IMAGINABLE

In 2008—as any reader of her first book, REALITY IS BROKEN, knows—Jane McGonigal was the lead designer on a six-week future forecasting simulation called Superstruct, run by the Institute for the Future, where she has worked for the past fifteen years. Set in the year 2019, 10,000 people worldwide simulated living through a global pandemic of a respiratory virus of Chinese origin called ReDS-19, short for Respiratory Distress Syndrome. In 2010, she led another large scale simulation, this time for the World Bank, set in 2020—and which featured a global respiratory pandemic that started in China called the Pearl River flu; an outbreak of misinformation and conspiracy theories driven on social media by a group called “Citizen X”; historic wildfires up and down the West Coast of the US; and a collapse of the power grid due to aging infrastructure and extreme weather. Jane was far from the only person who foresaw so much of what has happened over the past year. And yet so many people reacted as if things like Covid-19 were “unimaginable.”

Jane wants to change that—but not simply by giving readers her own predictions for what the next decade will bring. In IMAGINABLE, rather, she wants to share with readers the tools she employs as a futurist so that they can imagine the future for themselves, and—more importantly—what they can do to be prepared, and face the future with what she calls “urgent optimism.” Or even change it--because you can't change the future unless you can imagine it, and Jane sees the decade after Covid as the most significant opportunity in our lifetimes to really transform the way society works, and to create the future we want for ourselves along the way. This is surely the first and last time you'll ever hear this pitch, but it strikes me as nothing so much as FUTURE SHOCK meets Brené Brown, with a dash of Fareed Zakaria's TEN LESSONS FOR A POST-PANDEMIC WORLD.

A word on how—and how quickly—this book has come together. Six weeks ago, Coursera.org—where over 50,000 people have taken Jane's “Think Like a Futurist” course since it launched a year ago—approached her to ask if she could create a course called “Life After Covid.” They were getting over 10,000 searches per day for the phrase, and felt like there was no one better qualified to create a class to meet the demand than a professional futurist who was also a Covid long-hauler (not to mention one of their most popular teachers). At some point along the way, as she frantically prepared her lectures for the class's late March start date, Jane realized that she was well on her way to having written a book proposal—and for that matter the book itself, which she thinks she can finish in twelve weeks or so. So if you're looking to publish very quickly, even as soon as the fall, that could be theoretically possible. At the same time, all indications are that, despite Biden's promise of a vaccine for every adult American by the end of May, we'll be living with the virus for years, not months, to come—and so I think we'll still be looking ahead to “Life after Covid” a year from now, even if we're closer to it than we are today.

Jane McGonigal, PhD is a world-renowned designer of alternate reality games, having developed internal game workshops for more than a dozen Fortune 500 and Global 500 companies including Intel, Nike, Disney and Microsoft. She is the Director of Games Research and Development at the Institute for the Future.

Manuscript delivery (USA): Autumn 2021.

BEREIT FueR DIE ZUKUNFT
Das Unvorstellbare denken und kommende Krisen besser meistern
Deutsch von Juergen Neubauer
[HC Penguin 09/2022]