy to future generations? These are difficult questions because they force us to identify and challenge some of our most basic and embedded assumptions about how the world works and how it will continue to work in the future. But not challenging these assumptions is dangerous business. Why? Because how the world has worked in the past will not carry over into the future. Much of what we take for granted today, based on centuries of experience and history, might be in the process of unraveling.

Five Centuries of History Coming Undone

The roots of the future are buried deep in the past; so are our assumptions about the way the world is meant to be. Perhaps the greatest cognitive barrier we face in making sense of the world is that we have come to view certain realities as part of a “natural order” that will remain unchallenged.

In fact, many “fundamental truths” that we take for granted are simply the fragile constructs of history and could shift radically in the decade ahead. We are at a critical threshold in which much that has been established during the last five centuries may significantly change, and with remarkable speed. A quick tour through these centuries reveals just how much is poised to change.

At the dawn of the sixteenth century, when Petrucci so presciently spoke of powerful times, there were 300 million people on the planet (less than 5 percent of our current population) and Europe’s “scientific revolution” was well underway. Led by figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Nicolaus Copernicus, this revolution drew heavily upon Chinese and, particularly, Islamic knowledge in mathematics, medicine, astronomy, and experimental scientific methods, fields that these ancient civilizations had pioneered and refined. But the breakthroughs of this period shifted the center of gravity, establishing the West as supreme in the understanding and innovation of science and technology, a status it continues to maintain. This created an unconscious sense of entitlement that Western models and approaches—even its civilization—should prevail over the rest of the world. Such expectations are in for a harsh reality check as China, India, and other non-Western nations emerge as true powers in their own right, poised to develop and export innovations back to the West.

In the seventeenth century, following decades of wrenching religious war, much of central Europe lay devastated. The cost in blood and treasury had been staggering; some regions lost almost half their populations and saw their economies crippled. Exhausted, the great powers sued for peace. In 1648, they forged the Treaty of Westphalia, heralding a new order of European nations. The importance of the nation-state has underpinned all subsequent centuries of European and world history, creating modern states committed to achieving peace (not always successfully) and prosperity for their citizens and willing to accept shared accords as a means of moderating their behavior toward one another. We have come to think of the nation state as the natural level and form of governance.

Yet in our connected and interdependent modern world, it is time to question whether that should still be true. Economies are no longer “national” in character. Growth in global trade has been outstripping growth in global GDP for many decades. Likewise, most major businesses and institutions have a distinctly international character. Our greatest challenges— terrorism, environmental problems, infectious diseases—observe no borders. Nongovernmental organizations are increasingly important and are often either very local or transcend national boundaries. Given these changing circumstances, can and should the concept of the nation state remain as central to our identities and governance systems as it has in the past? In the coming decade, the concept and importance of the nation state will be challenged as new entities and experiments emerge.

By the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment had arrived—a remarkable period that invigorated science and reason and led to new understandings and attitudes about society, human nature, governance, and commerce. The enlightenment revolutions in the U.S. and France challenged the right of old monarchies and aristocracies to rule and helped establish the modernist principles of freedom, justice, and democracy that became the ideals of Western civilization. With the explicit separation of church and state and the assumed dominion of man over nature, a new, secular, and materialist modernity was forged—and has largely prevailed ever since.

For 200 years, it appeared that as education and prosperity increased, the “sacred” worldview—one that goes beyond the material and embraces the spiritual—would inevitably decline. That is no longer the case; the sacred is clearly back, and in many forms. Witness the resurgent evangelical and fundamentalist Christian movements in the U.S., the astonishing growth in Pentecostalism globally, the widespread resurrection of religious practice in many parts of the former Soviet Union, the rise of radical fundamentalism within Islam, the spread of Eastern religious traditions throughout the West, the growing tendency for indigenous people to reconnect with their own traditional spirit-based cultures, and the mushrooming of “New Age” spirituality practices among the world’s affluent. Secular modernity now has sacred company, adding to the complexity of our times.

In the mid-nineteenth century, at the opening of the first Great Exhibition in London, Britain’s Prince Albert gushed, “We are living in a period of most wonderful transitions, which tend rapidly to accomplish that great end to which indeed all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind.” Hyperbolic, certainly, but his sentiment was not entirely ridiculous. This was the century in which, for the first time in human history, a single powerful empire was setting many of the global rules, especially the rules of economics and trade by which others had to learn to play. By the latter part of the century, the U.S. was limbering up for its turn as the defining global superpower. Since then, with the economic triumph of the Western capitalist model over the communist experiment, it is reasonable to argue that Great Britain and the U.S. together have largely established the rules that almost every nation in the world must follow today.

But that is now changing. New powers are emerging—powers that may refuse to play by rules that were set to the advantage of others. In particular, the West has more highly evolved notions of ownership and property rights than much of the rest of the world, and it has aggressively transferred these concepts, created in the physical world, into the intangible world of ideas and intellectual property. Several of the largest countries— notably China and Brazil—may change these rules. Already, they are challenging Western notions of intellectual property rights and embracing open source approaches in their efforts to generate new knowledge and technologies. Some of our most basic assumptions about the rules of the global economic game will increasingly come under attack in the coming decade.

Fast forward to the twentieth century, arguably the most remarkable to date, during which we became accustomed to astonishing economic growth and rising prosperity. The population increased sixfold to 6 billion people; per capita GDP climbed from a few hundred dollars to $8,000.

Indeed, any developed economy that was not enjoying around 3 percent annual growth in GDP was considered “weak,” and any business that could not confidently predict double-digit annual growth rates was a poor investment. The concept of accelerating and compounded growth became ingrained in our expectations as we witnessed the economic output of this single century surpass that of all prior human history combined. Yet with prosperity also came greater polarization. The “haves” became increasingly separated from the “have nots” of the world. The very economic and technological dynamism that spurred prosperity also brought industrial restructuring and adjustments that were experienced unequally across regions and occupations; even in the most developed countries, many suffered from the friction burns associated with rapid change. Probably more challenging still, our prosperity was achieved at an environmental cost that we are only now beginning to appreciate. The evidence is clear that our human economy has triggered profound changes in climate, created a voracious appetite for scarce resources, and despoiled the natural environment. While we can expect to witness the continued rapid spread of prosperity in the decade ahead, we should also be prepared for much deeper concern about and attention to the critical issues of equity, transition, and sustainability. Different parts of the world will adopt different perspectives on these challenges, which will become a growing source of geopolitical tension.

In our fledgling twenty-first century, we can already see unique challenges on the horizon. Underpinning progress throughout the last five centuries has been a deep and widely shared confidence that the power of science and technology can be harnessed for human benefit. The fact that there are now about 15 times more humans alive than there were in 1500 and that there has been a 50-fold increase in GDP per capita is primarily a function of our remarkable and accelerating technological progress. But already in the twenty-first century we can observe a level of anxiety and concern about the potential downsides of technology that far exceeds the pushback and caution witnessed during previous eras. With its capacity to re-create nature and even change what it means to be human—steroids and stem cells are barely the tip of the iceberg—science is now confronting us with moral dilemmas and profound choices that will require deeper global dialogue and greater systemic thinking than we have ever achieved.

As we move into the future, not only will we see history being made— we will see it unmade as well. Five hundred years ago, Pandolfo Petrucci recognized that history was speeding up toward an unfathomable new complexity and bemoaned that “the times are more powerful than our brains.” Today, as the “natural order” that evolved over the last five centuries starts to unravel, the times are more powerful than ever. So should we, like Petrucci, adopt a reactive strategy of taking things as they come, adapting as we go, arranging things day by day? I am convinced that we should not. The stakes are too high: our era is too complex, its challenges too significant, its promises too great, and its velocity too fast for us simply to react. Rather, we must amplify the power of our brains, individually and collectively, to match our new circumstances.

It is this challenge—the challenge of learning how to think proactively about our present world, to make sense of its intricacies and interconnections, to see the “big picture” rather than a thousand smaller unconnected images flickering in and out of view—that inspired this book. I wrote Powerful Times in direct response to the growing need of ever more people to understand the present and better anticipate the future—a need that I encounter every day in my work with organizations and governments around the world. My aim is to help us all to see patterns where before we saw chaos and to give us the tools and imagination to think for ourselves about how the future might play itself out.

The lucky news is that we have never, as a planet, been more equipped to make sense out of utter complexity. We have greater access to data and information about both our challenges and opportunities than ever before. We have new means of sharing our knowledge, our ideas, our insights, our perspectives. Above all, we have a thirst for knowledge and understanding—a desire to make sense of the world and anticipate where it is headed. But before we can dive into the task of seeing the “big picture” in fresh light, we must first consider why we haven’t seen it already.

Gobbledygook and the Gorilla

Humans are sense-making creatures. We love patterns and are remarkably adept at recognizing them, even unconsciously. Consider the following gobbledygook. This series of sentences recently made the rounds through the world’s email inboxes:

Our powers of perception manifest themselves in myriad ways. Many people have outstanding instincts. They are able, for example, to sense imminent dangers, read the moods of crowds, or detect when others are lying or telling the truth, all from very subtle clues. Most people can quickly construct coherent narratives that link and explain seemingly disparate facts. We are typically good at spotting anomalies—things that don’t fit our understood patterns and structures—and figuring out what they might mean. These are fundamental human skills, and for millennia they have been applied effectively to increasingly complex systems and phenomena, enabling the incredible development of human knowledge and understanding.

Yet we are also capable of spectacular misinterpretation of what is happening around us. We are often victims of severe cognitive challenges that inhibit the power of our perceptions. One of the greatest of these has to do with focus: we miss important changes simply by focusing our attention too narrowly. An example from my own experience illustrates this nicely. For several years, I have commenced many speeches and workshops by showing a 30-second video in which six people are playing with two basketballs. Three are wearing white t-shirts; the other three are wearing black. Each “team” has its own basketball, which it passes only among its members.

Before starting the video, I tell the audience that their task is to count how many successful passes the white team completes. I make a fuss about defining what constitutes a “successful pass”—a ball moving from the hands of one player to the hands of another, either through the air or off the floor. Often I introduce an element of competition, instructing participants to share their answers with others at their table and agree on a number, and telling them that the table that comes closest to the right answer will be rewarded.

After running the video and hearing their answers, I ask if anyone noticed anything strange on the screen. Typically, a very small number of people (seldom more than 10 percent and never more than 20 percent) observed something unusual. What they saw, halfway through, was that someone dressed in a gorilla suit entered the frame, walked center stage, stopped, faced front, and dramatically beat his chest several times before sauntering off-screen again. It is so startlingly obvious when you watch the video the second time (without the distraction of counting passes) that no one can believe they missed it. On one occasion, I ran the exercise with 40 senior corporate executives and none of them saw the gorilla. Indeed, they emphatically accused me of playing a different video the second time.

The point of this story is that we often see only what we are looking for and are readily distracted from observing what should be fairly obvious. If we keep our focus narrow, we will probably not notice the big picture. But in a world of unexpected and radical changes, we will need to widen our lenses in order to make sense of our unfolding, and often surprising, reality.

Mental Maps and Paradoxical Certainties

There are numerous other constraints on our sense-making capabilities— indeed, there are close to 100 known forms of cognitive bias that can severely skew our perceptions and understanding of the world around us.

Some of these become deeply embedded. My colleague Peter Schwartz, a renowned futurist and one of the founders of Global Business Network, has in his office an original map of North America, made by Dutch cartographer Herman Moll in 1701. Based on reports from Spanish explorers, Moll, like other mapmakers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, depicted California as an island, with a wide gulf separating it from the remainder of the continent. These erroneous maps are now collectors’ items, but otherwise they are mere historical curiosities. Yet they confirm two important points about the power of maps.

The first is that faulty maps lead to faulty actions. The maps showing California as an island were carried by missionaries on their journeys to the New World. When they landed near today’s Monterey, they disassembled their boats, packed them on mules, and hauled them across California and up and over the Sierra Nevada mountains. It was only then, looking out upon the vast “beach” before them, that they realized their plight: there was no sea, the maps were wrong, their boats were useless, and their labors had been for naught. The second point is that it takes considerable force of will to change maps after they have been created. Reports from missionaries that California was not, in fact, an island came back to Europe for decades, yet many mapmakers refused to change their maps until compelled to do so by an edict from the king of Spain in 1747.

This story holds important insight for us today as we wrestle with an uncertain and accelerating world. Every decision we make—in business, in government, in our personal lives—plays out over time and is influenced by knowledge (based primarily on our known facts and experience) and judgment (based primarily on our perceptions, or “mental maps”). If our maps are wrong, our judgment will be wrong. Worse, even our knowledge is heavily influenced by our mental maps. These maps not only reflect how we see things, but also profoundly influence what things we see, the facts we choose to gather. Our mental maps, then, act as powerful filters. They can help us make sense and meaning but can also serve to inhibit our ability to perceive and understand what is happening in the world. And they are extremely resistant to change. Indeed, by framing what we observe and then how we interpret what we observe, they so influence our perceptions as to become tacitly self-reinforcing devices.

It is therefore essential that we learn how to put our mental maps under pressure, make our assumptions more explicit, test them assiduously, and open our minds to additional, different, and challenging possibilities. Few of us would argue with that. Yet as the world around us becomes increasingly ambiguous and uncertain, we often lean in the opposite direction, defaulting toward firmly held and quite polarized convictions about the shape and fate of the world. The “either/or” logic that works so well for politicians, media pundits, and even some academics results all too often in heated but uninformative “either/or” debates: globalization is good or bad; the Middle East is hungry and ripe for change or it is a dangerous and backward-looking threat; the U.S. has a sacred duty to promote and enable democracy globally or it is a nation on a collision course with history; genetic engineering will feed and cure us or it will inadvertently destroy us.

While such debates provide good theatre and may even be comforting in their simplistic certainties, they are unhelpful and, I believe, increasingly dangerous. They generate noise and heat from which it is hard to extract signals and light. They encourage overly simplistic and formulaic thinking. They distract us from understanding the deep patterns of the recent past and present—an understanding that can help us anticipate what lies ahead. They appeal to our laziest instincts, not our aspirational capacities. Simplicity, clarity, and certainty are undoubtedly virtues, but they are hard won. “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity,” Oliver Wendell Holmes once remarked, “but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Simplicity on the wrong side of complexity appears to be running rife in public discourse today, especially in the sphere of popular politics.

Enter any bookstore in the U.S. and observe the remarkable array of shrill and partial books that appear to decry all liberals “traitors” and all conservatives “liars.” In truth, few of us are entirely immune from knee-jerk, biased, and overly simplistic framing of the world; we all have our mental maps. Consider how you react to the following two competing stories of our world today, and what your reactions reveal about your own biases.

THE BEST OF TIMES...

We are blessed to live in an era of unprecedented opportunity and potential. Prosperity is growing and flowing around the globe, with literally billions of the hitherto impoverished achieving decent income levels. China, India, Indonesia, much of Eastern Europe—the list goes on—are enjoying staggering levels of economic growth and becoming fully integrated into the global economic mainstream. Educational opportunities are reaching more and more children with each new generation; adult literacy has risen to 74 percent globally, while in most of the developed world tertiary education has become the norm.

The end of the Cold War enabled the rise of many new democracies, while the number of totalitarian states has declined dramatically over the last 20 years. The collapse of rigid, centrally planned economies has brought wealth and opportunity to many countries previously hampered by allegiance to a defunct ideology. The dismantling of the former Soviet Union has led dynamic countries to emerge and to participate in the remarkable new European experiment in governance. Moreover, the end of the defining ideological tussle of the twentieth century has allowed many nations to cash in a sizable “peace dividend.” For the most part, the world has continued to enjoy an era of relative peace; outside of Africa, there are fewer victims of war per head of population than at any other time in the last thousand years. The U.S. has by far the greatest military strength in the world and, while not yet fully grown into its role as lone superpower, has an established record of responsibility and fairness in its deployment of strength and power.

People are living longer; the average life span is now 67 years. Infant mortality has declined to 5.6 percent globally. With birth rates falling in more and more countries, we can now anticipate the imminent end of the “population explosion.” Breakthroughs in the production and distribution of food are making a serious dent in world hunger. Meanwhile, many diseases are falling to the power of science; even AIDS, so recently a formidable and fearsome killer, can now be tamed by a potent drug cocktail. And the mapping of the human genome and innovations in biotechnology hold enormous promise for the future health—even enhancement— of much of humanity.

New information and communication technologies are connecting people, places, markets, capital, ideas, and cultures as never before, creating a new economic platform along with truly global opportunities for human well-being and wealth creation. More broadly, our global knowledge base continues to grow and integrate, drawing upon evolving scientific knowledge and unprecedented discovery processes informed by spectacular new technologies and tools. These expanding knowledge assets provide us with a reliable source for the transformative technologies of the future. In particular, with wise investment in alternative energy technologies, we stand to reduce significantly the world’s dependence on fossil fuels, with all their corollary pollution challenges.

If we can hold our course for the next decade or so, the longer-term future looks bright indeed…

THE WORST OF TIMES...

Our tragic species, doomed by its own arrogance and constant dissatisfied striving, stands ready to reap the catastrophic harvest it has been mindlessly sowing for centuries. In our hunger to consume and “prosper,” we have wrought economic havoc on our environment and our communities. The market-based values that we embraced have empowered amoral corporations to set the agenda of our times. We have been driven by simplistic metrics of progress that overemphasize the material and deny the spiritual and the human.

And what have we gained? A third of the world’s population subsists on less than a dollar a day; this is less than the public subsidy for every head of cattle in Europe. We have failed to support deteriorating and disorderly states around the world whose people suffer disproportionately from disease, starvation, and premature death. We have allowed the gap between rich and poor, between the “haves” and the “have nots,” to increase apace—even in that promised land of plenty, the U.S. We have permitted the once robust infrastructure of the developed world to begin to crumble, from the railways of Britain to the electric grid of the U.S.

And we have failed to invest adequately in the essential life-supporting infrastructures for the emergent world. We have allowed squalid conditions to breed virulent versions of once controlled diseases, leading to fear of a “post-antibiotic” world. We have enforced intellectual property rights that protect the interests of drug manufacturers over the needs of the poor, including too many of the many millions afflicted by, and still dying of, AIDS.

We play with the fire of new technologies, especially those relating to the redesign of nature through biotechnology—a tinkering with the essence of life that carries risks we cannot calculate because we do not understand them. We espouse secular governance while observing—and too often pandering to—fundamentalism in every major religion. The lone superpower of our era, the U.S., has abandoned multilateralism and alienated its friends, and its attempts to strike down its enemies have instead multiplied and energized them. Terrorist outrages, including the more apocalyptic threats of bioterrorism and dirty bombs, not to mention full nuclear threats, seem more imminent every day. Meanwhile, we despoil and take for granted the planet that is our only home and watch in denial as changes in the climate, many of which we prompted, threaten its stability.

Perhaps worst of all, we are disabled in our capacity to understand and address these matters. We can no longer readily separate truth from fiction, reality from spin, substance from presentation. The World Wide Web is proving to be a source of as much confusion, distortion, and conspiracy as insight and understanding.

In this foolish age, incredulity is the only rational stance—other than anger, frustration, and despair…

I suspect that both of these versions of our current reality would find plenty of supporters if put to a vote. Indeed, even more extreme versions of both stories are being told every day around the world. Both are essentially true sketches of our times—which, of course, is exactly the point.

The world we live in does not follow a single, easy storyline, and neither will our future. This ambiguity may be deeply uncomfortable, but it is nonetheless real. The more strongly we hold our own particular beliefs in an attempt to make coherent sense of the world, the less sense, paradoxically, we are able to make. Above all, neither blind optimism nor defeatist pessimism will prove an effective posture for any of us in the complex future ahead.

Making Sense of a Transformative Era

This book, then, is intended to be a useful resource for those seeking to make better sense of our powerful times. Its premises are based on several convictions.

First, the world has never been certain. Humanity has experienced great shifts and rifts, profound anxieties, and deep confusion many times throughout its history, as Petrucci’s observation confirms. Yet the world—the entire world—has surely never been more uncertain. As our systems—technological, financial, social, economic, cultural, and political—become more complex, more global, more interdependent, and develop at an accelerating pace, increasing (and increasingly widespread) uncertainty is an inevitable and ongoing consequence.

Second, much of this uncertainty is clearly visible—the stuff of the daily news, the issues and questions we wrestle with constantly in our personal and professional lives. But there are also less apparent but deep and fundamental dynamics at work, and we may currently be witnessing nothing less than the significant unraveling of much that we have come to take for granted over the last five centuries. If so, we are not at all well prepared for the transformations ahead.

Third, the changes that are currently underway are not only complex and systemic—they are also paradoxical and contradictory, which makes them much harder to perceive and interpret. This is greatly compounded by the fact that individuals and organizations have strong cognitive biases (including a tendency to oversimplify) that seriously impede our ability to observe and make sense of change.

Fourth, we are at a threshold. Profound challenges and opportunities for our emergent global civilization lie ahead—and in the relatively near future. How well we acknowledge, understand, and address these in the coming decade will have a very significant impact on the remainder of this century and beyond.

Fifth, no single actor—no person, institution, ideology, marketplace, religion, region, or nation—can come close to controlling the future in isolation, to solving our problems or fulfilling our dreams. In a tightly interconnected world, increased distribution of responsibility—and the opportunity to contribute—is inevitable. This will require people in many walks of life, in all sorts of organizations, in every sector, in all parts of the world, to learn and understand better and faster the nature of our changing world and to imagine what could and should lie ahead. Every decision and every action taken everywhere has consequences, and in accumulation, they will come to shape our future. The wiser our separate choices, the better our shared future will be.

This book aims to contribute to that better future. It is organized into four sections.

• WHAT’S HAPPENING?: PREDICTING THE PRESENT

  This section cuts through much of the complexity we see in the world right now by laying out seven “dynamic tensions”—multiple, confusing, and often contradictory forces that are largely fueling the transition from our present to our future. These call attention to some fundamental paradoxes and contradictions that are in play today and that require us to adopt a “both/and” rather than an “either/or” logic.

• WHAT IF?: CHALLENGES AND CHANGES AHEAD

  Given these dynamic tensions, I then explore two of the most important areas in which we will experience major challenges and changes in the coming decade—governance and innovation—and suggest that in both we appear poised for radical and important shifts.

• WHAT’S NEXT?: SCENARIOS FOR THE NEXT DECADE

  Having laid out these tensions and challenges, I then consider how we might expect a new global order to evolve, offering three very different scenarios that we might see unfold in the coming decade. While we must prepare for all three of these futures, each holds profoundly different implications.

• SO WHAT?: ACTING IN AN AGE OF TRANSFORMATION

  Finally, I consider some of the critical implications of this transformative era, and explain how and why three important sets of actors—businesses, leaders, and global citizens—will be largely responsible for shaping a better future.

There can be no “completeness proof” for the long term; I cannot hope to cover in this book everything that might matter in the coming decade as we create the foundation for a new century. But I believe that this is a very useful primer to the future, one that lays out powerful frameworks for making sense of an uncertain world and inspires us to turn our collective power and passions to the challenges and opportunities ahead.