Our philosophy is bound up with identifying, comparing, challenging, languaging and enacting different versions of reality. Our belief is that by revealing systemic flaws and misconceptions in our current ways of seeing and doing we can arrive at alternate, healthier, more bountiful paradigms to improve the human condition (at a macro level) and particular situations (at a micro level).

In this context we seek to help shape coherent worldviews and behaviours that are socially desirable, ethically defensible, economically viable, ecologically responsible, aesthetically aligned, culturally acceptable, spiritually compatible and politically achievable.

By consciously integrating past and future memories into our perception of the present we become more mindful, more capable of realising our full potential in the expanded now of our lives. Performance dramatically improves. We accomplish much more with less effort. We move in an atemporal space where past, present and future collapse into an extended moment balanced on the very edge of human potential.

This space is an attractor, accommodating both emergent dynamics and future intent. A zone where latent possibilities are freed from the gravitational pull of the past. Within this context, our task is to connect people - their ideas, values and aspirations – into an ever-widening consciousness of discovery and transformation.

The AFI is currently doing this through five action-research programs:

• State of the World – the dynamics of civilization transformation. The AFI closely monitors the trajectory, pathology and convergence of significant patterns and trends across the planet, examining these through integral lenses and proposing policy initiatives to off-set the most damaging of such trends. This knowledge is applied to our work as a strategic partner with the State of the World Forum, held in a different city each year. Our design interests explicitly focus on the application of social foresight to global transformational change in the context of this Forum. The AFI is also preparing for the possibility of hosting the 2012 State of the World Forum in Bangkok.

• Democracy 3.0 - the future of democracy and the nation state. This broad-ranging project, encompassing leadership, governance and the wealth of the commons, is examining issues such as how social identity and humanitarian theories might transcend embedded Western models and how democracy and capitalism interact and distort each other to create unintended systemic consequences. This research will culminate in an international summit in 2011 focused on The Future of Democracy and The Nation State.

• New Life Isaan – the design of a sufficiency economy in northeast Thailand enabled by cooperative economic and community development projects. The aim of this project is to assist in the emergence of an open, participatory, commons-oriented sufficiency economy, to examine the potential for social innovation, and to design new policy measures that will enhance economic and social value across the Isaan region.

• Transformational Narrative - the development of integral dialogue methods and decision theatre processes for achieving strategic breakthroughs in areas of complexity. Standard tools of diplomacy and dialogue fail to transcend embedded beliefs and worldviews to the extent that complex problems are never solved but simply morph and re-emerge at a later time. The object of our methodological research is to design a toolkit that will enable higher levels of consciousness and that could be used in geopolitical trouble spots or other forums to enable advanced levels of problem resolution and pluralist accommodation.

• Open Business Models – the trend towards open innovation, co-creation and co-design through entrepreneurial methods such as crowd-sourcing and peer production. This research is being undertaken in collaboration with business clients, political leaders and policy makers interested in promoting social and business innovation and is also exploring the convergence of Asian philosophy and Western business praxis in establishing new, hybrid models for private-public partnerships.