Making Futures Work

Phil Balagtas is a design leader with over 2 decades of experience creating innovative digital products and services. Working for companies such as General Electric and McKinsey & Company, he has served a variety of sectors such as aviation, healthcare, utilities, consumer electronics, and retail to name a few. As a consultant he has helped transform businesses through cultural and digital transformations, trained teams on Design Thinking and designed and shipped digital products for B2B and B2C organizations. He is also the founder of the Design Futures Initiative, a nonprofit based in San Francisco focused on the advancement of Futures Thinking principles and methodologies for assessing the threats and opportunities of the future. Through this initiative he has worked with the United Nations, Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco and also founded a global network of Futures Thinking chapters called Speculative Futures. Working as both a Futures expert, evangelist and consultant, he has been studying and applying Futures to a variety of business and organizational contexts in an attempt to integrate it into the design practice and make the approach more practical, accessible and viable for business and product strategy.