Future Agency Compass

Where should you invest personal energy, and which civic experiment is ready for an advisory vote?

Use the Compass to make two separate decisions:

1. Personal allocation — where will you invest time and energy during 2026–2036?
2. Civic allocation — which purpose-qualified, reversible experiment is eligible for an advisory vote?

The ten-year horizon is long enough to prepare and short enough to observe. The century check protects future generations, ecological viability, rights, agency, and options. It is not a forecast of 2126.

Evidence boundary

This method is a decision aid and mock allocation exercise. It does not predict the future, score national readiness, endorse policy, or run a live ballot. Expert reports inform scenarios; they do not establish truth or democratic authority. Unsupported, stale, disputed, or non-comparable evidence stays visible as an unknown.

Use three stress scenarios. Do not assign probabilities:

• Multitrack World — trade, security, data, and technology blocs diverge.
• Virtual Worlds — AI mediates more work, services, relationships, and public participation.
• Vulnerable World — climate, infrastructure, health, economic, and social shocks interact.

Test six pressures: changing work; information integrity and human oversight; ecological and infrastructure resilience; fragmentation and conflict; demographic change; and inequality, trust, polarization, and cohesion.

Ten Questions for Ten Years

Answer in order. Keep observation, inference, and unknown separate.

1. What is valuable, to whom, and which rights are non-votable?
2. What has materially changed, and what evidence supports that reading?
3. Which pressure could most change this country by 2036?
4. Who is unusually exposed, excluded, or positioned to benefit?
5. Which principles, players, platforms, processes, and performance gauges matter?
6. Which human capabilities turn this pressure into agency?
7. Which character qualities preserve judgment under stress or temptation?
8. Which cultural practices and community institutions enable coordination and legitimate dissent?
9. What status quo and three bounded, reversible options are purpose-qualified?
10. What will you invest, support, measure, stop, and reconsider—and does it pass the century check?

Build a future-agency portfolio

Select capabilities for the pressure you named. Existing pages remain their canonical homes.

Bundle	Use it to	Existing capabilities
Perceive reality	Separate evidence from persuasion and notice who the average hides.	Research, Questioning, Truth Recognition, Critical Thinking
Anticipate systems	Explore different conditions without pretending to forecast.	Future Vision, Pattern Recognition, Visualisation, Planning
Learn and adapt	Update skill and belief as evidence changes.	Learning, Curiosity, Creativity, Focus, Growth Mindset
Direct AI responsibly	State intent, delegate bounded work, verify output, and retain judgment.	Prompting, Orchestration, Truth Recognition
Coordinate across difference	Hear affected people, reconcile tension, and make a shared move legible.	Listening, Empathy, Negotiation, Leadership, Storytelling
Act and recover	Commit despite uncertainty, review honestly, and recover without denial.	Ownership, Courage, Consistency, Confidence, Optimism

Character is different from capability. Capability is what you can do. Character predicts how you use it when evidence is incomplete, incentives conflict, or nobody is watching. Test truth under pressure, adaptive courage, responsibility, respect, and sustained contribution.

Culture and Community own collective readiness: bridging trust, pluralism, legitimate dissent, third places, contribution onboarding, mutual aid, appeal, intergenerational stewardship, and learning after failure.

Personal allocation

Choose a real weekly budget before dividing it. Allocate every hour or energy unit; a larger total is not automatically better.

Allocation	Weekly budget	Evidence it should produce
Learn		One belief tested or skill practised
Prepare		One risk reduced or option preserved
Coordinate		One affected person heard or relationship strengthened
Contribute		One useful change delivered to a beneficiary
Recover		Capacity restored without exporting the cost to others
Total		Must equal the budget you declared

End with one 90-day practice:

Pressure:
Beneficiary:
Practice:
Weekly allocation:
Gauge:
Review date:
Stop signal:
Century-check risk:

Mock civic ballot

Compare the status quo with three mission classes:

• civic AI and information-literacy capacity;
• community and critical-infrastructure resilience;
• intergenerational skills, participation, and belonging.

Every proposal must name its beneficiary, lawful authority, protected constraints, requested resources, evidence and unknowns, subgroup effects, gauge, review date, kill signal, and century-check result.

Apply the gate before ranking:

• STOP — rights, lawful authority, consent, disclosure, or reversibility fails.
• HOLD — repairable evidence, subgroup, gauge, review, resource, or kill-signal fields are missing.
• READY — the bounded experiment is purpose-qualified, lawful, reversible, resourced, measurable, and honest about unknowns.

Only READY proposals reach the mock ballot. A vote ranks eligible experiments. It cannot establish truth, waive rights, revise a standard, or transfer the named steward's accountability.

Agent-readable assessment contract

Use future-agency-assessment.v1 for an assessment. Preserve strings such as unknown_missing, unknown_between, and unknown_noncomparable; never coerce them to zero.

{
  "schema_id": "future-agency-assessment.v1",
  "jurisdiction": "",
  "evidence_cutoff": "YYYY-MM-DD",
  "decision_horizon": "2026-2036",
  "century_check": {},
  "beneficiary": "",
  "protected_constraints": [],
  "scenarios": [],
  "pressure_states": [],
  "capability_portfolio": [],
  "character_practices": [],
  "community_capacity": [],
  "missions": [],
  "personal_commitment": {},
  "ballot_readiness": "READY | HOLD | STOP",
  "unknowns": [],
  "review_date": "YYYY-MM-DD"
}

Worked practice

Open the New Zealand–Denmark pilot to see identical fields produce different local questions without a winner. Then complete the personal allocation and one mock proposal for the place you can affect.

Failure modes

• A scenario becomes a prediction or receives an invented probability.
• A country average hides affected groups.
• A capability bundle becomes a second taxonomy.
• A vote is treated as truth, consent, or authority.
• A HOLD proposal is ranked before its missing field is repaired.

Source trail

The pressure frame draws on the WEF Global Risks Report 2026, WEF Future of Jobs 2025, UN World Social Report 2025, UN World Population Prospects 2024, UNDP Human Development Report 2025, and the International AI Safety Report 2026. UNESCO Futures Literacy and the OECD Learning Compass 2030 support treating agency, responsibility, value creation, and futures literacy as learnable capabilities rather than forecasting tricks.

Context

• depends-on Countries — locates the evidence and the five-P institutional reading.
• uses Capabilities — selects repeatable human ability without creating a second taxonomy.
• uses Tight Five — reads institutional capacity through the canonical five-P spine.
• depends-on Character — tests conduct when evidence and incentives pull apart.
• pairs-with Culture — examines shared practices for coordination and legitimate dissent.
• pairs-with Community — examines institutions for belonging, mutual aid, appeal, and recovery.
• measured-by Country Scorecard — reuses the readiness gate for one experiment.
• depends-on Regenerative Standards Economy — keeps votes, rights, authority, and standards judgment separate.

Questions

Which missing observation would most change your 90-day practice or make a HOLD proposal eligible?

• Which right remains outside the vote?
• Which affected group could reverse the national reading?
• Which stop signal protects the century check?

Changes my mind: a cold reader cannot keep personal allocation, experiment eligibility, and standards authority separate.

Next question: what evidence would change your allocation rather than merely increase confidence in it?