CRAVING THE FUTURE: Transforming Our Deepest Desires Into New Realities

What if the future could be brighter than doomsday?

Craving the Future offers a more human, creative, and optimistic approach to imagining what comes next. Rather than treating the future as something to fear, predict, or passively await, author and futurist Michael Perman shows how we can become more perceptive about what is happening now, and use those insights to create new realities.

Perman brings an unusual perspective to futures work. As an innovation strategist and futurist, he has helped brands including Levi’s, Gap, Hyatt, Hershey’s, and Williams Sonoma uncover emerging human desires and translate them into opportunities for innovation. He is also a Certified Sommelier, bringing expertise in sensory perception and the ways attention, curiosity, and our senses can reveal things we might otherwise overlook.

Drawing on extensive research and decades of innovation work, Craving the Future introduces a practical methodology built around Curious Clues, Reflective Values, Voracious Ideas, and Sensory Innovation. Together, these practices help us balance “what is” with “what could be”, grounding future possibilities in signals, human desires, values, and experiences that already exist.

The approach is especially effective for teams and organizations. The book’s provocative questions, visual exercises, stories, and practical tools give people a shared way to explore change, challenge assumptions, generate ideas, and envision possibilities together. Instead of leaving the future to forecasters, or assuming technology will determine what comes next, teams learn to participate in creating the future.

Highly visual and intentionally designed for conversation, Craving the Future is as much a collaborative experience as a book. Bring it into a strategy session, leadership retreat, innovation workshop, or simply put it on a table and start a conversation about what could be.

The future doesn't have to be dystopian. It can be imaginative, purposeful, optimistic—and deeply human.

Craving the Future provides an invitation to notice more, imagine more boldly, and create what comes next, together.ss teams in organizations.