I recently spent the day at Northern New Mexico College, surrounded by middle school girls, cardboard, tape, and a whole lot of imagination.
I was invited by the New Mexico Network for Women in Science and Engineering to lead workshops as part of their “Exploring the Possibilities” STEM event. They organize these experiences across the state, and you can feel the impact immediately. The room was full of curiosity before we even started.
We began with a time jump. It’s 2046. You’re 20 years older. The world didn’t stand still. Some things got better, some got messier.
I asked them to write quickly, no overthinking, about one thing they would fix, solve, or change before then. That shift, from now to later, changed the energy in the room. Suddenly, they weren’t just students. They were decision-makers.
From there, we moved into sketches and then into building. Cardboard bases, tape and glue everywhere, beads, and scraps. It got messy fast, in the best possible way. They built what we called future artifact portals, physical objects from 2046 that solve a problem they care about.
Not ideas floating around, but something you could hold, point to, and explain.
As they worked, the thinking started to surface. Who uses this? When? What does it change? What might it break? Without calling it anything formal, they were working through systems, cause and effect, and the reality that every object carries choices inside it.
What I love about this kind of work is how quickly it becomes real for them. The future stops feeling distant. It becomes something you can shape. You can see it happen in their hands, in the way they test, adjust, and explain their builds to each other.
It was collaborative and full of energy. The kind of learning that doesn’t sit still. I got to walk them through what being a futurist looks like in practice: not guessing, but making. Prototypes, sketches, artifacts. Evidence of ideas. It was so fun. There’s something powerful about stepping away from screens and building in the physical world. You can watch thinking happen in real time. You can see confidence grow as something takes shape.
The discussion is loud, fast, and often technical. New tools appear every week. Headlines promise transformation, disruption, automation, acceleration.
But the deeper work is quieter.
It lives in how we think.
Over the past few years, I’ve been studying how people interact with intelligent systems. The same technology lands in different hands and produces completely different outcomes. Some people feel overwhelmed. Others find creative momentum. Some freeze. Others experiment.
If you’ve been paying attention to the conversation around AI, you’ve probably noticed something strange.
Artificial intelligence is often described as a technological shift. In reality, it is also reshaping how we think, decide, collaborate, and imagine consequences across time.
When systems can generate ideas, synthesize information, and participate in creative processes, our relationship with knowledge changes. Our relationship with uncertainty changes. Even our relationship with time shifts.
The challenge is not simply learning new tools.
The challenge is learning how to think clearly inside systems that keep evolving.
The Future AI Mindset workshop was designed to address that challenge. It translates the ideas from the book into a structured thinking practice.
This approach is grounded in my work as an applied futurist and in the foresight methods I helped co-create over the years: Threatcasting, Futurecasting, andAppliedExperiential Futures. These methods were developed in environments where imagination must be disciplined and decisions carry real consequences.
Enterprise strategy. Government planning. Defense scenarios. Higher education. Innovation labs.
The goal in those environments is not prediction. It is orientation. Helping people think clearly in the presence of uncertainty.
The workshop brings that same discipline into our relationship with AI.
What We Explore Together
The six-week program is designed as a live thinking lab.
Each week we explore a different dimension of the Future AI Mindset framework, combining discussion, reflection, and practical exercises drawn directly from the book.
Participants will examine questions such as:
How does AI reshape cognition and creativity? What does collaboration look like when some collaborators are intelligent systems? How do we maintain judgment when machines produce convincing outputs? How do we think across time when technological change accelerates?
Instead of rushing toward answers, we practice structured curiosity.
We explore scenarios. We examine assumptions. We learn to hold multiple possible futures at once without collapsing into certainty.
These are skills futures thinkers have practiced for decades, and they are becoming increasingly valuable in AI-integrated environments.
What You Will Build
By the end of the six weeks, participants leave with more than notes or ideas. They will have built a set of practical tools they can continue using.
These include:
A personal Future AI Mindset statement that clarifies how you want to engage with intelligent systems.
An Applied Futures Map that connects present decisions with longer-term possibilities.
A backcasting pathway, working from a future you want toward actions you can take today.
A decision anchor that helps guide choices in moments of uncertainty.
And perhaps most important, a personal thinking practice that can travel with you into your work, teams, and projects.
These artifacts are designed to remain useful long after the workshop ends.
Who This Is For
This workshop is designed for people who sense that AI is not just changing technology. It is changing the terrain we think and act within.
Leaders making strategic decisions without complete information.
Educators preparing students for futures we cannot fully describe yet.
Researchers, designers, and builders working inside emerging systems.
Curious professionals who want to remain intentional rather than reactive.
If you have ever felt the acceleration and thought, I need to be thoughtful about how I navigate this moment, you are exactly the kind of person this workshop was designed for.
The Structure
The program runs for six weeks and meets live once a week.
Start date: March 30, 2026 Session length: One hour each week Format: Live virtual sessions with recordings available
And if someone comes to mind who might enjoy spending an hour a week thinking about the future together, feel free to share it with them.
The future is not something we simply wait for.
It is something we learn to think into.
Cyndi Coon is a time traveler and rule-bender, nerding out for good using data, science and curious questions as an Applied Futurist, author, creative, ecosystem builder, facilitator, producer, researcher, storyteller and publisher for: governments, the military, higher education, private partnerships, enterprise, and industry. Cyndi is the Founder and Principal Futurist at Applied Futures Lab, Founder of Laboratory5, and Co-founder of Arizona State University’s Threatcasting Lab and is the co-founder atThreatcasting.ai. Cyndi is the author of Future AI Mindset, co-author of Threatcasting (2021), Futurecasting (2026) and the author of numerous reports, articles and book chapters. Founder and Publisher at Turkey Hill Press.
For the last ten weeks, I was part of an experience that didn’t look like an experiment at first. It wasn’t framed as disruption or acceleration. It wasn’t about chasing the latest tool. It was a practice lab inside the Mastermind at AI Salon, led by Liz Miller-Gershfeld and Kyle Shannon, and it gathered people who had largely met through our shared work with generative systems.
On paper, this could sound like a story about AI.
It isn’t.
Black Ink Drawing by Cyndi Coon
This is a story about attention. About permission. About noticing friction instead of smoothing it over. And, unexpectedly, about getting pulled back into my studio like gravity had been waiting patiently for me to remember it existed.
Somewhere along the way, the most meaningful thing that happened to my work with AI was that it pushed me deeper into my hands.
That became the through-line.
We started with a deceptively simple idea: intention before interface. Before opening a tool, pause. Ask what you’re bringing as a human. Ask what you’re actually ready to explore. Then put the work inside a time container. Set a timer. Notice what’s happening as it unfolds. Write while you’re in it, not later, not as performance, but as part of the thinking.
That small shift changed everything.
It made the work deliberate instead of incidental. It also made resistance visible. Slowing down enough to name intention meant I could no longer disguise avoidance as productivity.
When confusion or discomfort showed up, the invitation wasn’t to fix it immediately. It was to stay with it. Long enough to see what it was pointing toward.
That’s when I started tracking complaints.
Not big, dramatic ones. The quiet, habitual grumbles that surface when something feels inconvenient, unclear, or slow. I wrote them down without judgment. I treated them as data. Complaints, I realized, are often early signals of learning. They show up right at the edges of what we don’t yet know how to do.
Around that same time, I pulled out inks and watercolors and put them next to my notebook. At first, it felt like a minor choice. In hindsight, it was a turning point. I wanted slowness. I wanted texture. I wanted the kind of thinking that only happens when the hand is involved.
I’m trained as an artist. This wasn’t nostalgia. It was a dormant system coming back online.
As the weeks went on, my digital and physical practices began to speak to each other. I explored AI image generation not as a finished output, but as a way to spark ideas. I loaded years of my own artwork into mood boards, generated images that echoed my visual language, printed them, and brought them into the studio. From there, I drew, collaged, and made by hand. Then I scanned those pieces back into my digital work.
It wasn’t replacement. It was circulation.
That loop changed how I thought about authorship and credibility. When I stopped outsourcing my hand by default, the work didn’t become less professional. It became more grounded. When I used hand-made images in client-facing work for the first time, the response wasn’t hesitation. It was recognition.
This experience also reshaped how I think about community. Instead of abstract ideas about connection, I created a simple weekly ritual with a small group of friends. Three questions. Once a week. Wins, support, and one intention to revisit. That structure created coherence without pressure. It allowed work to be witnessed, not evaluated.
As the tools grew more capable, the need to stay awake inside them grew stronger. Ease, I was reminded, is not neutral. Systems that work well invite overuse. Grounding practices became a way to calibrate.
When I write with a pen, I can’t move faster than my thinking. When I draw, I have to sit with uncertainty. Those limits aren’t obstacles. They’re feedback. They show me what I actually understand versus what I can generate quickly.
The final week was about integration. Not neat synthesis, but coexistence. Holding my creative practice, my professional work, and my technical fluency in the same space without fragmenting myself. Integration showed up in decisions: what I included, what I stopped outsourcing, what I allowed to be visible.
And here’s the irony I keep returning to.
My relationship with AI led me back to my hands.
Not away from them.
Back to a way of working where attention is not optional. Where thinking slows down enough to feel true. That wasn’t the conclusion I set out to reach. It’s simply where the path led.
That has been the gift.
What I’m carrying forward isn’t a framework. It’s a practice. Timers as doorways. Complaints as signals. Hands as thinking partners. Community as structure. Screens and studios in conversation.
In a moment when many people feel unsettled, the most grounded thing I can offer isn’t an answer.
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