Synthesis Lectures on Threatcasting – serie

Impending technological advances will widen an adversary’s attack plane over the next decade. Visualizing what the future will hold, and what new threat vectors could emerge, is a task that traditional planning mechanisms struggle to accomplish given the wide range of potential issues. Understanding and preparing for the future operating environment is the basis of an analytical method known as Threatcasting. It is a method that gives researchers a structured way to envision and plan for risks ten years in the future. Threatcasting uses input from social science, technical research, cultural history, economics, trends, expert interviews, and even a little science fiction to recognize future threats and design potential futures. During this human-centric process, participants brainstorm what actions can be taken to identify, track, disrupt, mitigate, and recover from the possible threats. Specifically, groups explore how to transform the future they desire into reality while avoiding anundesired future. The Threatcasting method also exposes what events could happen that indicate the progression toward an increasingly possible threat landscape. This book begins with an overview of the Threatcasting method with examples and case studies to enhance the academic foundation. Along with end-of-chapter exercises to enhance the reader’s understanding of the concepts, there is also a full project where the reader can conduct a mock Threatcasting on the topic of “the next biological public health crisis.” The second half of the book is designed as a practitioner’s handbook. It has three separate chapters (based on the general size of the Threatcasting group) that walk the reader through how to apply the knowledge from Part I to conduct an actual Threatcasting activity. This book will be useful for a wide audience (from student to practitioner) and will hopefully promote new dialogues across communities and novel developments in the area.

This book is a guide to Storycasting for futures and forecasting practitioners. A portmanteau of ‘storytelling’ and ‘Threatcasting,’ Storycasting is a supplementary application of the Threatcasting model, which develops meaningful and human-centric qualitative data that can be presented in thought-provoking narratives that illicit responses and stimulate interest in the outcomes. This book proposes that in distilling the work product of strategic futures planning, threat assessments, and long-term thinking into bulletized reports, organizations significantly diminish the interest as well as insight that can be gleaned from such efforts. In order to recapture the attention of senior leaders and decision makers, the Storycasting model covered in this book presents a way of converting the plausible into the compelling. After guiding readers through the theoretical and practical aspects of Storycasting, the book includes a case study novella, news reporting, and industry publications to demonstrate the potential of the methodology. Through this, the author creates a reality-based and human-centered scenario rooted in a possible future in which a proposed policy is realized, including anticipated add-on effects, reactionary push-back, and supplemental action that can be anticipated through speculative fiction using the Threatcasting methodology. The book closes with an analysis of the narrative output and advises readers on optimizing their own stories to best relate important projections  to their organizations, clients, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

This book provides an overview of Long COVID, the chronic illness and disability that can result from COVID-19 infection in 20–30% of survivors. It approaches the topic through its larger social, political, and historical context utilizing the Threatcasting methodology for scenario-based foresight. The book brings together multiple perspectives on Long COVID, such as patient experiences, healthcare system impacts, historical frameworks, and the information ecosystem surrounding COVID to explore the long-term structural implications of Long COVID beyond the current acute crisis. It is intended to be a guide for policy makers, healthcare providers, researchers, and anyone whose work will play a role in mitigating the long tail of COVID-19. Framing the pandemic within a historical and political framework while approaching Long COVID from the future-casting perspective, this book seeks to disentangle the issues posed by Long COVID from the current moment and is intended to establish newways of thinking about and preparing for similar complex, over-the-horizon potential threats. The first book to apply the Threatcasting framework to a public-health issue like COVID-19Draws together multiple perspectives of Long COVID that were previously discussed independently within their fieldsComprehensively examines the history and future of Long COVID

This book provides an overview of Long COVID, the chronic illness and disability that can result from COVID-19 infection in 20–30% of survivors. It approaches the topic through its larger social, political, and historical context utilizing the Threatcasting methodology for scenario-based foresight. The book brings together multiple perspectives on Long COVID, such as patient experiences, healthcare system impacts, historical frameworks, and the information ecosystem surrounding COVID to explore the long-term structural implications of Long COVID beyond the current acute crisis. It is intended to be a guide for policy makers, healthcare providers, researchers, and anyone whose work will play a role in mitigating the long tail of COVID-19. Framing the pandemic within a historical and political framework while approaching Long COVID from the future-casting perspective, this book seeks to disentangle the issues posed by Long COVID from the current moment and is intended to establish newways of thinking about and preparing for similar complex, over-the-horizon potential threats. The first book to apply the Threatcasting framework to a public-health issue like COVID-19Draws together multiple perspectives of Long COVID that were previously discussed independently within their fieldsComprehensively examines the history and future of Long COVID