What will work be like in the future? In our view, the outlook for the next 50 years calls for cautious optimism.

Experts anticipate that jobs will blossom over the next fifty years—even as technology becomes more prevalent and climate challenges persist.

• With policies in place to build tomorrow’s critical skills, entire populations will benefit from new opportunities and clarified purpose.
• Jobs will be plentiful in regenerative, community-based economic models that support nature-based activities.
• High-demand skills will include interpersonal communications, holistic security, creativity, and continuous learning that begins with a community’s early schooling.

To build an understanding of what the next five decades may hold in store for workers, BCG engaged with more than 150 futurists through panel discussions and opinion surveys. Contrary to popular fears that the future will offer fewer work opportunities for people, most experts anticipate that rewarding work options will be plentiful. Individuals, organizations, and communities that build new skills will flourish. Economic sectors such as regenerative industries and areas that require strong creativity will offer new paths to sustainability and personal satisfaction.

Public sector organizations and their private sector partners are ideally positioned to maximize the effectiveness of human contributions to prosperity over the next 50 years. Understanding the factors that will affect the 21st-century economy and crafting future-oriented policies will ensure that populations have what they need for shared purpose and success.

Pavel Luksha, Global Education Futures founder, was the lead expert of this research team.

As a species and a member of a planetary family, we stand at a crossroads with the potential for either our extinction or an ascent to higher realms of consciousness and collective being. The responsibility for this choice lies with each of us. As change leaders, visionaries, creatives, entrepreneurs, peacemakers, and weavers, our ways of being and doing are essential to make this transition a reality.

We held a series of Co-Creation sessions where we delved into pathways toward thrivable ways of living for humanity - with the aim of identifying and establishing community-led initiatives in service of this.

The University for the Planet project was a synthesizing initiative that brought these ways together

One of the remarkable achievements of international cooperation in recent decades has been the establishment of common human goals, starting with the Millennium Goals and followed by the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 (SDGs). Endorsed by over 180 countries, as well as more than 500 global corporations and NGOs, these goals have facilitated the synchronization of efforts among business, civil society, and governments to build a better future.

However, criticisms of the SDGs arose almost immediately after their inception. While these goals serve as benchmarks, some of them are easily achievable while others are completely neglected. One major flaw is SDGs’ failure to address existential threats to humanity, such as the violation of planetary boundaries or the risk of global war. The goals uphold the established industrial model of society and overlook the necessity of transforming its fundamental principles.

This has prompted the discussion of a new approach called Evolutionary Development Goals (EDGs). Rather than replacing the SDGs, the EDGs aim to complement and extend them beyond the 2030 horizon. The EDGs are envisioned to reflect a potential pathway for humanity's transition towards a regenerative, inclusive, and universal well-being-focused way of life and interaction with the planet.

In the Evolutionary Renaissance Assembly forum (October 18-20, 2023), we aimed to catalyse a conversation about a new long-term dream for humanity - and discuss ways to making it real. What can heal our civilisational wounds, inspire co-creation of the future, and lead to universal flourishing? Can the evolutionary transition of humankind be guided, and how can this guidance engage all of us? What needs to change in models of education, governance, economy, and culture so that this dream of 'thriveable' futures can be fulfilled? What is our dream of the Earth, and what does the Earth dream for us?

The forum delved into three overarching themes: understanding the essence of the evolutionary crisis, exploring new approaches to technology, economy, and governance, and shaping models of new education and learning for a regenerative, inclusive, and decolonized society.

During three days of the event, four key notes were held and twelve panels by 50+ top international speakers were conducted.

This work pulls together threads that were woven in journeys across six continents, and hundreds of visioning sessions about the futures of society, economy, cities, jobs, and education. These sessions engaged indigenous youth, senior corporate leaders and politicians, engineers and researchers working on groundbreaking technologies, and activists, movement builders and weavers cocreating a new world.

Three distinct themes emerged from these diverse communities:

• First and foremost, none of these visioning individuals and groups are inherently malevolent. Every person I engaged with shares a common desire for the betterment of the world's futures - and while many harbor personal ambitions, the prevailing sentiment is an earnest intention to channel these ambitions towards positive ends.

• Second, people are not seeking mere incremental enhancements in their lives - rather, they yearn for a radical transformation. The prevailing view is that traditional approaches are no longer effective, and our civilization demands a fundamental recalibration — from social institutions and education to governance, finance, families, and even food. People sense discontent, and they often react with rebellion or distress, yet underlying it all, they hold on to a glimmer of hope.

• Finally, many sense that change is inevitable on a global scale. Almost unanimously, there is agreement that the world we are familiar with is on the cusp of transformation. It is the moment when humanity finds itself possessing the utmost potential for transformation, capable of either creating the new Garden of Eden — or manifesting Hell on Earth. This is also the moment when every human being — all of us and each of us — through decisive action or deliberate inaction, becomes an active participant in determining the trajectory of our shared futures.

To choose, we need to be aware of our options. The purpose of this book is to show possible pathways, to accentuate hopeful opportunities and to provide some guidance for concerted action.

About the author
Pavel Luksha is a global thinker, change catalyst, and facilitator working with systemic social innovations in education, business, social entrepreneurship, culture, and urban development. Pavel is the founder & director of Global Education Futures think-do tank, the Associat Fellow of World Academy of Art & Science, and the co-founder of several international social movements, including The Weaving Lab, UNESCO-supported Learning Planet, UN-supported Future of Capital, and Living Cities: Earth.

The Peaceful Futures project was initiated by Global Education Futures together with VZOR Lab, School of International Futures (SOIF), and Next Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP).

It explores principles and methods for the establishment of a global peace-based civilization. The project intentionally brought together a set of intergenerational perspectives of: foresight practitioners with lived experience of conflict, those with direct experience of peacebuilding – both at community and diplomacy levels, and foresight practitioners with experience of driving system transformation.

The findings of this first stage of the Peaceful Futures project were organized into the Peaceful Futures White Paper and Roadmap

Project page at NGFP website

Together with Jaipuria Group, the leading private educational corporation in Rajasthan (India), GEF has conducted a 5-day professional training of 250+ teachers on various aspects of Future Learning Systems, including EdTech, new pedagogies, innovative assessment methodologies, and new leadership models

The three year program with the support of European Social Fund is dedicated to the initiation, catalyzation and evolution of learning ecosystems in 7 municipalities of Limburg Province, Belgium. GEF acts as the methodological partner of the project providing frameworks, methods for weaving and evolving learning ecosystems, and conducting internal assessments

GELP-X gathering at Doncaster (UK) was dedicated to the cultivation of learning ecosystems in the City of Doncaster. GEF provided methodological support to the further evolution of the learning ecosystem project towards 2030 and beyond, in order to establish human conditions for a regenerative economy and thrivable society.

This unique research project involved over 100 international futurists and strategy thinkers to discuss long-term global challenges and existential threats for humanity, and conditions to overcome them.

The result of this work is a long-term vision and the roadmap for establishing a new civilizational paradigm in economy, governance, culture, and consciousness - and fundamental implications it will have for the learning institutions in the 21st century and beyond.

GEF has advised the team behind the innovative investment platform seeking to organize innovation & startup challenges backed by impact investors. In 2021, the first challenge of the platform brought 11 leading EdTech startups focused on professional education. As a result of the challenge, over 100,000 young professionals were upskilled, and over 5,000 of them placed in highly demanded jobs

Together with the Moscow School of Management SKOLKOVO, GEF has launched an open enrollment online program in weaving learning ecosystems (in Russian, conducted twice a year).

The core of the program is the simulation software that models the process of ecosystem weaving for teams of participants. Other components include masterclasses, training on weaving methodologies, and mastermind discussion of participants' projects

A set of lectures on the Protopian challenges and practices of the future.

The goal of these lectures is to describe what wisdom and thrivability society is and to identify the basic models of culture and human development that help us create a model of such a society.

The set includes 8 lectures and laboratories, online discussions and a number of products created by a community of more than 100 participants.

This is an educational program for leadership teams from 11 regions of Russia, which represented regional Universities, technology parks, business communities and regulatory bodies. The aim of the program was to develop regional teams and help them to create the roadmaps for the development of regional educational ecosystems, as well as to launch pilot projects such as forums, competitions and other initiatives that link communities together.

An educational program was launched following the forum in Lyon.

It took place from June to December 2018 in the Netherlands in Mastricht, in Russia, Moscow and in Switzerland in Bern. The partners of the program were Ashoka Foundation, Moscow School of Management Skolkovo, THNK, Chaos. As part of the program, 25 leaders of ecosystem projects from around the world have developed their ability to weaving - a focused cultivation of purposeful organizations and multistakeholders 'communities and accelerated their own ecosystemic projects.

A number of maps for global educational innovator community have been created in recent years worldwide, with the purpose of strengthening collaboration between innovators and users of innovations worldwide. Most of these projects, however, have focused on incremental innovations that improve existing educational institutions, or ¨leapfrogging¨that would allow educators from less developed regions ¨catch up¨ with those from more developed regions.

Our work at GEF indicates the need for disruptive scalable innovations that begin to shape educational systems of the future - lifelong learning ecosystems. In this project, we identify which educational innovations are best at producing "ecosystemic" education. We are producing definitions and criteria for "ecosystemic" innovation, and we create a prototype map of "ecosystemic" innovators for the region of Russia, Ukraine, Eurasian Union, and the Baltic States.

The project is accomplished with the support of Rybakov Foundation, and results will be presented in Spring 2018.

This program, created as a partnership between Global Education Futures, Global Change Leaders Collaborative, Ashoka Foundation, and SKOLKOVO Moscow School of Management, is a multi-modular international program that runs in several key locations around the world to showcase a variety of approaches to shape new models of education that exist in the US, Europe, Russia, and China. It focuses on primarily on new strand of leaders that shape and steer educational ecosystems - known as "weavers" or "ecosystem gardeners". The role of the program is to prepare these leaders who will lead transformation of educational ecosystems in several regions of the world, as a part of Global Change Leaders effort. The purpose of the program is threefold: it aims to give boost to existing teams of "weavers" to help them work on transforming education in their regions, it allows to incubate projects of systemic change in education during the program, and it helps create new knowledge and practice of "weaving" or "ecosystem gardening".

Currently, the voice of children and young learners, main beneficiaries of the future educational systems, is underrepresented in the process of design. During one of the first meetings of Global Education Futures in Menlo Park, California in April 2015, Valerie Hannon and Marc Prensky suggested that a methodology needs to be created, which brings voice of youth into the system. In late 2015, during the design of the national roadmap of childhood, Ekaterina Luksha has designed such a methodology that involves young learners as participants of the design of future learning in schools, families, and cities. This methodology has been since then applied for the design of policies on regional and national level, and the redesign of schools, orphanages, summer camps, and other educational formats. The projects using this methodology have been conducted in Russia, Latvia, California (US), and Argentina.

The methodology of Voice of Youth offers to transform the relationship between teachers and students, between children and adults, into one that is more sincere, more equal, more open, and more empowering. Sessions, where learners open up and present their authentic thoughts and feelings about their desired future, are followed by sessions where they are endorsed and empowered, to make this future real. That way, children and adults become cocreators of new ways of learning and living. The most important transition that may happen is the transformation of a teacher mindset, from autocratic and patriarchal, to a more democratic and more holistic way of acting and interacting.

We are currently launching an international platform that will share voices of young learners of the planet and will allow to spread this approach internationally. We are welcoming partners who want to cooperate with us in applying and developing the Voice of Youth methods further.

In partnership with Global Education Futures, Global Education Leaders Partnership (GELP) organized its 14th forum, GELP Moscow, which is considered pivotal in many regards by both organizations. The forum provided opportunities for intensive learning and collaboration between the international community of educational leaders, and the community of Russian / CIS educational leaders. As other events organized by GEF and GELP likewise, this event was largely based on participatory

The forum focused on the rise of the "Complex Person" and the emerging and future competencies required of all our young people to thrive in a complex and constantly changing global society.

GELP is one of the most powerful alliances of global education leaders, thought leaders and consultants committed to transforming learning systems to meet the needs of learners. The Partnership aims to radically transform education for the future, enhance process of collaboration and mutual learning between educational leaders, and to focus on education systems and system conditions. To do so, it has been organizing many conferences, sessions and projects worldwide since 2009.

Protopia Futuriser was a pro-active and living gathering of global changemakers and innovators who experimented with co-creating a new educational ecosystem through the exchange of practices, collective playing, and establishing a network of international transformative teams. 150 educational innovators from 12 countries attended the first meeting.

Futuriser aimed to create international student/teacher teams that establishing "points of attracting the Future" – transformative projects that can help bring new education & new society into being. It was particularly focused on projects that addressing, or combining, three types of educational "venues":

• University/school as a heart of educational "ecosystem" that transforms its environment (re-shapes its city/region, creates new industry, etc.)
• Cultural/educational hub for life-long urban learners that attracts city activists and acts as a center of city transformation
• Educational online / offline platform for regional / country / global activism

Meeting in Moscow was GEF pivotal event that brought key partners of Global Education Futures into the discussion on how to make GEF vision a reality.

The purpose of the gathering was to present current results of GEF initiative and reflect on its journey, to discuss practical collaborative activities that can start building bridge(s) from the present into the desirable future, and to connect with initiatives that exist in Russia and can become part of the global movement for education redesign. The meeting brought together partners from Ashoka, GELP, ASI, WorldSkills, and other partners of GEF. The idea of Protopia Labs movement was created, and a number of experiments on whole educational systems were initiated.

Key results of GEF Moscow meeting included the summary of GEF contributions to the international dialogue on the future of education and the first design of the movement of educational changemakers.

Global Education Futures partnered with WorldSkills Russia to conduct the foresight session aimed at creating a vision for the future competencies demanded in the emerging job markets. The Future Skills Foresight session took place as part of the international sessions for determining the future direction of development and long term "rules of the game" for a global educational system. Participants of the foresight session were official and technical delegates from the WorldSkills movement, as well as international experts in the fields of economic growth and professional education.

Subject groups have been formed in such a way as to enable participants the greatest opportunity to discuss issues on changing various spheres of the economy and appropriate training systems. Focal discussion topics were:

• What processes for technological and social change will provide the greatest impact for the sphere of activity?
  
• How specifically are processes changed in manufacturing and services, what new competencies (knowledge and skills) are required, and what competencies become outdated with the appearance of new technologies?
  
• What new processes for training personnel are necessary to introduce in connection with the change in necessary competencies?
  
  

Global Education Futures forum in California was conducted in conjunction with Global Technology Symposyum. It explored main changes in education driven by technological innovations, major social & economic transformations, and personal & collective demands for an education that meets 21st century needs.

Keynotes and panel discussions with education innovators and thought leaders set the stage for the Rapid Foresight session that focused on four big themes:

• How to create global online learning platforms that serve better the world's education?
• How to organize more productive models of knowledge creation?
• How will educational ecosystems for emerging social practices be created?
• How to increase the resilience of our cities and communities through collaborative learning?