Making Futures Work: Integrating Futures Thinking for Design, Innovation, and Strategy
Phil Balagtas
Aug 2025 · Gildan Media · Narrated by Mike Chamberlain
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12 hr 41 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Learn how to get started with Futures Thinking. With this practical guide, Phil Balagtas, founder of the Design Futures Initiative and the global Speculative Futures network, shows you how designers and futurists have made futures work at companies such as Atari, IBM, Apple, Disney, Autodesk, Lufthansa, and McKinsey & Company.
This book demystifies the process of Futures Thinking into a language that's practical and useful for both designers and strategists. You'll learn about Strategic Foresight for using ideas about the future to anticipate and prepare for change; explore Speculative Design to deal with the relationship between science, technology, and humans; and Design Fiction to explore and critique possible futures.
Balagtas also shares stories from his journey to build a global community and describes how he works with clients to reshape the futures vocabulary. With this guide, you'll learn how to prepare your client, team, and/or audience for futures; facilitate and work with the fundamental methods and frameworks; gain advocacy and support within your organization; provide measurable value from the process and outcomes; build a futures culture and team; and sustain a culture and support system beyond projects.
This book demystifies the process of Futures Thinking into a language that's practical and useful for both designers and strategists. You'll learn about Strategic Foresight for using ideas about the future to anticipate and prepare for change; explore Speculative Design to deal with the relationship between science, technology, and humans; and Design Fiction to explore and critique possible futures.
Balagtas also shares stories from his journey to build a global community and describes how he works with clients to reshape the futures vocabulary. With this guide, you'll learn how to prepare your client, team, and/or audience for futures; facilitate and work with the fundamental methods and frameworks; gain advocacy and support within your organization; provide measurable value from the process and outcomes; build a futures culture and team; and sustain a culture and support system beyond projects.
About the author
Phil Balagtas is a design leader with over two decades of experience creating innovative digital products and services. Working for companies such as General Electric and McKinsey & Company, he has served a variety of sectors such as aviation, healthcare, utilities, consumer electronics, and retail, to name a few. As a consultant he has helped transform businesses through cultural and digital transformations, trained teams on Design Thinking and designed and shipped digital products for B2B and B2C organizations.He is also the founder of the Design Futures Initiative, a nonprofit based in San Francisco focused on the advancement of Futures Thinking principles and methodologies for assessing the threats and opportunities of the future. Through this initiative he has worked with the United Nations and Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco and also founded a global network of Futures Thinking chapters called Speculative Futures. Working as both a Futures expert, evangelist, and consultant, he has been studying and applying Futures to a variety of business and organizational contexts in an attempt to integrate it into the design practice and make the approach more practical, accessible, and viable for business and product strategy.
Mike Chamberlain is an actor and voice-over performer, as well as an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning audiobook narrator. Along with animation and video game characters, Mike performs narration and voices promos for television. He lives with his wife and daughter in Southern California.
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