What IS THreatCASTING?

The rapidly evolving global technological and information landscape demands a proactive approach to assessing potential threats and opportunities to address them.

Threatcasting is a conceptual framework used to help multidisciplinary groups envision future scenarios. It is also a process that enables systematic planning against threats sometime in the next 10 years.

Utilizing the Threatcasting process, groups explore future threats and how to transform the future they desire into reality while avoiding undesired futures.

Threatcasting is a continuous, multi-step process with inputs from social science, technical research, cultural history, economics, trends, expert interviews, and science fiction storytelling. These inputs inform the rich exploration of potential visions of the future, underpinned by high degrees of technical and operational accuracy.

RECENT EVENTS

#Connexions24

Extreme in the Mainstream:
Information Disorder, (Dis)engagement, & Digital (R)evolution

"#Connexions is dedicated to developing informed and expert leadership for the networked information age. To that end, our annual conference targets thought leaders, practitioners, and critical thinkers who are at the frontlines of information warfare in the broadest sense of the term, be it in education, media, government, healthcare, or business."

- connexions.ai

Workshop Generated Science Fiction Prototype

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Founders oF THREATCASTING

Cyndi Coon

Futurist

Rule Breaker

"Time Traveler"

Cyndi Coon is the Co-Founder of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab and Press, producing publications, reports and sci-fi prototypes. She advanced the Threatcasting Methodology to enrich the human-centric design of the workshops and exercises. As an Applied Experiential Futurist Coon works with organizations to walk through the Threatcasting Foundation Phases with a human-centric lens. Focusing on a ten-year time horizon Coon takes Threatcasting exercise participants on an experiential journey to build a person who is their 'Scout,' sending them out into the future to look around on their behalf and report back what happened. This experience is developed as a movie script concept with report-outs during the exercises acting as quick-share movie trailers. The gamified experiential advancement of the method allows participants to go deeper in constructing their effects-based model and build incredible empathy for the Future Scout they will need to ensure disruption on behalf of. Participants have fun and forget they are in the middle of an experiential research activity. This builds the ecosystems of Threatcasting participants who develop a bond over the practice. Gamified human-centric Applied Experiential Threatcasting is Coon's Contribution to the practice.

Cyndi Coon is a time traveler and rule-bender, nerding out for good using data, science and curious questions as an Applied Experiential Futurist for enterprise, governments, higher education, industry, the military, and private partnerships. She is an Affiliate at the Center for Emergency Management & Homeland Security and is a Co-Chair of the Human Wisdom Committee IEEE Planet Positive Strong Sustainability by Design and the Chief Media Officer for Content Evolution. She leads the i4j (global innovation for jobs workforce) and Coolabilities communities. She is the Founder and Principal Futurist at Applied Futures Lab, Founder at Laboratory5 and Co-Founder of the Threatcasting Lab and Press.

Brian David Johnson "BDJ"

Phaedrus Senior Fellow

Futurist

Brian David Johnson is the inventor of the Threatcasting Methodology. As an applied futurist he has worked with organizations for over twenty years to develop an actionable 10 -15 year vision and what it will feel like to live in the future. He works with governments, trade organizations, start-ups, and multinational corporations to not only help envision their future but specify the steps needed to get there. Johnson is currently a Senior Fellow at Phaedrus as well as the futurist in residence at Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination, a professor in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society and the Director of the ASU Threatcasting Lab.

Johnson speaks and writes extensively in ongoing columns for IEEE Computer Magazine and Successful Farming where he is the "Farm Futurist”. He has contributed articles to publications like The Wall Street Journal, Slate, and Wired Magazine. Johnson holds over 40 patents and is the best-selling author of both science fiction and fact books (A Threatcasting Textbook [Springer Nature], The Future You [Harper], WaR: Wizards and Robots [Penguin], and 21st Century Robot [Make]). He was appointed first futurist ever at the Intel Corporation in 2009 where he worked for over a decade helping to design over 2 billion microprocessors. Johnson appears regularly on the BBC, Bloomberg TV, PBS, FOX News, and the Discovery Channel and has been featured in Scientific American, The Technology Review, Forbes, INC, and Popular Science. He has directed two feature films and is an illustrator and commissioned painter. In 2016 Samuel Goldwyn released "Vintage Tomorrows” a documentary based upon Johnson's book of the same name.