Nikolas is the Chief Futurist for the Futurist Think Tank at futurist.com, a Fellow of The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (The RSA), and works with trillion-dollar companies, central banks, governments, startups and those willing to challenge our poverty of imagination, awaken curiosity and create incredible futures.

As a futurist keynote speaker and Artificial Intelligence expert he has worked with hundreds of world-leading companies, including NASA, Google, Microsoft, United Nations, United Way, Bayer, Corteva, Bank of Canada,  American Express, AT&T, Thales International, Rolls Royce, Heineken, Procter & Gamble, Government of Canada, UK Home Office, Government of Cayman Islands, IDEO, and many more.

Nikolas has been a mainstay in the media for the past decade talking about our futures. He’s appeared in the ‘Smart Drugs’ documentary, was an advisor to the ‘Age of AI’ series with Robert Downley Jr and appears in the upcoming series ‘The Secrets of Big Data’ on Discovery. He appears regularly on SIRIUSXM, and on CTV’s Future Friday. His essential research has also been featured by the BBC, VICE, The Atlantic, Fast Company, Techcrunch, Business Insider, Huffington Post, Forbes, Sputnik, Venturebeat, and Global News. He also produces and interviews incredible thinkers on the renowned Exponential Minds Podcast.

Nikolas’ award winning book ‘Facing Our Futures’ provides executives and organizations with the foundations for futures design and the tools to imagine new futures, create bolder visions, anticipate unforeseen risks, and strengthen strategic planning. Nikolas’ thinking can also be seen in the opening chapter of ‘The Future Starts Now’. Both are published by Bloomsbury Business.

Contact us to discuss your project needs.

Work with  Nikolas Badminton to become a world-leading Futurist & Hope Engineer that inspires people to change the world.

You will learn the Hope Engineer’s mindset and give you the processes and tools that will help you develop unique thought leadership and deliver futurist keynotes that create energy for change, drive exponential transformation and exponential growth.

Nikolas will work with you to take your futures work to the next level. This is for those that have been doing the work and need to push through the challenges they face daily in establishing and mobilizing futures work in their organizations. We go deeper into the practice together and create robust strategic foresight capabilities together.

Learn more about Futures+ here.

What if we can look beyond the hype to see the practical and impactful opportunities to supercharge our workforces using A.I. and a Hope Engineer’s mindset?

Join Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer™ Nikolas Badminton as he explores how Artificial Intelligence promises employee augmentation, automation, increased productivity and unlocked opportunities for growth. In harnessing its ability, we hope to positively affect the world and create incredible futures to build businesses that delight customers and solve some of the greatest challenges of our times. If only it was so easy.

World-renowned Chief Futurist and Hope Engineer Nikolas will show you A.I.’s role in shaping our futures, how our world and industries are being revolutionized, and what the practical abilities and skill sets are needed. He’ll also show how to integrate A.I. capabilities across your organization and in the essential work undertaken.

Client takeaways

• Adopt an A.I. futurist mindset – Ignite imagination, build anticipation, and develop a deep sense of empathy and hope for positive futures and the energy to drive change with A.I. today.
• See A.I. signals, trends & scenarios – See how A.I. is evolving how industries work. See how your workforce will supercharge their capabilities using A.I., spatial computing and other technologies;
• See thought leadership in action – Learn the  stories of how world-leading companies are applying A.I. and hopeful futures thinking to supercharging our strategic thinking.

Please contact Nikolas Badminton to discuss igniting imagination and empowering attendees with a futurist mindset at your event.

What if we can ignite imaginations, build anticipation, and deepen empathy to create bold visions of our futures with hope?

Join Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer™ for an energetic and inspiring keynote that helps you explore and see opportunities in the future of your industry, how hope creates energy for change, and the exponential technologies – Data Science, AI, sensor fusion, quantum computing and more shaping our world. 

Nikolas will show you how to think like a Hope Engineer, shift your mindset from what is to what if, and create incredible energy for change. You’ll understand the power of a high-hope, futures-informed mindset, see the global megatrends changing geopolitical dynamics, and explore the trends that will transform your industry – digital transformation, data growth, Artificial Intelligence and automation, spatial computing, water-energy-food resiliency, sustainable agriculture and food supply, construction, transportation and logistics, healthcare, banking and fintech, smart cities, privacy and cybersecurity, and more.

Client takeaways

• Adopt a Hope Engineer mindset – Ignite imagination, build anticipation, and develop a deep sense of empathy and hope for positive futures and the energy to drive change today.
• See the hopeful futures ahead of us – Explore signals, trends and scenarios that show how industries will change in the next 5, 10, and 20+ years. Anticipate opportunities, challenges and risks;
• See thought leadership in action – Learn the  stories of how world-leading companies are channel hope, exploring futures, and applying A.I. to supercharge strategic thinking, growth and profit.

Please contact Nikolas Badminton to discuss igniting imaginatio

What if we create a company-wide culture of innovation that uncovers new opportunities, and drives incredible growth through a Hope Engineer mindset?

Join Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer™ Nikolas Badminton as he explores how organizations desire to be innovative in the evolution of their products and services, and in solving real world problems. Innovation is often seen as a new tech or process opportunity however it’s a shift in how we obsess over problems and look at the incredible futures ahead of us. 

Nikolas will show you steps to take in building a culture of innovation, and the inspirational stories of those doing it. He will also show you how to fuel new ideas in your organization and apply futures thinking to de-risk the innovation process and create incredible roadmaps for change. He will show you how that supercharges thinking that drives increased revenues and explosive growth.

Client takeaways

• Adopt a hopeful, futurist innovation mindset – Ignite imagination, build anticipation, and develop a deep sense of empathy for how change will impact companies and industries;
• Learn innovation methods – New industry dynamics will be explored together that indicate how your workforce will augment their capabilities using A.I., spatial computing and other technologies;
• See thought leadership in action – Learn the  stories of how world-leading companies are disrupting themselves and innovating using futures thinking.

Please contact Nikolas Badminton to discuss igniting imagination and empowering attendees with a futurist mindset at your event.

Join Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer™ Nikolas Badminton as he explores how emerging technologies are reshaping global power dynamics and strategic competition. From Artificial Intelligence application and supremacy and quantum computing to global supply chains and the critical water-energy-food nexus, discover how nations and industries are leveraging technological innovation to gain strategic advantage.

This keynote examines transformative shifts in cybersecurity, renewable energy, supply chains, and financial systems. Learn how urban technologies, biotechnology, and defense innovations are revolutionizing societies and redefining national security. Plus, explore how space commercialization and arctic technologies are opening new frontiers of geopolitical competition.

Gain crucial insights into:

• • How AI and quantum computing are driving a new era of technological collaboration and rivalry

• • The intersection of digital sovereignty and cybersecurity in shaping national security and power dynamics

• • Critical resource management in an era of climate change, decarbonization, and technological transformation

• • Strategic realignment of global supply chains and financial systems

• • The evolution of defense, space, and arctic sovereignty and technology innovation

This keynote is essential for business leaders, policymakers, and strategists navigating the complex intersection of technology and geopolitics.

Contact Nikolas today to discuss your event or project.

What if we can gain foresight to master renewable energy opportunities?

Join Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer™ Nikolas Badminton as he explores how global and domestic markets are seeing economic shifts, growth and changing market dynamics through transformation of how we generate, distribute and consume energy. Our renewable energy economy is being accelerated by policy, competition, new innovation and research ecosystems powered by data, AI, and automated systems that present new opportunities for efficiency and growth.

Nikolas will show you how progressive leaders embrace futures exploration and take action to plan for what comes next in energy independence, electrification of infrastructure and transportation, and global sustainability.

Client takeaways

• Adopt a hopeful futurist mindset – Ignite imagination, build anticipation, and develop a deep sense of empathy for how change will impact companies and industries;
• Learn about future energy ecosystems – We will see how solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and storage solutions combine to create 
• new energy industry dynamics .
• See thought leadership in action – Learn the  stories of how world-leading companies are disrupting themselves and innovating using futures thinking.

Please contact Nikolas Badminton to discuss igniting imagination and empowering attendees with a futurist mindset at your event.

Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth is a No. 1 Amazon Best Seller in Business Research & Development, JP Morgan’s “Next Gen Pick” for their esteemed 2023 Summer Reading List, and selected as a book to read by the Next Big Idea Club – purchase here.

Bulk purchase is available for your event – reach out to discuss.

Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth presents a fascinating insight into how professionals and businesses can develop their foresight and strategy to ensure that they are prepared for an unpredictable future.

Businesses, organizations and society-at-large are all subject to unforeseeable events and incidents that often have a dramatic impact upon prosperity and profit. Due to their unpredictable nature, business leaders and executive teams are unable to prepare for these specific events. But, through innovation, strategizing and an open-minded approach, they can restructure their organization and practices in order to mitigate (or even take advantage of) the impact of such events.

In Facing Our Futures, Nikolas Badminton draws upon his decades of experience as a consultant and futurist to provide readers with the skillset and outlook they need to prepare their organization, team and themselves for whatever obstacles the future may hold. CEOs, executive teams, government leaders and policy makers need to gain a broader perspective and a firmer grasp on how their relevant industry, society or community is evolving and changing. Once they have acquired this foresight, they need to then discover how to fully harness it – by strengthening their foundations, forecasting and establishing a resilient and adaptable strategy.

Facing Our Futures acts as a primer on the value of seeing how bad things can get and the power in imagining these futures. It also provides a proven strategic planning and foresight methodology – the Positive Dystopia Canvas (PDC) – that allows leaders to supercharge their teams to build evocative visions of futures that strengthen planning today.

Read more about the book.

Nikolas Badminton is a world-renowned futurist speaker, the Chief Futurist & Hope Engineer at Futurist.com, Consultant, Author, Media Producer, and Executive Advisor. He has delivered futurist keynotes to and worked with executives and the C-suite at over 450 of the world’s most impactful organizations and governments.

Nikolas and the Futurist Think Tank help executives learn strategic foresight practices that shape the visions that shape impactful organizations, trillion-dollar companies, startups, progressive governments, and multi-billion dollar investment funds.

Nikolas’ keynotes are always customized for what you need and ignite your audience’s thinking to shift midgets from WHAT IS TO WHAT IF… The result is the ability to be curious, explore possibilities, and imagine incredible futures for all.

All keynotes are available in-person at your event or workplace, full virtual from Nikolas’ Future Casting studio (4K streaming and high-production), or in hybrid format using your studio or event space.

Contact us to discuss your event.

“If operations are the body, strategy is the brain then Foresight is the awareness and consciousness of an organization. We need to embrace foresight and challenge our collective poverty of imagination to create long-term growth, profit and resiliency.” Nikolas Badminton

World leaders, impactful organizations and governments engage Nikolas Badminton and the Futurist Think Tank to help them build the skillsets needed for strategic foresight, anticipatory organizational capabilities and the ability to be curious and consider the futures ahead of us deeply.

The Futurist Think Tank works with executives to

• Discuss of global megatrends, secondary research and scanning for signals.
• Identify disruptive industry trends.
• Seek challenges and seeing unforeseen risks.
• Build WHAT IF… futures scenarios.
• Write speculative fiction and designing experiential futures.
• Backcasting and risk anticipation.

The result is bolder future visions of that might be and imagined future states that allow teams to anticipate unseen risks and create stronger strategic plans that guide the companies forward.

Contact us to discuss your project needs.

“If operations are the body, strategy is the brain then Foresight is the awareness and consciousness of an organization. We need to embrace foresight and challenge our collective poverty of imagination to create long-term profit and resiliency.” Nikolas Badminton

Progressive organizations develop strategic foresight capabilities to strengthen strategic planning, innovation initiatives, and operations. In fact, organizations that build anticipatory capabilities, strategic foresight practices, and future-proof their business have been found to outperform the average by a 33% higher profitability and a 200% higher growth. Those organizations that do not can face performance discounts of 37% to 108%.

Nikolas Badminton and the Futurist Think Tank works with the C-suite and executives to provide Strategic Foresight services, including:

• Foresight training
• Foresight workshops (using our proprietary Foresight Development Framework)
• Future product exploration
• Discuss of global megatrends, secondary research and scanning for signals.
• Identify disruptive industry trends.
• Seek challenges and seeing unforeseen risks.
• Build WHAT IF… futures scenarios.
• Write speculative fiction and designing experiential futures.
• Backcasting and risk anticipation.

Contact us to discuss your project needs.

“If operations are the body, strategy is the brain then Foresight is the awareness and consciousness of an organization. We need to embrace foresight and challenge our collective poverty of imagination to create long-term profit and resiliency.” Nikolas Badminton

Nikolas Badminton provides coaching to C-suite executives on augmenting corporate strategic planning and risk analysis with foresight processes and capabilities. His ongoing counsel and collaborative methods create the ability for executives to more deeply consider our futures and bring incredible value to their organizations.

In addition, monthly and quarterly signals and trends reports can be provided with active coaching on the implications of

• Global megatrends, secondary research and scanning for signals.
• Disruptive industry trends.
• Unforeseen challenges and risks.
• WHAT IF… futures scenarios.
• Exploration of speculative fiction and experiential futures.
• Backcasting and risk anticipation.

Futures coaching can also be provided for incumbent and incoming Futurist-in-Residence and Chief Futures Officers (CFuO) to ensure a broader worldview is maintained and a connection to the wider foresight community is ongoing.

Contact us to discuss your coaching needs.

Nikolas Badminton and the team at the FUTURIST THINK TANK have developed an interactive experience where you can interact with the keynote and learn about building complex futures stories from the signals, trends and scenarios we explore together across a number of areas that we identify as important for you and your audience.

Areas of exploration can include global megatrends, evolution and transformation in your industry, algorithms and data growth, security and privacy, circularity and sustainability (ESG), and more. We adjust for your industry and organization.

This interactive game is played throughout the keynote and can teach you how to

• Understand signals and trends that will shape the future of your industry
• Explore scenarios that define technological, human and wildcard futures
• Shift your mindset from what is to WHAT IF… and develop over 200 stories that can be used as a starting point for exploring the future of your organization and strategic planning.
• Create fun, engagement and discussion on important topics within your audience

And, following the keynote you will have a deeper understanding of how your organization considers possible futures – is it tech-driven , humanity-focused or hoping that they’ll survive the changes coming your way?

Contact us to discuss your event and how ‘The Futures Game’ will ignite thinking.

Chief Futurist and leader of the Futurist Think Tank Nikolas Badminton presents the Exponential Minds Podcast where he explores ideas with experts from futures thinking all fields around the world discussing how humanity is impacted by the exponential growth in technology and the thinking behind it.

Since 2016 he has been interviewing incredible creators, designers, thinkers and futurists on their philosophies and work. These include – Denny Unger, Kharis O’Connell, Dr. Wendy Schultz, Madeline Ashby, Karl Schroeder, Monika Bielskyte, Leah Zaidi, Dre Labre, Dr. Jake Sotiriadis, Dr. Joseph Voros, Tracey Follows, Bronwyn Williams, Loes Damhof, Ian Burbidge, Carol Anne Hilton, Rotem Petranker, Pia Puolakka, Chris Dancy, Peter Nowak, Natalie Nixon, Melissa Eshaghbeigi, Rocky Ozaki, Sasha Despotovski, Rafeeq Bosch, Cathy Hackl, Ben Feist, Marianne Lefever, Anne Boysen, Glen Hiemstra, Shawn Kanungo, Liza Amlani, and more.

Subscribe on Anchor, Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts.

Futurist.com began in 1993, when Glen Hiemstra was working on a project in the greater Seattle area to be called ‘Smart Seattle’. From a project team member, Jan Greylorn, he learned about Mosaic, the first web browser that was going to launch that very year, at which point the Internet would start to become the World Wide Web. He also learned that there was an international registry for what would become Home Pages or Domains on this new World Wide Web.

Glen was primed to hear such news because he had literally been studying the future of communication on the Internet since 1980, publishing some of the early academic work on that topic while in academia. And, Glen had been using the early Internet in my futurist consulting business for years via AOL. So he immediately inquired about registering the domain Futurist.com and was surprised to learn that neither the World Future Society nor Alvin Toffler nor anyone else had registered Futurist.com. So Glen stepped up and did just that.

And now, over 27 years later, as so well expressed by the poet David Whyte, “I turned my face for a moment, and it became my life.”

By 1995 with the help of Brenda Cooper (now an award winning science fiction writer and member of the Futurist.com Think Tank, but then an IT manager for a small city who was experimenting in writing HTML code) Glen had put a website up, and by 1998 it was well established. You can find a version of that early Futurist.com on the Wayback Machine – this is about the oldest version that you can access.

We at futurist.com have always offered free information to the public, written by Glen and guest writers, while also acting as a marketing tool for his futurist business of consulting, research, and keynote speaking. At various times Glen tried to make it more of a team operation, most recently with the creation of the Futurist.com Think Tank in 2013.

In 2018 Nikolas Badminton had the the pleasure of connecting and working with Glen and the Think Tank members in running projects, delivering futurist keynotes, creating content and advising clients.

Over the past 25 years Nikolas benefited from the wisdom gained from studying artificial intelligence and linguistics to delivering large scale data analytics solutions to advancing digital strategy and consumer engagement through advertising and sharing economy platforms. This experience is the bedrock for the futures practice he have built over the past 10 years.

In that time Nikolas worked as a futurist speaker and consultant to keynote and advise over 300 companies, established national TV and radio conversations on the future, published research into the implications of artificial intelligence and technologies’ effect on mental health, and advised A-list Hollywood in producing documentaries. In addition, Nikolas has shared over 750 articles on his own website – www.nikolasbadminton.com – in addition to speaking around the world, working with the most impactful companies, and curating events like Cyborg Camp YVR, Dark Futures and Future Camp.

The parallels between the futures practice Nikolas built and what Glen has been delivering for decades are hugely complementary so we decided for Nikolas to take the reins on running Futurist.com for the next 27 years, and beyond.

Nikolas Badminton FRSA takes on the reigns at Chief Futurist of the Futurist Think Tank while Glen Hiemstra remains involved at a distance as Founder and Futurist Emeritus.

Our futures are certainly bright. Come along for the ride.

Contact us to find out more.