Our Mission
Founded in 1989 by futurist John L. Petersen, The Arlington Institute is a 501(c)(3) non-profit research institute that specializes in thinking about global futures and trying to influence rapid, positive change. We encourage systemic, non-linear approaches to planning and believe that effective thinking about the future is enhanced by applying newly emerging technology. Therefore, we strive to be agents of change by creating intellectual frameworks & tool-sets for understanding the transition in which we are living.
TAI believes that we are living in an era of global transition, to a degree that our species has never seen before. The exponential increase of human knowledge, and the acceleration of its application through technology, is propelling humanity towards a new era of thought and endeavor. Society, science, ecology and commerce are converging at the intersection of danger and opportunity. A complexity and unpredictability that is beyond our past experience characterize the challenges at hand. If humanity’s preferred future is to be realized, new tools for strategic planning and problem solving must be invented and combined. We must think differently.
We have made it our mission to help facilitate this transition, and to connect and associate with like-minded people so that we may together embrace the opportunities of this future. In the broadest sense, we help leadership from all sectors chart the most direct course to preferred futures by:
Tracking and evaluating major scientific, technological, social, demographic, and environmental forces that drive change.
Conducting future-focused studies and initiatives.
Exploring how trends might crosscut in significant ways.
Cataloging potential ‘wildcards’ – low probability high impact events.
Helping leadership translate information – from data to scenarios – into mental maps by which to guide decision making and build sophisticated organizational visions.
A TIME OF IMMENSE OPPORTUNITY:
We are attempting to produce a historic breakthrough in the ability to anticipate and understand the future by building a world-class combination of extraordinary analytical technology, a core group of very creative analysts, and an internationally distributed network of thinkers and resource people. This is a radical new model for a “think tank” that focuses upon the fact that TAI as an information/idea enterprise that exists in an era of unprecedented advances in information technology. This revolution is eliminating the historic constraints of geography and location and makes it possible, for the first time in history, perhaps, to predict the social behavior of large groups of people to certain types of events.WILD CARDS AND TRENDS:
The unprecedented change that we are seeing in almost every area of reality presents the significant likelihood that, in the coming few years, the world will experience one or more low probability, very high impact events – Wild Cards – of a scope and magnitude for which we have neither the experience nor the tools to respond effectively. TAI tracks the early indicators that might lead us to anticipate the arrival of selected Wild Cards. We are also developing computer-based tools that would provide new insights into the behavior of these events.Our History
The Arlington Institute was founded in 1989 by John L. Petersen who previously had pursued multiple careers in the military, nonprofit sector, residential real estate development, advertising and marketing, presidential politics, national security policy, and the music industry. Petersen launched TAI to help redefine the concept of national security in much larger, comprehensive terms by introducing the rapidly evolving global trends of population growth, environmental degradation, scientific/technological explosion, and social value shifts into the traditional national defense equation that had focused on “killing people and breaking things”. From the beginning, TAI has always focused on big ideas and big issues.
The need for an organization like TAI evolved from the bipartisan, eighteen month long National Security Group project that Petersen co-founded and jointly led in Washington, DC in 1986-7. That ad-hoc group of national security experts was brought together to explore and map the security environment that the successful candidate would have to operate within after the 1988 presidential campaign. Petersen also wrote the final report for the group, The Diffusion of Power: An Era of Realignment, which became a strategy document used at the highest levels of the Department of Defense.
Learning about the future: In the early part of the 90s, Petersen was engaged in a number of projects for the Department of Defense which functioned to build a systematic understanding of the major approaches that were then being used to study and anticipate futures. One notable project for the Office of the Secretary of Defense involved traveling throughout the world visiting the foremost practitioners of futures research to assess each methodology and attempt to develop a new, synthetic approach that drew from the best of the then current processes. It was during this period that he became familiar with scenario planning.
Changing the outlook of the military: Petersen became an advisor to a number of senior defense officials during this time, serving in various personal support roles to the Undersecretary of the Navy and the Chief of Naval Operations, among others. For a number of years he was retained to bring speakers on issues related to different aspects of the future into the Pentagon each month to expand the horizons of the uniformed and civilian leadership of the Department of the Navy. The Arlington Institute successfully executed a number of major projects during the first half of the decade. The Commandant of the Coast Guard retained Petersen to develop an “environmental scan” of the horizon, assessing the major trends that were driving change in the key sectors (science, technology, environment, energy, transportation, space, et al.) that would define that service’s future.
Those findings were then used as the foundation upon which the Coast Guard’s strategic plan was built. The report became the basis for Petersen’s first book, The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future which was published in 1994. That book was selected as a CHOICE Best Academic Book in 1995. Other notable projects included a two-day workshop with all of the flag officers responsible for financial management in the Navy to develop alternative approaches for dealing with emerging futures, as well as number of workshops with the most senior leadership of the Department of the Navy, exposing them to breakthrough concepts and potential events that could dramatically influence the future.
Vision 21: A particularly rewarding project, Vision 21, involved taking the twenty one most senior generals in the Marine Corps through eight, two-day workshops to develop a vision for the future of the Corps. That effort resulted in a major strategic direction document being written by the incoming Commandant for his general officers that guided the direction of the service for a number of years.
Midway through the 90s, Petersen became convinced that humanity was living in an extraordinary time of change that would necessarily result in a major global shift within the following two decades. TAI committed itself to playing a significant role in facilitating a global transition to a new world that operates in a fundamentally different way from the past. The question begged by this perspective was: What kinds of events could be the catalyst for a big, historical shift? That query led to an exploration of “wild cards,” rapidly moving, surprise events that had the potential of quickly and fundamentally reshaping the global landscape. In an attempt to understand the breadth of the possibilities, he wrote his second book, Out of the Blue: Wild Cards and Other Big Future Surprises in 1997 which became a World Future Society best seller and was the first and only book on the subject written in English.
Y2K – The big wild card: The emergence of the year 2000 computer problem led to a great deal of seminal work attempting to understand and anticipate the potential implications of possible large-scale computer failure. It was a wild card that was certain to happen on a given day, with no knowledge of what fallout might transpire. We looked at it as an extraordinary opportunity to study the structure and dynamics of a major global event that could have extraordinary implications. One article co-authored by Petersen, The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation?, became a major assessment of the potential for change associated with the event and was published in seven different publications. The Arlington Institute was retained by the government to help with preparing for Y2K in a number of ways. One included consultation on the design and operation of Y2K crisis response centers. More importantly, we developed a process to regularly survey the American populace to anticipate changes in behavior that might presage social problems and provide input to DOD and the White House on policy options. During this period TAI became seriously involved in studying and applying agent based modeling and nonlinear system behavior to Y2K-associated issues.
Developing Global Scenarios: TAI’s Y2K activities caught the attention of Silicon Valley and it was retained in 2000 to develop a large number of scenarios around the forces driving global change for a major encyclopedic Internet portal that was under development. These alternative images of the future were to be based upon individual system dynamics models that would allow Web users to manipulate the inputs to a particular area (like energy, for example) and determine what kinds of potential worlds evolved. John Petersen brought his staff together and they developed a set of basic issues that they felt would be the main contributors and shapers of the future in the coming decade –
The global have/have-not situation
Wars over drinking water
Rapid climate change
Fundamental computer-influenced changes happening to major human institutions.
Nanotechnology
Biological Terreorism
Rapid disintegration or positive change in Africa’s future
Genetic modification and biotechnology
Augmented intelligence – where humans were merging with computers and computers were taking on the capabilities of humans.
Global epidemics
Discovery of extraterrestrial life
These issues, which included both trends and wild cards became the core subjects that the organization continues to focus upon today. TAI began to monitor these subjects and enlisted input from an international network of friends who regularly submitted harbinger articles and stories from a wide variety of publications and sources.
These pieces were edited by Petersen and published fortnightly in the free email-based newsletter, FUTUREdition, which has grown to a readership of many thousands of individuals. TAI regularly receives comments from readers who consider it one of the most informative publications in existence for staying abreast of early indicators and weak signals of potential global change. When the dot-com bubble burst, the scenario project ended. The loss of funding necessitated that TAI cut back its staff and activities to a minimum and begin a process of redirection.
Tools for anticipating change: Global change will only come with shifts in human values and attendant consciousness and in the development of new tools that will allow us to operate on this planet in fundamentally different ways. TAI has developed a number of potential projects for encouraging new ideas that will lead to rapid social evolution. One two-year project, the Arlington Forum, is designed to develop a strategy for the future of humanity – looking out twenty years for a new framework for human behavior that deals systemically with some of the largest problems that our species faces.
Global change will require breakthroughs in the tools available to humanity for providing the basic needs that advanced and developing societies need, like energy, education, drinking water, food, health care, et al. In 2001, John L. Petersen conceived of what has become the Technology Horizon Foundation, a partnership with two venture capital executives to raise significant amounts of philanthropic funding ($30 – 100 million) for seed capital investments in fledgling companies that have a product idea that could “fundamentally change the world”. THF is presently reviewing the business plans for companies in the healthcare, waste conversion, education, and energy areas, among others. Financial projections suggest that over a decade as much as a billion dollars could be made available for funding breakthrough technologies through this vehicle.
In the early part of this decade, influenced by technologies TAI had become exposed to in the Y2K era, John L. Petersen came to believe that humanity was on the verge of being able to develop, for the first time in history, tools that could begin to relate current events to specific alternative futures, thereby providing early warning of major, disruptive events. Individual applications were being developed that could perform extraordinary single functions (like searching for information from multiple sources, monitoring specific sources twenty-four hours a day, translating between and among languages, performing a variety of processes based upon natural language processing, visualization of complex information in increasingly powerful ways, and recognizing patterns over time and allowing systems to learn) which, if integrated together into a seamless tool suite could open a new era in “sense-making.”
TAI began what turned into an eighteen month process of evaluating alternative technologies that might be included in such a tool suite. Its efforts came to the attention of the government of Singapore in 2001 which ultimately joined TAI in a two-year partnership to develop the capability that is now called DIANE (DIgital ANalysis Environment). DIANE represents the beginning of a revolution in what TAI calls “anticipatory analysis” – the process of analysis with the goal of anticipating the emergence of specific futures. Many government agencies and other organizations are seriously considering adopting the DIANE tool suite into their analytical processes as it represents a capability that is otherwise unequalled.
Over the next two years TAI built upon the capabilities and success of DIANE to make it the core engine in a National Surprise Anticipation center that was named the Risk Assessment – Horizon Scanning (RAHS) project, which continues after multiple incarnations to this day.
Facilitating a global transition: TAI continued to work to learn more about the major forces that are driving global change. A particular area of interest for many years has been energy. In 2003, TAI completed a project for the Office of the Secretary of Defense to develop an energy strategy for the country that accelerates the movement away from a dependency on oil for transportation. A Strategy: Moving America Away From Oil has been embraced by the United Nations Foundation as the best strategy that they have found to move the U.S. toward renewable biofuels.
TAI’s newest initiative is the development of a major web portal called the “World’s Biggest Problems,” which will be a single source of descriptions, scenarios, resources, news, and unsolicited advice on dealing with those problematic trends that will inevitably force major global change. Subjects that will be addressed will include increasing shortages of drinking water, the fragility of the global financial system, the end of oil as an economical source of fuel, rapid climate change, et.al.
TAI works with big ideas that can make a big difference. We are sincerely interested in helping humanity prepare for and transition to the new era that is clearly on our horizon.
For 30 years, TAI has published a free bi-monthly newsletter FUTUREdition; it has sponsored a speaker series – now called TransitionTalks – for 25 years, and is now hosting a video blog with John Petersen, PostScript, which is aired regularly.
Expertise
Knows how to think about the future. We know where to look and how to array information so that current trends inform our clients about future operating contexts. We use very sophisticated processes and information technology to scan the horizon for possible big surprise events and early indicators of change which could rapidly shift the familiar fundamentals upon which an enterprise is based. We use systems thinking to look at the driving forces and wild cards so we can understand the complex interdependencies that are the fabric of any future. We can help you think out-of-the-box – and see relationships and possibilities that otherwise you would have missed.
Is expert in identifying possible futures that would fundamentally effect our clients. We lead groups in developing scenarios, or images, of how their marketplace – or any other environment or relationship — might evolve. We help them identify normative scenarios, or desired futures, that can form the core of a concrete organizational vision. We can help an organization look internally and extract its unique business idea from all that it does and then relate those core ideas and competencies to the spectrum of plausible futures that it will confront. For some of our clients, we look for convergent areas of great opportunity. For others, we look for hazards.
Looks for early indicators of large-scale change that would impact those for whom we work. Our technology will allow us to identify potentially significant information emerging from almost any place on the planet which can then be used to find meaning in subtle events that point toward the possibility of much larger change. Our clients have early warnings of change that are not available elsewhere.
Has a unique understanding of the future which comes from viewing the emerging environment from a high, integrated vantage that is informed by a sensitivity to potential unusual events. We have worked for many types of organizations and have seen the future through their eyes. These varied perspectives, coupled with those from our stable of creative and curious analysts, provide us with a singular viewpoint that tends to be richer and wider than those of most observers.
Founder
John L. Petersen is considered by many to be one of the most informed futurists in the world. He is best-known for writing and thinking about high impact surprises (wild cards) and the process of surprise anticipation. His current professional involvements include the development of sophisticated tools for anticipatory analysis and surprise anticipation, long-range strategic planning and helping leadership design new approaches for dealing with the future.
He has led national non-profit organizations, worked in sales, manufacturing, real estate development, and marketing and advertising, mostly for companies he founded. A graduate electrical engineer, he has also promoted rock concerts; produced conventions; and worked as a disc jockey, among other things.
Mr. Petersens government and political experience include stints at the National War College, the Institute for National Security Studies, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Council staff at the White House. He was a naval flight officer in the U.S. Navy and Navy Reserve and is a decorated veteran of both the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars. He has served in senior positions for a number of presidential political campaigns and was an elected delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1984. He was twice the runner-up to be Secretary of the Navy.
In 1989, Petersen founded The Arlington Institute (TAI), a non-profit, future-oriented research institute. TAI operates on the premise that effective thinking about the future is impossible without casting a very wide net. The “think tank” serves as a global agent for change by developing new concepts, processes and tools for anticipating the future and translating that knowledge into better present-day decisions. Using advanced information technology, a core group of bright thinkers and an international network of exceptionally curious people along with simulations, modeling, scenario building, polling and analysis, Arlington helps equip leaders and organizations from many disciplines with tools and actionable perspectives for dealing with uncertain times.
An award-winning writer, Petersens first book, The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future was awarded Outstanding Academic Book of 1995 by CHOICE Academic Review, and remained on The World Future Societys best-seller list for more than a year. His Out of the Blue: How to Anticipate Wild Cards and Big Future Surprises book was also a WFS best-seller. His latest book is a Vision of 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change. His coauthored article, (The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation?) was one of the most highly acclaimed writings on Y2K. His 1988 book-length report (The Diffusion of Power: An Era of Realignment) was used at the highest levels of American government as a basis for strategic planning. He has also written papers on the future of national security and the military, the future of energy and the future of the media.
Petersen is a past board member of the World Future Society, writes on the future of aviation for Professional Pilot magazine and is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh Foundation. He is a former network member of the Global Business Network and a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science. A provocative public speaker, he addresses a wide array of audiences around the world on a variety of future subjects. When he is not writing or speaking, Petersen invests in and develops resources for large, international projects and advanced technology start-up companies. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia.
Speaking Inquiries: Email [email protected]
Services
The Arlington Institute offers the following customized products and services:
Scenario Development, Business Idea Identification, and Strategy Design for enterprises or groups of enterprises.
Normative Scenario Development for individuals, organizations, sectors, and humanity.
Customized Brainstorming and Tutorial Workshops to catalyze ongoing projects and teach new thinking skills.
Sophisticated Group Facilitation to achieve specific objectives from groups of all sizes.