Alida Draudt, MBA

Alida Draudt, MBA believes the future is for everyone. She works in Silicon Valley as a futurist, strategist, and service designer.

Ali is curious, loves frameworks, and has a thirst for knowledge and collaboration. She explores and experiments and asks a lot of questions. She believes simplicity is the key.

Ali earned her M.B.A. in Design Strategy and Strategic Foresight at the California College of the Arts in 2016. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Visual Arts at Bowdoin College in 2008.

For more than four years, Ali worked at Ziba Design in Portland, Oregon as Program Manager, Account Manager, and later Account Director. Ziba Design is a global innovation and design consultancy. Ali participated in the Business Accelerator Program for Ziba Design in 2012–2013, where she focused on improving business acumen and extensibility with real-world applications.

In 2013, Ali moved to San Francisco, where she started her work for Liquid Agency as Senior Client Manager. For a brief time, she joined United Dsn and Civic Consulting USA and offered her Independent Strategic Consultancy all the while she was working on her M.B.A. at the California College of the Arts.

Today, Ali works as Design Strategist and Futurist at Capital One, where she is creating visions of possible futures and articulates their applicability and actionability. She is Cofounder of Strategic Foresight Partners, where they collaborate with companies and organizations to better forecast and understand their possible futures.

Ali is Author and Speaker for her recently coauthored and published book What the Foresight: Your personal futures explored. Defy the expected and define the preferred, a personal futures guide and workbook, and contributed to the book Toward A Preemptive Social Enterprise by Matthew Manos.

Ali looks to solve current challenges with an eye toward future applications and implications. Her futures work has spanned a variety of subjects including The Future of American Public Housing 2025, The Future of California Water 2030, The Future of Money 2020, Implications of 4D Printing and Programmable Matter, Governance Systems on Mars 2050, Implications of Autonomous Vehicles on the Gig Economy, and Blockchain Application.

Since May 2017, Ali has been working with the Army Cyber Institute (ACI) at West Point, Arizona State University and futurist Brian David Johnson to explore cybersecurity and artificial intelligence ten years in the future by conducting a Threatcasting Workshop to envision potential threats on a 10-year horizon, and backcast towards solutions for near-term implementation.

She holds a great deal of passion and enthusiasm for quality work, creative problem solving, collaborative teamwork, and adventure of all shapes and sizes. Utilizing strong leadership skills, foresight research, scenario planning, workshop facilitation, and excellent writing skills, Ali is able to translate ideas and concepts across all organizational levels. She believes looking toward the future will help us better understand our present, but getting there is no easy task.

Visit her LinkedIn profile and read her LinkedIn articles. Follow her Twitter page. Check out her home page and her recent book What the Foresight and read her interview about her book at Singularity Hub. Read her article Whose Tuesday Are You Living In? in Slate. Read her Envisioning Personal Futures published at IEEE Computer Society. Watch the interview with Alida & Julia at Singularity University.