Planning for the Near Future — Scenario Planning with Strategic Foresight — Nate Hagens & the Institute of Applied Metatheory’s Applied Philosophy & Alethic AI tool

Introduction

Strategic foresight and scenario planning constitute complementary approaches that enable individuals, communities, organizations and policy makers to anticipate and shape complex, uncertain futures with courage, resilience, innovation and creativity. See the reference section for additional reading on this.

These tools have been around and used for decades, but perhaps ineffectively for our current times and our current needs and challenges. Everyone now needs to think about future scenarios differently given the state of our current world.

These tools are needed now more than ever to address the meta-crisis of our Global Complex system and The Great Release as they are unfolding now. I previously wrote about a small consulting firm, arkH3, that is presenting strategic foresight for CEOs as imperative for confronting the coming likely scenarios resulting from the meta-crisis.

Nate Hagens has been discussing this and teaching about it with his work, specifically the Great Simplification podcast and educational site for many years. His most recent work, a 4-part series, “How To Think About the Future,” is available for viewing on YouTube and the Great Simplification site and runs approximately 2 hours. It is among the best work that Nate and his team have done and I highly recommend it as it is well worth your time. Links to his show-notes and his accompanying essay with additional references are available for each session and included in the reference section and at the Great Simplification site.

As the meta-crisis continues to unfold, the relevance of metatheory has become ever more pronounced. Its relevance is increasingly being recognized, including for the field of anthropology. I will briefly cover Hagen’s work and his four scenarios then will offer another take on four future scenarios produced by the Institute of Applied Metatheory’s Alethic AI tool, which is a key part of its overall strategy which I will discuss below.

Four Future Scenarios to Plan For

Nate discusses four grids of variables that will be core components of the likely scenarios that will shape the future. These are:

• Economic Direction (continued growth up or contraction down)
• Power and its distribution in society. Power is not energy or electricity in this instance. Rather, these powers include military, political, financial (money and control of flows and resource allocation) and technology.
• Geopolitics
• Earth Systems.

Nate Hagens — Four possible future scenarios, The Great Simplification Podcast

In Nate’s framing, technology is an amplifier or modifier of any of these major components of the Global Complex System. He is correct but may be vastly underestimating the impact of the AI revolution as an “extreme amplifier.” I will address that in a forthcoming essay.

Global Complex System, Jim Loving

See the graphics below for the four grids, each with four quadrants, creating 256 possible scenarios and technology’s role. I have overlayed some of the IAM Alethic AI scenarios in yellow which are discussed below. In support of Part 2, Nate also published an essay and referenced a 2024 briefing he has given that delves deeper into these topics.

Nate Hagens — Economic Direction with Alethic AI overlay

Nate Hagens, Power Distribution with Alethic AI overlay

Nate Hagens, Geopolitics with Alethic AI overlay

Nate Hagens, Earth Systems with Alethic AI overlay

As Hagens notes, “the future world won’t land neatly in just one of those quadrants. These are directional attractors for conversation and planning and education. Different regions in the future may be in different quadrants at the same time.” These grids or frames for scenarios each have four quadrants and form a foundation for future planning.

Hagens discusses this as a moving Landscape with shifting topographies. Combining sections from each scenario creates composite worlds which will exist for different communities around the world. See the graphic below.

Nate Hagens, Composite worlds from 4x4 grid-scenarios

Nate Hagens, Technology as modifier for 4 key grids

Four Possible future Scenarios

In part four, Hagens notes that each of the four grids has four quadrants which means there exists 256 possible future scenarios using this framework. Hagens presents four of the most likely scenarios to frame a way to think about options. These four scenarios are from the most desired to the least desired.

Hagens points out that each of these scenarios are driven by what type of economy the world chooses moving forward, and how it chooses to implement and support such an economy.

These four scenarios are:

1- The Long Repair — this is the preferred scenario which will be hard to realize, but still possible.

2- Mordor Persists — this is our current situation and continued pursuit and operating as we currently are.

3- Fortress World — this is the scenario we may be moving towards, driven by Techbro oligarchs pushing AI for the benefit of the few. I will address AI in my next essay.

4- The Unraveling.

See the graphics below for each of these scenarios.

Nate Hagens, The Long Repair future Scenario, The Great Simplification

Nate Hagens, Mordor Persists future scenario, The Great Simplification

Nate Hagens, Fortress World future scenario, The Great Simplification

Nate Hagens, The Unraveling future scenario, The Great Simplification

Institute of Applied Metatheory and Alethic AI Analysis of Four Grid-Scenarios

I have previously written on several occasions about the work of the Institute of Applied Metatheory (IAM), an applied philosophy network, social action think tank. See the reference section.

IAM’s strategy and theory of change constitutes a three-layer approach that seeks to enable conscious, curious, complex and compassionate (4C) leaders with their own inverse complexity gap* to best address the current and future life conditions within their contexts whether they be local, regional, institutional, national or global and to bring about their desired societal changes. See the graphic below for a high-level overview of this strategy and approach.

As the meta-crisis continues to unfold, the relevance of metatheory has become ever more pronounced. Its relevance is increasingly being recognized, including for the field of anthropology.

• Inverse Complexity Gap — is not a standard term in the complexity‑leadership literature, but it is directly inferable from the foundational concept of complexity gaps in systems thinking — where a gap arises when the complexity of an environment and the complexity of an agent do not match. Complexity Leadership Theory describes how individuals often experience misalignment between their adaptive capacities and the constraints of simplified organizational structures.

The Institute of Applied Metatheory 3-layered strategy

Layer 1 of the strategy consists of the think tank component — the work of the philosophical underpinnings, called Integrative Metatheory 2.0 for the Big Picture Thinking and other social change that IAM seeks to enact. These underpinnings include: Critical Realism — Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014), Integral Theory — Ken Wilber (1949–), Complexity Theory & Complex Thought — Edgar Morin (1921–2026), Unified Theory of Knowledge — Gregg Henriques (1966-), Process Philosophy — Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947), and others addressing questions of four interrelated elements, which are assumptions about the nature of reality (ontology), the nature, scope and conditions of knowledge (epistemology); ethical values inherent in scientific research (axiology); and the rationale behind the procedures used to design and conduct research (methodology) using contemporary approaches grounded in principles such as methodological transparency, epistemic reflexivity and ontological realism.

This work currently has an Integration Journal, an Integration Society of scholars focusing on the key Big Picture theories, along with the development of Natural Philosophy 2.0 and the underlying knowledge base that the subsequent layers of the strategy will use and draw upon. This Integrative Worldview from Integrative Metatheory 2.0 will be instantiated with a bold ambition to develop an underlying knowledge base such that will “have the benefit of all of the world’s accumulated philosophical, scientific, artistic, political and spiritual knowledge; all of our accumulated insight and wisdom; from every continent, culture, and tradition; and across the entire span of human history and pre-history; and with all of that, to create a richly-detailed, scientifically-credible, and spiritually-meaningful story and framework of who we humans really are.”

Layer 2 is a translation layer from layer 1, building out a global integrative commons with shared tools for those seeking to learn and understand new approaches to develop and incorporate into existing practices to address the contexts of wicked problems they are facing and seeking to address.

The objective for Layer 2 is to increase Human Agency. If human agency is the one capacity that cannot be automated away (by AI) and the lever on which other outcomes turn, then the highest-leverage intervention is not another framework or movement but an operating system for agency itself — and that is the L2 project’s central hypothesis. Nate Hagens has also recently discussed the importance of human agency, or “staying human.” Cate Hall’s entire blog, Useful Fictions, is about how to become more agentic.

One of the tools offered through this layer will leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) using a customized AI tool that IAM has initially developed, currently called Alethic AI. The IAM founder and CEO Robb Smith has written about the need to rearchitect AI systems to address the well-known but yet to be addressed AI Alignment problem which Smith asserts is a philosophical problem, not a technical problem. Alethic AI is the tool Smith built to apply the IAM knowledge base against real world problems. I used Alethic AI and asked it for four future scenarios to be able to compare to Hagens work, see below and the figures.

Layer 3 is where “4C leaders” within institutions globally will hopefully apply the knowledge and tools from layers 1 and 2 in their context to address their issues and challenges. As with any entrepreneurial start-up or new initiative, whether for profit, non-profit, or social, there is an early phase in a start-up lifecycle of seeking users, clients, and/or adherents to adapt what is being offered then converting this adapting to broader adoption to increase market share or in this case, effecting major social transformation to address the on-going meta and meaning crisis.

The IAM envisioned outcome will have many global social entrepreneurs adopting an ecology of practices and applying this knowledge and these practices to change the world for greater planetary flourishing and wellness. Over time, like-minded practitioners can bring about practices imbued with meaning that re-opens participatory knowing and may enable collaboration in specific Communities of Practice. Eventually, these Communities of Practice will foster new professional associations, shared evaluation frameworks, coordinated funding mechanisms, and develop new cross-institutional roles. These 4C leaders will become causal agents of seeing opportunities for integration and wholeness within their institutions.

Ideally, these leaders and communities of practice that have changed their perceptions more effectively will be change agents within institutions and will mediate structural changes within these institutions, including instantiated new forms of governance, standards of practice, professional licensing, and organizational policy with the desired effects to follow. These communities become laboratories for institutional design — a place where new forms of integrative role architecture, evaluation infrastructure, and cross-organizational coordination are prototyped and developed.

An example of the type of changes of this flourishing of individual epistemic capacity becoming more socially legible and causally effective at scale envisioned above is considering how the scientific community addressed the analogous problem of spreading the scientific method.

The solution was not (only) to train better scientists and give them shared vocabulary. The solution was to build the middle-layer infrastructure of science: peer review, journals, professional associations, grant review panels, university departments, conference systems. These structures: made individual epistemic capacity legible to institutions (what counts as credible knowledge). This created cross-scale causal pathways from individual research to macrolevel policy and industrial practice and established recognized bases of authority for scientific expertise and configured institutional influence filters to register scientific signals.

The model of envisioned institutional transformational change will follow the social morphogenetic cycle — structural conditioning, social interaction, structural elaboration, which all describe how structural institutional change actually occurs.

The envisioned constituents in Layer 3 are:

• Institutional Leaders

• Cultural Influencers

• Scholars

• Global Citizens

• Change Architects

• System Builders

• Spiritual Practitioners.

With the Layer 2 infrastructure in place, these constituents will be met where they are and they can then be routed to resources based on their interest, their role, their practice, and their developmental context.

Artificial Intelligence — Big Challenge and Big Opportunity

There are many challenges for global societies to address with the current scale and speed of deployment of AI tools as they are currently being developed and deployed. As Robert Wright writes in his just released book, humanity will have to pass the “God Test, with our coming cosmic reckoning” with these AI technological tools. I will address Wrights book and AI more broadly in my next essay.

As to humanity passing that test, and as to whether and how soon AI becomes “God like” — i.e. achieving General Artificial Intelligence (AGI), there are plenty of models and guesses on the timing of this, but it could certainly be early in the careers of Generation Alpha. As I previously wrote, AI is but the latest but perhaps most impactful technology tool within humanity’s Technosphere epoch.

Alethic AI’s Four scenarios for the unfolding meta-crisis

Following up on Hagen’s work and his four scenarios, I decided to put the question to IAM’s Alethic AI, framing it around scenario planning and strategic foresight and asked it to provide four future scenarios as Hagens did.

Below is a summary of what was provided.

Four Scenarios for the Near Future: An Integrative Metatheoretical Foresight Analysis

The Institute of Applied Metatheory’s mission — applying big pictures to big problems — provides an unusually powerful epistemic basis for strategic foresight. Where conventional scenario planning typically operates within a single disciplinary lens (economics, geopolitics, climate science), the Alethic knowledge base enables scenario construction that is simultaneously multi-perspectival, ontologically stratified, and developmentally sensitive. The result is not just a set of forecasts but a structural map of the possibility space confronting humanity in the near-term (roughly 2026–2036).

The four scenarios below are not arbitrary. They are derived from two generative axes — which together create a four-cell scenario matrix — and then enriched through the structural lenses available in Integrative Metatheory 2.0.

The Generative Axes

Drawing on Complex Thought’s Dialogical Principle — that complementary, concurrent, and antagonistic logics are inseparably linked — and on the Polarity lens, two irreducible axes structure the near-future scenario space:

Axis 1: Systemic Integration ↔ Systemic Fragmentation Do the major complex systems structuring human life — ecological, technological, political, economic, cultural — move toward greater coherence and coordination, or toward increasing breakdown, divergence, and conflict?

Axis 2: Consciousness Evolution ↔ Consciousness Regression Does the meaning-making capacity of individuals, communities, and institutions develop toward greater complexity, reflexivity, and integrative capacity — or does it narrow, rigidify, and regress under pressure?

These axes are chosen deliberately. The meta-crisis is not merely a technical or material problem — it is simultaneously a crisis of systems (the Integral Theory’s outer Quadrants — Lower-Right interobjective structures, Upper-Right behavioral patterns) and a crisis of meaning and consciousness (the inner quadrants — Upper-Left subjective experience, Lower-Left intersubjective culture). Any scenario framework that addresses only one axis will misdiagnose the terrain.1

These two axes result in four possible scenarios:

1- Scenario 1: *The Integration Horizon, (High Systemic Integration + Consciousness Evolution) — this would be the ideal with the best possible future for humanity and the earth*,

2- Scenario 2: The Managed Divergence, (High Systemic Integration + Consciousness Regression),

3- Scenario 3: The Polycentric Renaissance, (Systemic Fragmentation + Consciousness Evolution),

4- Scenario 4: The Cascading Threshold, (Systemic Fragmentation + Consciousness Regression).

Each of these scenarios have a narrative associated with it and as Hagens points out, they occur across a landscape of possibilities and there can be gradations within each scenario. Different scenarios will appear at different places in the world with different experiences and realizations occurring for individuals and communities. Each of these Alethic scenarios could be mapped to Hagen’s scenarios, and I have done so, refer back to the figures and see the yellow blocks.

Since Alethic AI’s Scenario 1 is the target or ideal scenario, I will now highlight Alethic’s description for that scenario, which helps to explain my placement against Hagen’s scenarios above.

IAM Alethic AI Scenario 1 — The Core Narrative

A convergence of pressures — cascading ecological disruption, AI-driven economic transformation, and the visible failures of nationalist fragmentation — catalyzes a wave of institutional innovation and cross-cultural cooperation. Not a utopian triumph, but a functional adequacy: the emergence of governance architectures capable of managing planetary-scale challenges while preserving meaningful local autonomy.

Crucially, this scenario is driven not primarily by technological solutions but by a maturation in collective meaning-making. The Meaning Crisis — the widespread experience of existential emptiness identified by John Vervaeke — is partially addressed through new cultural narratives that reconnect scientific, contemplative, and ethical knowledge into coherent worldviews adequate to the complexity of the age.2

Structural Signature

Through the Ecological Holarchy lens: micro-level communities develop resilient local practices; meso-level institutional networks coordinate across jurisdictions; macro-level governance frameworks (reformed multilateral institutions, new planetary-scale agreements) create enabling constraints. Cross-scale coupling functions — information and authority flow productively between levels.

Through Developmental Stages: the scenario is characterized by Qualitative Reorganization at the civilizational scale — not incremental improvement within existing structures but the emergence of genuinely new modes of social organization that retain the achievements of modernity while transcending its fragmentations.

Through Integral Theory’s AQAL lens: all four quadrants develop in rough correspondence — individual consciousness (UL), behavioral competencies (UR), shared cultural narratives (LL), and institutional structures (LR) — avoiding the pathology of partial development where structural reform outpaces cultural evolution or vice versa.

Strategic Imperatives for This Scenario

• Invest heavily in integrative education — developing the metatheoretical literacy that can hold complexity without collapsing it,
• Build cross-scale governance bridges that connect local democratic energy to planetary coordination needs,
• Support the cultural infrastructure of meaning-making: philosophy, wisdom traditions, arts, contemplative practice — the intersubjective (LL) foundations without which structural reform cannot hold.

Alethic AI Footnotes

1. This dual-axis structure draws on the diagnostic logic of Wilber’s AQAL model, which insists that interior (consciousness) and exterior (systems) quadrants must develop in correspondence — the pathology of privileging one at the expense of the other is a central theme in Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything (2000).↩

2. John Vervaeke’s diagnosis of the meaning crisis as rooted in the loss of a coherent “religio” — a binding of cognitive, affective, and motivational capacities — is developed across the lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (2019) and provides a crucial interior-quadrant complement to exterior-systemic analyses of civilizational risk. ↩

3. Sean Esbjörn-Hargens’s development of Critical Realist Integral Theory provides the methodological basis for this move — distinguishing between the Real level of generative mechanisms and the Actual/Empirical levels of observable events. See Esbjörn-Hargens (Ed.) Metatheory for the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, 2016).

Conclusion and Recommendation

Over thirty years ago, the late Stephen Covey wrote about the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He wrote of the importance of people becoming proactive in their life (Habit 1), then to begin the proactive journey “with the end in mind” (Habit 2 — what do you want your life to look like at the end of your life?), and planning one’s activities in alignment with this goal, objective, vision or set of values.

Habit 3, “Putting First Things First,” speaks of effective time management aligned with the larger vision or set of values and suggests that one focus on activities that are important, but not urgent. While this is an important and useful habit, the meta-crisis is increasingly urgent today so it becomes imperative for all to begin to conduct personal, family, and community scenario planning for the near future to best respond to what is unfolding now and the very near future.

The most important activities today for individuals and communities are directly related to the urgency of the global meta-crisis. One’s goals, values, plans and actions will need to align with this emerging reality. In light of the meta-crisis unfolding all around, it is more important than ever for everyone to re-visit and adjust their first three habits.

Everyone will need to incorporate activities in daily living to not only meet present needs, but near-future needs that will likely affect one’s larger plans that will need to be constantly adjusted and adapted to the ongoing changing life conditions as the above scenarios unfold. This is particularly true if people have concerns for offspring or future and younger generations and/or the sustainment of humanity thriving on planet earth.

Planning for possible future scenarios will be important in everyone’s life, regardless of their position, goals or outlook as all of these are likely to be affected in the near term. Becoming educated, aware and skilled in understanding possible scenarios and taking appropriate action is in everyone’s best interest.

We are at a kairos. In the window where AGI could reshape what human capacities are worth, a civilization can either expand the one capacity that remains irreducibly human — the power to author a life and a world — or let it atrophy by default as agency is quietly automated, outsourced, and shrunk to institutional convenience.

To survive and thrive as a civilization, through whichever of the scenarios emerges, humanity will require what these transitions have always required — solid cultural and material foundations. Across the history of humanity, new societies usually failed because they could not solve the core challenges of continuity: meaning, reproduction, transmission, coherence, adaptation, and scale.

As Hagens says in his podcast, we “don’t know which scenario specifically is coming, none of us do. The more honest and ultimately helpful move is to learn how to hold several scenarios at once if only to have overlap enabling discussion, with people that you’re striving towards making change with.”

References

Our Global Complex System is Not Sustainable and Accelerating Existential Risks and Societal Collapse, 9/18/2025, Jim Loving, Medium.

The Great Release — The Rise of Trump and the End of U.S. Hegemony, 2017, Robb Smith, Integral Life.

Inspiring Corporate Leadership to Confront the MetaCrisis, A Transformational, Regenerative Path for Saving Humanity, 7/2/2024, Jim Loving, Medium.

Metatheory: Time to take it seriously?, June 2026, Vavvos Andreas, University of Thessaly, Anthropological Theory, Sage Publications.

How To Think About the Future, Frankly 138, Part 1, 4/11/2026, Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification podcast, Youtube.

Show Notes for How To Think About the Future, Part 1, Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification.

Four Variables Shaping the Coming Decades | Frankly 139, Nate Hagens, How To Think About the Future, Part 2, 4/24/2026, The Great Simplification Podcast, YouTube.

Show Notes for How To Think About the Future, Part 2, Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification.

How to Think About the Future (Part 2): Four Variables Shaping the Coming Decades, 6/9/2026, Nate Hagens, Substack.

Illusions about the Energy Transition and Our Future, November 2024, Nate Hagens presentation, Summit Baha, YouTube.

Uphill Futures in a Downhill World, Frankly 145, Nate Hagens, How To Think About the Future, Part 3, 5/22/2026, The Great Simplification Podcast, YouTube.

Show Notes for How To Think About the Future, Part 3, Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification.

How Might Daily Life Feel in the Next Decades?, Nate Hagens, How to Think About the Future, Part 4, 6/9/2026, Frankly 148, The Great Simplification Podcast, YouTube.

Show Notes for How To Think About the Future, Part 4, Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification.

Introduction to Leadership Concepts Handbook, Seth Kastle; Lori Kniffin; Brett Whitaker; Brent Goertzen; Justin Greenleaf; Donnette Noble; and Tamas Kowalik, Leadership Program for Fort Hays State University.

*Inverse Complexity Gap — is not a standard term in the complexity‑leadership literature, but it is directly inferable from the foundational concept of complexity gaps in systems thinking — where a gap arises when the complexity of an environment and the complexity of an agent do not match. Complexity Leadership Theory describes how individuals often experience misalignment between their adaptive capacities and the constraints of simplified organizational structures.

Why Integrative Metatheory 2.0 Now? | Robb Smith, Nick Hedlund, Brendan Graham Dempsey, 6/17/2026, Robb Smith, Nick Hedlund, Brendan Graham Dempsey, Institute of Applied Metatheory, podcast, YouTube.

A Sociology of Big Pictures: Network Strategy for a 21st Century Worldview, February 2025, Robb Smith, Institute of Applied Metatheory.

A Guide to Staying Human (Part 1): Desperately Seeking Agency, 5/26/2026, Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification, Substack.

Beyond Alignment — Alethic AI and a Real Values Topography, 5/13/2026, Robb Smith and IAM, Substack.

Achieving Consilience with Natural Philosophy 2.0, 1/12/2026, Jim Loving, Medium.

The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning, 6/23/2026, Robert Wright, Simon & Schuster.

My AI Opinions, 6/11/2026, Scott Alexander, Substack.

The Ethics of the Technosphere: Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance Capitalism and the “Cold Evil” of Imperial Modernity, 6/17/2025, Jim Loving, Medium.

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, FranklinCovey Institute.

From Seed to Civilization — Why some movements generate new societies while most vanish, 6/14/2026, Timothee Bres, Substack.

Scenario Planning for Strategic Foresight

Teaching scenario analysis — An action learning pedagogy, 11/2015, Ron Bradfield, George Cairns, and George Wright, Technological Forecasting and Social Change/Science Direct.

Scenario Planning For Strategic Foresight, Meegle Software.

Beyond Scenarios: Systemic Foresight Planning Models for Organizations, 7/17/2025, Ugur Sahan, CEO and Founding Partner at CoreXas.

Strategic Foresight and Scenario Planning in Innovation Systems, Nature.com, Nature Research Intelligence (AI generated).

How interactive ‘Scenario Game’ helps navigate uncertainty and develop foresight, 2/18/2025, **Jan Oliver Schwarz and [Katharina Kleine](https://www.weforum.org/stories/authors/katharina-kleine/)**, World Economic Forum.

Institute of Applied Metatheory (IAM) Essays — Jim Loving

The Meta-Crisis and Underlying Worldviews — Mapping a way forward, 7/25/2025, Jim Loving, Medium.

IAM — Convening Global Networked Communities for Developing and Promoting a Minimal Integrative Worldview to Address the Meta-Crisis, 8/23/2025, Jim Loving, Medium.

The Ethics of an Integrative Worldview Is Needed for Global Leadership Now, 8/31/2025, Jim Loving, Medium.

Achieving Consilience with Natural Philosophy 2.0, 1/12/2026, Jim Loving, Medium.