What everyone knows is what has already happened or become obvious. What the aware individual knows is what has not yet taken shape, what has not yet occurred.

Everyone says victory in battle is good, but if you see the subtle and notice the hidden so as to seize victory where there is no form, that is really good.

— Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The future is happening today and the challenge for any organization or project team is to see and understand the dynamics and the multiple complexities of the big picture context in which their decisions are being made. A FutureScape® is a visual thinking tool that will help you see and understand the larger environment or context in a realistic and coherent way. It is a powerful, but deceptively simple sense-making tool.

Based on insights from complex systems research, the FutureScape® process engages the mind’s pattern recognition and visual synthesis abilities. It helps you integrate your intuitive sense of events in the larger environment with your intellectual understanding about what you already know and what the data indicate.

In any type of planning process, it’s important to see the environment as it is today, not as it was last month or last year. A FutureScape® promotes hindsight about the past, insight about the present and foresight about the future—the keys to successful strategic thinking.

The FutureScape® process will help you gather information on many levels, which then makes it possible to see connections, opportunities, influence points and "perking" information and events—those subtle changes and emerging conditions that are just beginning to take shape, that seem small now, but could mushroom overnight and dramatically influence your future. By applying your thinking and planning resources to emerging phenomena, you have an opportunity to influence the future, today!