From One Game to Many Games
Introducing 10F: Ten Forecasts for the Unravelling of Globalization
Something has broken in how the world organizes itself.
Not in the usual ways we talk about disruption—technology shifts, market corrections, political swings. This is different. The frameworks we use to understand global systems are being dismantled faster than we can build new ones.
For decades, leaders operated under a shared fiction: everyone is playing the same game, the rules are clear, and the rules don’t change. The narrative wasn’t entirely false—just incomplete. For many countries, the “one game” of multilateral order was never really their game, but maintaining the illusion often offered more benefits than openly challenging it.
That illusion is over. Few are pretending to follow the old rules any more. New rules haven’t yet been established.
We are shifting from one game to many games.
Where previously organizations navigated a single global system with recognized rules and institutions, they now operate simultaneously across multiple incompatible arrangements. The rules aren’t just unclear—they change unpredictably, strategically, situationally. To play at all now means playing several games at once, with on-the-fly translation between systems that don’t interoperate.
The Patterns Are Breaking Through
When we finalized these forecasts in fall 2025, we described a world where powerful actors were deliberately abandoning shared frameworks, where the pretence of universal rules had become untenable, and where middle powers would need to navigate multiple incompatible systems simultaneously.
Three weeks ago, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood at Davos and delivered a speech that drew a rare standing ovation for saying much the same thing: “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.” He called it a “rupture, not a transition”—the end of a pleasant fiction.
This weekend, the Munich Security Conference is making the same point from a different angle — a US secretary of state offering reassurance with no commitments, European leaders calling it progress, and everyone in the room navigating the gap between what was said and what it means. The old script is being performed, but nobody believes the plot anymore.
We’re not claiming prescience. We’re noting that what a volunteer network of strategists, futurists and domain experts mapped from signals and patterns is now being articulated by heads of state at the world’s most elite economic and security gatherings. The transformation we describe isn’t speculative. It’s underway.
Why This Matters for Monday Morning
If you run an NGO, your funding mechanisms are fragmenting as geopolitical competition drives financial systems toward incompatibility. If you manage global supply chains, your partnerships span regulatory regimes that shift without warning. If you’re a policymaker, your interventions may be calibrated for a system that no longer exists. If you lead a foundation, your assumptions about how change happens may need fundamental revision.
The patterns you’ve sensed but lacked language for—this project aims to make them visible and actionable.
What 10F Is
The 10F Consortium is a practitioner collective who self-organized to map the systemic transformation underway from 2025 to 2035. We convened in Singapore last September, developed ten forecasts across critical global domains, and are releasing them as open-access strategic intelligence under Creative Commons licensing.
We’re not a think tank or consultancy. We’re not selling scenarios to those who are well resourced. We built this for the organizations—NGOs, multilaterals, government agencies, philanthropies, mission-driven companies—trying to do the right thing amid unprecedented uncertainty. The ones making Monday morning decisions without a map.
Our approach is “advocacy through realism.” We’re not predicting the future. We’re mapping the shifts already underway and the capabilities needed to navigate them.
The Mechanism: How Norm Cascades Spread
What we’re witnessing isn’t random chaos. It’s systematic reorganization driven by actors powerful enough to redefine acceptable behaviour.
China restricts economic data that was previously public. Russia exits post-Cold War arrangements with Western institutions. The United States withdraws from climate agreements and radically cuts global aid programs. Major digital platforms engineer opacity into their systems. Countries turn deportation and detention into revenue models. Global climate cooperation becomes a patchwork of local and regional choices. Each action signals that old constraints no longer bind.
The cascade accelerates through three dynamics. First, early defection reveals information—knowing the rules no longer hold is itself a strategic advantage. Second, maintaining old norms while competitors abandon them imposes costs without reciprocal benefit. Third, the pretence of universal rules becomes obvious, further weakening institutions that continue to enforce them.
This isn’t simply moral collapse. It’s strategic adaptation to changed circumstances. And it’s spreading like contagion.
The Ten Forecasts
The forecasts are now live via the 10fconsortium.org website, examining transformations across these themes:
Information & Governance
From Agreed Transparency to Engineered Opacity — Governments and corporations engineer information asymmetries as competitive advantage
From Political Spectrum to Ideological Fog — Traditional left-right categories dissolve into algorithmically-driven contradictions
From Digital Empathy to Localized Solidarity — Universal humanitarian cooperation erodes toward identity-focused, proximity-driven priorities
Relationships & Systems
From Special Relationships to Strategic Situationships — Stable alliances fracture into fluid, transactional partnerships
From Collective Ambition to Fragmented Adaptation — Unified climate mitigation gives way to isolated resilience strategies
From Open Society to Tactical Shape-shifting— Formal civic participation declines as informal arrangements become primary
From Selective Migration to People as Asset Class — Human mobility transforms from humanitarian concern to strategic resource competition
Strategic Assets & Resources
From Energy Hegemony to Power Plurality — Energy dominance fragments without clear winners emerging
From Dollar Dominance to Money Unbundled — Monetary systems proliferate across incompatible digital and state architectures
From Technology Convergence to Sovereign Stacks — Tech ecosystems diverge into parallel, mutually unintelligible systems
Each forecast uses a “From-To” structure: what’s been widely assumed, what’s emerging, who’s positioned where, and what it means for organizations navigating the transition.
Read the Full Forecasts
If you want to go deeper now rather than wait for the weekly analysis:
One Game to Many Games: Understanding the Transformation — the framing document that explains the meta-thesis, norm cascades, and capabilities needed to navigate fragmentation
The Complete 10F Forecast Collection — all ten forecasts plus the AREAS framework in a single PDF
The Forecast Index — A place where you can download individual forecasts, access adapted audio versions, and follow thematic discussions and coverage.
All forecasts are released under open license. We’re building this as a public resource, not a gated product.
A New Framework: AREAS
Traditional geopolitical categories—Global North/South, East/West, developed/developing—impose hierarchies that obscure how power actually operates in fragmenting systems. We developed a new framework—AREAS—to map how actors position themselves toward each transformation:
Architecting — Designing and building new systems, setting rules, establishing infrastructure. China building data sovereignty frameworks. Central banks creating digital currencies.
Resisting — Working to prevent, slow, or reverse transformation. The EU pushing disclosure requirements. Transparency coalitions defending open data.
Exploiting — Taking advantage of emerging or structural gaps, frictions and contradictions. Private contractors filling gaps left by retreating multilateral aid. Cryptocurrency exchanges operating across incompatible monetary regimes.
Avoiding — Building parallel systems to escape both old and new constraints. Mutual aid networks bypassing formal institutions. Diaspora networks creating cross-border support.
Shaped — Experiencing transformation without capacity to architect, resist, exploit, or avoid. Adapting to conditions created by others. Small island states watching climate negotiations decide their future without them. Gig workers classified by algorithms they can't see or appeal.
The key insight: positioning varies by domain, not identity. The same nation can be architecting in energy, resisting in trade, and being shaped in technology—simultaneously. Understanding this dynamic mapping matters more than knowing which bloc someone belongs to.
What’s Coming
In the coming weeks, we’ll also provide:
Podcast episodes expanding on key themes
Spotlights on some of the practitioners who contributed to 10F
Invitations to live conversations for different time zones
Highlights of how people and organizations are using the forecasts
Other opportunities to engage and reflect on these provocations
The Underlying Question
The transformations we’re mapping present real challenges: cognitive overload, institutional breakdown, permanent uncertainty. The question isn’t whether the old order is ending. That’s already happening. The question is what organisations — and the people who run them — do with the transition.
We recognise some readers may find these forecasts heavy. We take that seriously. We wrote them to be honest about what’s happening, not to give reasons for disengagement. If old constraints are failing, that also means old capture is weakening. If systems are fragmenting, that also means new arrangements are possible that weren’t before. The example adaptive strategies in every forecast exist because the contributors who wrote them strongly believe there are moves to make which, while challenging, can lead to new futures. We hope you’ll find yours.
We’re here to help you see the patterns clearly enough to act.
Share with colleagues navigating the same uncertainty.
Correction: On 14.2.26, F05 has been updated to v1.1 to correct a factual error. Both the standalone PDF and the full forecast collection have been updated on the website.
Follow the Project
Beyond this newsletter, you can find 10F on:
LinkedIn — 10F Consortium — longer-form updates and discussion
Bluesky — @10fconsortium.bsky.social — signal tracking and real-time commentary
Instagram — @10fconsortium — visual summaries and forecast highlights
GitHub — 10F Consortium — full forecast archive with version history and transparency