Acting as a Romanian-based think tank, UNFINISHED Future regularly brings together experts and professionals from diverse disciplines to enlighten each other with their industries’ current and upcoming trends, centralizing research and insights for the benefit of all.

In the early days of UNFINISHED in 2016, we struggled to talk about multidisciplinarity. Why try to gather so many different fields under one roof? What can a doctor learn from a musician? Or an artist from a politician? What can business learn from non-profit and the other way around? Over the years, the answer has become more and more obvious: because multidisciplinarity is one of the most efficient and authentic strategies to achieve wholesome, productive, inclusive, and innovative change. In other words, if we don’t pay attention to what’s outside our field of knowledge, then our work and our impact will remain limited to inside our field of knowledge. Having over the years accumulated both knowledge as well as a precious network of rarely intersecting professionals—from creatives and academics to scientists and technologists—we wondered how we could scale our methodology and catalyze it into tangible, shareable, and actionable results, to help us and others better imagine and build the future. This became the UNFINISHED Future, a laboratory for imagination and future preparedness.

While the UNFINISHED Festival bridges disciplines in an ephemeral and celebratory way, the UNFINISHED Future aims to extract insights, trends, results, and conclusions applicable to long-term planning for various industries and domains of interest. Functioning as a think tank, UNFINISHED Future will regularly bring together key subject matter experts around chosen issues, to centralize research and co-imagine important future alternatives both for the Romanian society and for the international community. We plan to leverage on a solid toolkit of foresight and futures research methods to help decision makers understand drivers of change, manage risks, capitalize on opportunities and improve decision making. The output of the discussions, planned to take place regularly, will be published in the form of foresight public papers, launched in partnership with relevant institutions.

Not only is multidisciplinarity enriching and exciting, we argue that it is essential. Few summarized it better than David Epstein, the author of Range, whose research warns against the dangers of specialization, saying that “it [specialization] infects not just individuals, but entire systems, as each specialized group sees a smaller and smaller part of a large puzzle.” As Epstein further points out, “highly credential experts can become so narrow-minded that they actually get worse with experience, even while becoming more confident—a dangerous combination.” Time and time again, especially in recent years, we have collectively paid the high price of entrenched monodisciplinary thinking. Social media bubbles and misinformation. Monoculture and the global industrial food complex. Even climate change and the 2008 global financial crisis, which occurred when, in Epstein’s words, “legions of specialized groups optimizing risk for their own tiny pieces of the big picture created a catastrophic whole.”

At UNFINISHED, we have to come to believe that the movement of information is the basis of all information, not its storage. And this is why the UNFINISHED Future has the mission to build bridges and cross trenches where imagination and information-sharing can have the most long-term impacts: in future preparedness. UNFINISHED Future aims to explore the future and think beyond the plausible.