Richard is an academically trained futurist and chief executive of Vision Foresight Strategy LLC (VFS), a foresight and strategic analysis firm based in Honolulu. He has conducted foresight and strategy work on projects for organizations such as U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, the European Commission, the UK government, the Canadian government, the Singaporean government, NASA, and PepsiCo. Richard is the author of 4 Steps to the Future: A Quick and Clean Guide to Creating Foresight and his contributions were featured in the books Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight (2006), A Careful Revolution (2019), Rethinking Asia 7: The Future of Work (2020), and Strategic Latency Unleashed: A SOF Perspective (2020). He has been published in the Journal of Futures Studies, the journal Futures, International Journal of System of Systems Engineering, World Future Review, and Small Wars Journal. Richard is a member of the GeoTech Center Action Council at the Atlantic Council. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the futures studies program at the University of Hawai‘i. His dissertation research focused on developing a conceptual framework for designing future governance systems.
The emerging landscape in which we will be leading our organizations and serving our communities in the years ahead will be deceptively familiar. Veiled from our perception, this landscape will in fact become increasingly alien. Leading in the coming years will require us to see the world in new ways in order to recognize and address its novel challenges and threats.