Worktech 2026: Scenario Planning, The Future of Work and Intelligent Buildings
The following is a transcript of the presentation by Daniel W. Rasmus at Worktech 2026: Seattle, held on July 21, 2026.
A couple of you I gave cards to, and I told you they were kind of cool. I told you I would tell you now why they look like they do. Tomorrow morning very early, I am getting on a plane. I’m going to San Diego. My next two presentations are at San Diego Comic-Con. I’m giving a talk on the future of libraries in their library program.
Then, for the last five years, I’ve run the Science of Science Fiction panel, where I get up and talk about artificial intelligence and the future of work. And sitting next to me are three scientists from JPL who are talking about physics, planetary bodies, and can you actually have a dogfight in space?
So with that in mind, Carsten, you should always listen to your Spock. I don’t know what a Spock is in this context, but I know you should always listen to him (reference from an earlier conversation in which Carsten from Bank of America talked about “spocks.”).
A title that I give to a presentation like this is “How You Think About The Future Is Dangerous.” And I’ve heard a few hints of that today, and I’ll talk a little bit about that. I teach scenario planning at the University of Washington. I did this at Microsoft for a number of years. I created the New World of Work program at Microsoft. One of the coolest calls I ever got, and some of my former colleagues are here that can attest to this—I got a call from the general manager of Microsoft Netherlands.
And he said, ‘Dan, I want to do your new world of work thing.’ And as you’ll see, here we have four different futures. I was like, ‘Okay, which of the four futures are we doing? What are we talking about?’ Because that’s not a normal request that you get when you’re talking about scenario planning. Right? And so we ended up collaborating and coming down to creating some scenario-influenced designs that made the Schiphol airport Microsoft office, one of the most visited areas of Europe for a number of years.
I have a client now in Portugal, and I was at a recent event there, and the CIO of Microsoft Portugal said, ‘It’s so happy to meet you.’ And let me show you your offices. Because he understood that the scenario work we did had influenced and moved across Europe and then back into the States.
An introduction to scenario planning
Scenarios are a way of looking at the future through uncertainty. I can get into a lot of philosophical debates about driving forces and uncertainty. I like to think about uncertainty, the things we do not know, and putting a name on them—purposefully putting a name on them. Because if we can’t do that, we can’t think about them, we can’t talk about them, we can’t research them. And scenarios are not just for strategic planning.
Scenarios also help us avoid surprises. They help us challenge our assumptions. They help us think about the world in a different way. A lot of us do, for instance, SWOT analysis. Everybody does SWOT analysis. And it’s about today: who’s our competition and what are our strengths, our weaknesses? Imagine if you take SWOT analysis and put it into multiple futures; those answers are all very different. And that’s just one example of how we put this to work.
I do not consider myself a futurist. My friend Kevin Kelly, you know, The futurist’s dilemma: “Any believable prediction will be wrong ;. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable. Either way, a futurist can’t win—he’s either dismissed or wrong.”
Right? And so I do not claim to be a futurist. I have two ideas that I’ll give you as takeaways right now, and I may repeat them.
One is there’s no data from the future. And second, if somebody comes up to you and asks you, “So what do you think about the future?” which happens to me a lot. I say, I have no idea any better than you do, but I have a better way of thinking about it.
And so then let’s talk about the process that we go through. Scenarios can be used for reinvention. They can be used for innovation. I love to run innovation workshops where I have people come together, and we take the scenarios, and we take a problem that you’re looking at or a building design or a software roadmap, and I put it through the different futures, and people look at me and go, “Oh no. So we kind of had some biases when we were doing this. And it might not fit into all of the potential futures.”
And so we start having conversations about how to make things more adaptive. Some of you, it sounds like, had this kind of conversation. It may not have been that question, but somebody walked into your office at some point on a couple of these projects we’ve heard about and said, ‘So what’s the future going to look like? Can you design that thing for me?’ And you went, ‘I got a degree. I got a job, and this is like my superior. So I should probably do something about this.’
And what we do as humans is we tell stories. We tell stories to ourselves, we tell stories to everyone around us, and that’s how we communicate knowledge. It’s how we communicate historical perspective, and it’s how we invent myths of the future. And so, left to your own devices, most people without scenario planning will have a bunch of variables in their head, and they’ll say, “I don’t know how all this stuff is going to work. But this person just asked me this, and I’m going to write down what I think the future will look like.”
Now at Comic Con, I have this discussion with writers all the time because they do this too. So if you’ve ever been in a science fiction movie and you go, “Oh my god, how did that happen?” There’s this great flow going along, and then there’s a weird thing that happens that makes no sense whatsoever. It’s because they didn’t do this. They didn’t sit down. They let this happen.
All of these variables cascaded down, and they created a story. Without actually thinking about whether all the variables align with each other, do they make sense together, what’s the story I’m trying to tell, and do I have a feedback loop on the story that actually helps me refine it.
So that’s when I say that the future-―how you think about the future is often dangerous because that’s what most of us do. Scenario planning helps you step away from that and go, “Okay, so in a different context, that answer might be different.”
There are variables that are going to change, and I can name the variables, and I can put values on them, and I can tell stories that are very concrete about those futures.
But then you say, “But Dan, if I was smarter and I had more money, couldn’t I just figure this out?”
The answer is you know Thomas Edison: no commercial value for the phonograph. Nobody needs a computer in nineteen seventy seven from Digital Equipment. Margaret Thatcher doesn’t want to be Prime Minister because that’s too hard for a woman; in 1969, she said that.
By the year 2000, machines will be producing much more than anyone can imagine. This is my favorite, because by the year two thousand, people will work no more than four days a week in less than eight hours a day, with legal holidays and long vacations. This could result in an annual working period of one hundred and forty-seven days of work and two hundred and eighteen days off. Thank you for coming on your vacation.
And learning with us today? Herman Kahn told a story that he was in charge of scenario planning for nuclear weapons. The New York Times said, ‘So what’s the future of work going to look like?’ And he did the same thing everybody else did.
It was like I was on a nonprofit board and the director of the nonprofit board said to me, “Dan, you guys from industry come in. If you do all this great work in the daytime, and then when you come to the nonprofit board, you forget everything you know.”
That’s what I think happened to Herman Kahn. He forgot that he couldn’t predict the future very well, if in any kind of linear way. The oil industry is terrible at it, from the price of oil to the extraction of oil. We’re very bad at it in multiple places. IBM. And when they first did the PC, they said only two hundred ninety-five thousand of these are going to be required. And they ended up selling twenty-five million of them.
And then here is this lovely young lady from nineteen thirty-two. We go out of our way to sometimes to put blinders on, but we also don’t pay attention to the world around us as well as we could. But then we also do this right. This is the ultimate expression of that. Can anyone guess what she was not adopting in 1932? So this is a technology adoption thing. We’re talking about AI. I’m sitting here with my AI pin on, recording my conversation so I can create a blog after this presentation. What do you think she was not adopting in 1932? Refrigeration. What kind of refrigeration? Natural gas. Some people have good eyesight.
Natural gas refrigeration is what she was avoiding. So all of us have natural gas refrigerators today, right?
We need to think about the critical factors. We have to be curious, pay attention to the world, and think about the ideas we have. I’m not going to read this quote, but I am going to read the front of the book because I think it’s very applicable to you guys. Too Big To Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That The Facts Aren’t The Facts. Experts are Everywhere, and the Smartest person in the Room is the Room.
You guys, are you guys designing for that future? What I want to do is impart to my students and the people that I give these presentations requires keeping your brain active and getting your brain this way: where it’s holistic and collaborative and curious, where you are thinking about strategy, and you’re skeptical about things.
But also you’re balancing because a lot of people love telling stories, and they could get lost in the telling of the stories and they never make business decisions.
Then there are people that want to make business decisions and ignore the stories. Scenario planning is very much a balance between those. And we work on social, technological, economic, environmental and political (STEEP). There are other versions of this like PESTLE, but they’re basically the same thing with different arrangements of letters.
And so we look at all of those factors, not just what’s happening in technology. But when we talk about AI, for instance, AI has a number of technological issues. I find it fascinating that we’re four or so years into this evolution and revolution of artificial intelligence. The first book I ever wrote was in 1988, called Understanding Artificial Intelligence. 1988. This is not new.
And so, we’ve decided technologically that the breakthrough that led to ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and others is the breakthrough. I do not believe it’s the breakthrough; it’s a breakthrough. So the companies we now very nonchalantly reference as our AI gurus may get displaced at some point.
They may get displaced by people creating models that are much more sustainable. And we also have on the same side of that, I heard a lot of sustainability talk. Right now, we don’t care so much about sustainability everywhere, right now, universally. And so we have all of these conflicting issues that we deal with.
Scenario planning tries to bring those out and then create a process in which you guys get to vote on what you think are the most critical and important uncertainties for your area. Then we create these stories, and I’ll share a couple with you.
One of my Comic Con stories is that William Gibson (“the future is not evenly distributed” quote on the screen) is one of my favorite authors. I think this is absolutely true because I think between Stripe and Google we saw this absolutely happening right here in the room of the Bank of America. We already have the walls, and Google’s going, “We realize we need some walls for the same reason that they already have walls.”
Their future (Google’s) was not evenly distributed as they got into different parts of their business.
Anybody who has an AI device on you that you use regularly right now? A device that’s just for AI. Anybody? A couple people. So like my Plaud Notepin. This is an AI device. I am living in a different future than you are right now.
And my Comic-Con story was my daughter and I are walking across a crosswalk, and all of a sudden I disappear. And she goes, “Where did you go?” and I said. “William Gibson just passed as I went to say hello and meet him.”
So I chased him down and got to say hi to him.
The future of work scenarios
Future of work: these are a bunch of uncertainties. I am not going to read through them. I would be happy if we get to have time over lunch or in a workshop at some point in the future to talk about them, but lots of things around the future of artificial intelligence, the future of how we think about labor law, the futures of sustainability, the future of people’s acceptance of technology. Lots of different factors.
So I teach, as I said, at the University of Washington. I teach how to think about the future. I did all of the homework this quarter with my students because my future of work stuff needed to be updated. And so I said, “I’m going to do all the assignments with you.” One of the things I realized out of all that, I gave them permission to use artificial intelligence the entire time.
And I realized that my students were terrible at using artificial intelligence. So I ended up creating a whole class at the end of the quarter to teach them how to cheat in my class because they had failed at cheating in my class when I gave them permission to do so.
(Some uncertainties on the display)
Power allocation, and we’ve heard a lot about power already today. Do we ask people or do we tell people? Do we have a concentration of power and wealth? And the displacement, the automation boundaries, and AI substitution were the two big ideas that we came across. We selected those as the axes for the futures.
We ended up with: Permission Prosperity, Rediscovered Agency, The Friction Age, and Reliability Dividend. To William Gibson’s point, I’ve heard conversations today talking about all four of those futures already.
Very high-level versions.
Permissioned Prosperity. Access requires permission. So we heard about Stripe. Wall. Door. I’ve got to put my badge in. I can’t walk anywhere.
Rediscovering Agency power is shared communities. And the answer to you. Do you ask people over here? Yes. They absolutely expect that you ask them. And in fact, they’re co-creating it with you. I didn’t hear the word co-creation yet today. But when we think about space in this future, we’re co-creating. People before automation. AI assists rather than replaces workers. Open systems, et cetera.
And then we have power concentrating with AI augmentation. The Friction Age. This is where you have all of those boundaries of thinking about the AI is being used in a way that is.
Augmenting, but it’s also checking and rechecking and putting barriers in front of you and other things. And again, you may not have the permission to actually question that.
And then the Reliability Dividend. I do not believe in creating Autopian visions. Sorry, I was thinking about Disneyland. Utopian visions.
All of these futures are in the process of becoming. So scenario planning is not something that you do once, and you say, “Here’s our futures for ten years out.”
You need to think about the ongoing evolution, and you keep monitoring them. The Reliability Dividend is a future in which we started asking better questions of ourselves and our technology, and we started finding answers to things. We started implementing them. They’re not perfect, but we decided to be better. We made a choice of being better collectively. And so that’s a different future.
And all of these futures will happen; none of them will happen, but they are very strong tools for having conversations about whatever you want to talk about.
So this is again future of work stuff, but I’ve done scenarios on the future of education. I’ve done, as I said, I’m doing the future of libraries, the future of money.
Implications for buildings and facilities
So I did some analysis for this session where I looked at what the implications were on the future of facilities and buildings. And these are the robust implications. In scenario speak, robust implications mean that multiple futures have a similar outcome for these variables. So I’ll just give you a couple. The building’s emotional contract changes. It doesn’t tell you what the emotional contract is. How many of you are writing emotional contracts for your buildings?
Public-private boundaries blur. Facilities become sites of inequity and inequality. The open office loses legitimacy. Older real estate bifurcates. Worker support becomes spatial infrastructure. AI governance moves into the walls. Energy resilience becomes real estate value. Access becomes the core design problem, and buildings become governed operating systems. The building is an operating system. Those are things that came up across multiple futures.
And then for each future, they had some of their own characteristics. In the Reliability Dividend: reliability infrastructure: durability, accessibility, governance and continuity: we trust the building.
The idea of reliability is built into our experience, not just in the hardware but also in the experience of the building.
Rediscovering Agency, a civic agency platform. We’re thinking about building community wherever we go.
Manage friction in The Friction Age. Verification, compliance, risk controls, procedural layers keep work moving and Permissioned Prosperity: access to tools, rooms, data and opportunity. Everything is continuously scored and access granted based on the scores. People are deciding for you what you have access to.
And then we have these five fault lines: the purpose of the building, the relationship to workers, the technology logic, the energy resilience, and the emotional experience. You can see each one of those has very different characteristics. I’ll just give you: ‘the purpose of the building proves reliability,’ as we just mentioned, expands participation and agency
Rediscovering Agency manages distrust. We see procedural risk in the Friction Age, and grants and limits and scores for access in Permissioned Prosperity.
I just love the lobby as a moral signature. You walk in. I just did some work with a library in Arizona. That was one of the outcomes of the work that we did. I walked in, and I said, now that we’ve done all the scenario stuff, let’s walk in the lobby. What does your lobby say about your strategic plan?
The job was to challenge their strategic plan and think about how they could be different and how they need to be adaptive to the future. And I said, “It’s a lobby; it tells me I’m in a library. Doesn’t tell me where I am or what you do differently, or why I should be here. It’s just a lobby.”
And so think about the future. Each one of these futures has a lobby that tells the story when you walk in about what the future is unfolding. And then space becomes policy, right?
Buildings become a reflection of and implementation of. Especially Kevin’s working on some of this stuff right now, thinking about how we bring technology together to be reflective of the building. If you can be reflective and have data, and you’ve got the sensors in the building, that also means that you could make the next leap, which is I’m going to control some of that.
The experiences are very much part of that infrastructure. And then the felt experience. That’s just the idea of when you’re in the building. We heard some great descriptions a few minutes ago about what the felt experience was here.
If you use scenarios, you could say, ‘I am designing this.’ And then we could come in and have this conversation about what it would look like, what the experience would be, under different circumstances. Could that be adaptive? Could that space be adaptive if what people want to feel changes?
And then there are a couple of pillars here: property as a data platform. I won’t go into the detail on those because I am seeing at two minutes and forty three seconds to lunch: modular infrastructure, dynamic layouts, microzones HVAC, and open source stack. So these are again some of the robust implications. Radical asset independence. One of the things that kept coming up, and again, this may be an artifact of the scenarios. Because unfortunately, when I am not doing this with hundreds of people, I am doing it with tens of people, you don’t get all of the subtleties that you necessarily get in all of the storytelling.
These are still evolving stories. There was a lot of stuff about because, regardless of where you think climate change happens or why it happens, things are going to happen. There is going to be an increase in the severity of interruptions, so having buildings that are becoming self-sufficient and integrating with the grid, and maybe even giving power back. That came up quite a bit: life cycle procurement, the right to repair, circular design and maintenance standards.
And again, those are things that came out, but not necessarily for all of them. And then a recommendation to engage in strategic planning, use scenarios and build early warning systems. One of the things that, when you take scenario planning to the next level, we say we’ve got these uncertainties. Now let’s write them down and watch them.
In an ideal world, you will continue to monitor the uncertainties and see how they change over time. And then you’ll start seeing evidence that they’re migrating in a particular direction, which may have you trigger a contingency.
And I can share some contingency work that actually happened over lunch if you’re interested. How many of you are familiar with this book (How Buildings Learn)? Stuart Brand was one of my scenario planning mentors. And for those of you who are not familiar with this book, this is a book about scenario planning where the future is the future of buildings and how buildings learn how they, brick-and-mortar places that were built in the 1800s, become something else. And I heard a few hints of that in the conversation already today. And I think if you haven’t read this, I encourage you to do so.
Finally, my Agile Thinking Workshops, where I conduct a day workshop—where you just come in and blow your brain up/ Today you get a few minutes. In the workshop, you get a full day of exploration. It becomes professional development for you to think about the world in a different way. And then Innovation Workshops that focus on how you think about a particular problem. We wind tunnel your topic together and come up with different outcomes and inputs for what you’re looking at. I probably don’t have time for questions, but I’ll be here. Feel free to ask them. And thank you very much.
Thank you to Samantha and Worktech 2026.
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Learn from Dan in his University of Washington scenario planning class.
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