Thinking Futures

About Futures

The field of futures studies has been emerging and developing since the middle of the 20^th century. The term 'futures' should be viewed as a collective noun, in the same way that we talk of 'economics' or 'politics'. And, the term is always plural, because there is always more than one future to consider.

There is much on the web about the futures field. Some useful overviews include:

Vision Foresight Strategy LLC's "An Introduction to Futures Studies",
Sohail Inayutallah's "Questions and Answers About Futures Studies" which covers many of the expected questions,
Wendy Schultz, a well known futurist, has a useful slide show on her website, Infinite Futures, which provides an overview of futures concepts,
Shaping Tomorrow provides a set of links to a pretty comprehensive introduction to futures,
a January 2007 article in the Financial Times called The Times Lords explores what futures is about, from a mainstream media perspective, and
check out the Wikipedia pages on futures studies.

A recent development in the field has been the emergence of integral futures. Based on the integral theory of Ken Wilber, integral futures builds a stronger framework for action for both the futures practitioner and for futures methods. Integral futures is new and is generating some discussion in the field. I particularly like this approach because it requires that considering the thoughts, motivations, beliefs, values and attitudes of individuals (that is, their worldviews) be an essential part of any futures work. Check out the Integral Futures page for more information.

	An Innate Human Capacity
	The ability to think about the future is an innate human capacity. Each of us does it every day, but it is often unconscious. Futures work seeks to surface the future thinking of individuals so that it can be shared - that is, futures work attempts to shift thinking about the future from individual to collective, from unconscious to conscious and from implicit to explicit.

	Links to Futures Information
	There are many websites out there that provide comprehensive sets of links to sites about foresight and futures work. Here are some. Peering into the future, a very generous site, with lots of info about futures work, including a complete copy of the author's PhD. jovokutatas.lap.hu has a great set of links to futures and foresight resources (while the site is Hungarian, most links are in English).

		Futures Time

Steward Brand said "this present moment used to be the unimaginable future". The 'future' could mean tomorrow or it could mean the next millennium, yet we seem to use it as a unitary term - "the future". In futures work, one of the basic tenets is that there is always more than one potential future, and interpretations of those futures are always dependent on interpretations of the past and present.

There will always be a past, present and future, but just not necessarily our past, present and future. The three are interdependent, and each cannot really be understood without reference to the other two. In strategy work, explorations of potential futures always come back to the present where decisions have to be made, but we need to be clear about how far out into the future we are exploring.

A simple typology of future time is:

Near Term Future: up to one year from now
Short Term Future: one to five years from now
Mid Term Future: 5-20 years from now
Long Term Future: 20-50 years from now
Far Future: 50+ years from now

I read a project brief recently that talked about the future of xxx. In this case, the future was short term - one to five years out. The problem is that the short term future is still within the boundaries of convention, and of people's comfort zones. Innovative thinking and strategy development does not emerge from comfort zones. This particular brief posed a series of 'consultation questions' derived largely from quantitative trends. The phrase "if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got" springs to mind. Nothing in this brief challenged existing assumptions about the way things are done, and there was no stage in the project where a systematic exploration of the future was to be undertaken. The assumptions underpinning what we do in the present may well be robust, but you won't know whether they will be robust into the future unless you continuously test them against changes in the external environment.

Most strategic planning focuses on the the short term future, while scenario work generally uses a 10 to 20 year time frame. It is quite difficult to deal with much beyond the short term future, particularly if our minds are closed to the potential of what might happen. The current belief in data driven or evidence driven decision making exacerbates our inability to deal with more than the short term future, because there are no future facts. Those wedded to data and evidence as the basis for decision making about the future will generally have a difficult time seeing any value in exploring the future, yet their facts and evidence are based on the past. While the past will inform the future, the two cannot be the same, so basing our decisions about the future on information from the past, no matter how factual, seems just a little shortsighted.

The message here is that we need to be clear about the timeframe in which we are operating when doing futures work, because that will influence both the choice of methods and potential outcomes.