# Transcript: Featured Session: Strategy in the Times of Chaos: Imagining Futures of Education **Date:** March 12, 2026 · 10:30 PM **Session:** [Featured Session: Strategy in the Times of Chaos: Imagining Futures of Education](/sessions/2026-03-12/pp1149832-featured-session-strategy-in-the-times-of-chaos-imagining-futures-of-education) ## Summary This session brought together Lynn Jeffrey from the Institute for the Future and Dr. Maisha T. Winn from Stanford to explore foresight techniques for navigating chaotic times, with a focus on education futures. Jeffrey presented three principles — looking back at historical patterns, identifying 'zombie ideas' (like the assumption that degrees guarantee economic mobility), and scanning for signals of change — culminating in four AI-university scenarios for 2036. Winn introduced the concept of 'historical signals' and 'historiography for the future,' drawing on the Black Arts Movement's institution builders as exemplars of strategic imagination under adversity. ## Topics `foresight` · `futures thinking` · `higher education` · `economic mobility` · `signals of change` · `ai in education` · `black arts movement` · `historical signals` · `afrofuturism` · `community institution building` ## Key Takeaways 1. Organizations need to operate in two modes simultaneously: improvisation (reacting to immediate crises) and imagination (lifting your head from the noise to envision different futures). 2. The idea that a higher education degree guarantees economic mobility may be a 'zombie idea' — disproven by data showing stagnant wages despite rising degree attainment, with the wealth premium declining dramatically, especially for Black graduates. 3. Historical signals — innovations of the past that hold implications for future work — are a powerful new foresight tool that repositions innovation as always having historical roots, never entirely new. 4. The Black Arts Movement institution builders of the 1960s-70s offer a model for strategic imagination under adversity: they prioritized reimagining over reacting, documented everything for the next generation, and operated with a local-national-local framework. 5. Education's primary purpose can be framed around three pillars from historical institution builders: identity (who we are), purpose (what we're doing and why), and direction (where we want to go) — a framework that transcends age and context. ## Full Transcript To say we live in unprecedented times at this point feels a little trite. Daily we make highest temperatures in reporting history, technology acquiring human-like communications and the realignment of global alliances and ideologies. In these times of rapid global upheaval, it is easy to feel overwhelmed and discouraged, but such times are also opportunities to reinvent institutions and the very world we live in. I'm Lynn Jeffrey, and I am from the Institute for the Future, which is a nonprofit education and research organization based in Palo Alto, California. We are almost 60 years old, and I'm going to be joined by Dr. Maisha T. Winn from Stanford. We're going to be laying out some of the different approaches to building strategy in times of chaos. Our executive director Marina Gorbis created the core of this presentation, but she was unable to be here unexpectedly, so I've curated the work to focus on what's most relevant for our conversation today. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that we are living in chaotic times. We have a war in the middle of Europe, a new war in the Middle East. The Wall Street Journal said this morning that we are projected to enter the largest disruption of the global world oil markets ever. There are a lot of different ways that people deal with this kind of chaotic situation. Some people are even turning these unimaginable events into profit with new betting markets. It's a good time to strengthen our ability to think about the future, to get better at being futurists, to find different ways of dealing with the chaos and to do things with a sense of immediacy. One of the future's favorite books is called Future Shock by Alvin Toffler. It was written in 1968 and was the first kind of pop culture futures book in the United States. Toffler wrote that we need more sanctuaries for social imagination. That's what we try to do with the Institute for the Future. Marina and I wrote an article about two approaches: you need to be both improvisational and imaginative at the same time. Improvisation is reacting to unimaginable things that come up with immediacy. Imagination is finding the space to pick your head up from the noise and think about what the future might look like. We like to use three principles for approaching thinking about the future, often 10 years ahead — the year 2036. The first one is looking back to look forward: examining the past, understanding how we got here, looking at historical patterns and cycles. By paying attention to historical patterns, we can illuminate the structural tensions shaping our world today, and we can identify what we call zombie ideas — ideas that have been disproven by facts, but they're still around and refuse to die. The second is imagining the future by scanning for signals of change — real surprising things happening today that give us a peek into how the future might be really different. We use a model from Professor Marc Trow, a sociologist at Berkeley, to think about the changing role of higher education. His model tracks the evolution from elite education, where a tiny percentage gets education, to mass higher education at about 15% of the population framed as a right, to universal higher education once more than 50% are participating. At the universal stage, higher ed degrees no longer guarantee high status — instead, it's the absence of a degree which guarantees lower status. In 1960, about 5% of people over 25 had a bachelor's degree. That number is close to 40% today, and about 50% when you add two-year degrees. Higher education is correlated with positive social outcomes: life expectancy about seven years longer for college graduates, probability of a 20-year marriage twice as high, voter turnout higher, and probability of being incarcerated almost five times lower. But the zombie idea we want to explore is that the higher education degree is a pathway to economic mobility and security. The data shows that while the number of people with degrees has increased dramatically, wages have been pretty stagnant over a 60-year timeframe. A 2019 US Federal Reserve study looked at the economic return on higher education degrees across cohorts from the 1930s through the 1980s. They calculated the predicted wealth premium — how much more wealthy you'd be with a degree versus without. For bachelor's degrees in the 1930s, that was about 250% greater wealth. But there's been a steady decline over time. For the non-Hispanic Black population, the wealth premium declined to only 6% for bachelor's and 8% for post-graduate degrees by the 1980s cohort. The idea that a higher education degree guarantees economic mobility and security may be a zombie that is time to let go of. Looking for signals of change on the edges of the mainstream is a great way to start imagining futures. There is an explosion of experiments happening: Scandinavian-style forest schools where nature is the primary classroom, SUNY Buffalo's new Department of AI and Society with seven new interdisciplinary AI degrees, and the Rolex College in Dallas — more selective than Harvard — where you learn to be a certified Rolex repair person with a steady career path. We use signals to build new scenarios, new points of view and new frames of value. We've created what we call 'What If Universities' — scenarios for how universities might organize themselves in 2036 around their relationship to AI. The AI-Proof University has no AI at all, focusing on real-time human learning. The AI-Literate University focuses on critically evaluating AI outputs and learning to work with AI. The AI-Adjacent University doubles down on skills AI can't do: belonging, care, judgment, human dynamics, crisis response. The AI-Directed University features co-authored learning between you and an AI system with distributed learning environments and constant tracking for skill assessment. Dr. Maisha T. Winn then spoke about what she calls historical signals — innovations of the past that may hold implications for future work. In 2019, she embarked on a futures journey at the Institute for the Future. She was the lone educator in her cohort, but was inspired by the out-of-the-box thinking. She was interested in the educational futures of children from non-dominant communities, and Black children in particular. Like science fiction author N.K. Jemisin, she has been aware of how terrifying it is to realize that no one thinks her people have a future, and how gratifying to begin spinning futures she wants to see. Afrofuturism scholar Ytasha Womack notes that those making claims on the future often assert the need for some sort of apocalypse to begin anew, but acknowledges that some of those apocalyptic things have happened to people already. Communities on the margins have long had time to think about liberating themselves. Dr. Winn could trace a historical trajectory of strategy in times of chaos from enslaved Africans through to the present day. Black parents, educators, and community members continue to dream, imagine and execute educational futures for children. Historical signals reposition innovation as inevitably having historical roots and foundations, never entirely new or untangled. Dr. Winn introduced the concept of historiography for the future and discussed multiple forms of AI beyond artificial intelligence: ancestral intelligence (from Chris Chapman of Keymakers in Oakland), ancient intelligence (from artist Kara Walker's exhibition), and archival intelligence (from scholars Elizabeth Yakel and Deborah Torres). Walker notably tried ChatGPT to create aphorisms but found the responses lacked fire and soul, choosing to write 100-plus of them herself, proving her human sensibility was not yet replaceable. Dr. Winn's portal was the Black Arts Movement, from 1965 to 1975, when poets, parents, educators, artists and creatives leveraged the technologies of their time — mostly printing and publishing — to signal to a new generation that dreaming was not enough. They had to be doers and world builders. At the Institute of Positive Education in Chicago, started in 1969, they created future-oriented pre-K through 12 schools, art and performance spaces, healthy food co-ops, publishing houses, and bought farmland. In her book 'Futuring Black Lives,' she refers to these historical efforts as futuring: intentional collective planning that prioritizes innovation, sustainability and self-determination. The Futuring for Equity Lab at Stanford, along with the Transformative Justice and Education Center at UC Davis, has been partnering with the Institute for the Future on a Families as Futurists project. This seeks to understand how families from non-dominant communities can take up foresight and futures tools to imagine and plan for their children's education futures 10, 15, 20 years out. Families explore signals of change and historical signals of people-led movements for self-determined education. In the Q&A, Dr. Winn discussed lessons from historical institution builders: they were keen on reimagining rather than reacting, they were intentional about everything and meticulous about documenting their work for the next generation. She highlighted the local-national-local model from Black Arts Movement poet Kalamu ya Salaam — starting with local needs, expanding to national and international, then curating back for the local context. She also emphasized intergenerational spaces where children were everybody's responsibility, not just their parents'. On the question of education's primary purpose if AI is transforming knowledge creation, Dr. Winn drew on the institution builders' three pillars: identity, purpose, and direction. Identity is about who we are and historicizing yourself. Purpose is about what you're doing now and why. Direction is about the future — where do you want to take this? These pillars feel as relevant now as they did in the late 1960s. The speakers discussed how AI in education is playing out very differently across cultures — noting the enthusiasm in China where hundreds of thousands of parents are working with AI at home with their kids, versus the polarized conversation in the United States. Dr. Winn emphasized the importance of listening to youth voices on AI, describing a Youth Powered AI event at Stanford that brought middle and high school students and teachers from across the country. On translating future-building theory into action, Dr. Winn shared that families in the Families as Futurists project take scenarios and implement elements at their children's schools or in their homeschooling journeys. The speakers noted that foresight work can be applied at every level — from local family decisions to national participatory visioning projects. As Lynn Jeffrey concluded, any vision that has mobilized systemic change is a futures vision. --- *Source: stt · Language: en · Model: claude-opus-4-6* [← Back to session](/sessions/2026-03-12/pp1149832-featured-session-strategy-in-the-times-of-chaos-imagining-futures-of-education)