Futurists share a concern about humanity and the future of the planet and society. Their work focuses not on predicting the future, but in helping people better understand their choices about the future, and the futures that we can create. They work in the futures field in a range of roles: as researchers, as academics, as consultants, or as organisational futurists - practitioners who are applying futures approaches in organisations.
Richard Slaughter has some succinct words on 'what is a futurist' on his Foresight International website. On the same page, there is a link to more information on 'how to become a futurist' which makes good reading. Joseph Coates, a US futurist, also has a one pager on how futurists think differently which is worth reading.
Andy Hines, in his Hinesight column published in early issues of Foresight, describes three types of futurist:
- academic futurist - those in universities, who do most of the research,
- consulting futurist - those who 'sell' futures in a consulting role, and
- organisational futurist - those in organisations in a futures role, often the interface between academic and consultant futurists.
And, Acceleration Watch provides a detailed explanation of the different types of futurists - this page is a tad theoretical, but provides an overview of different approaches used by the range of people calling themselves futurists.
There are a number of ways to define a futurist or to list the characteristics of a 'good' futurist. For example, Roger Caldwell from the University of Arizona, lists the following characteristics of a 'good general futurist':
- develop anticipatory skills and maintain awareness of current and potential changes,
- know what to look for and separate out important events from noise,
- use a radar approach rather than a vacuum cleaner approach to data gathering,
- know what tools are available and when to use them and when not to use them,
- prepare to react early to new changes while allowing for flexibility as more in learned,
- don't place undue trust in experts or in non-experts (or in yourself),
- watch out for the bandwagon effect (safety in keeping with fads),
- watch out for group think (fear of standing out),
- be wary of unstated assumptions or simplistic statements,
- define your 'future' time frame and don't go out too near or too far, and
- implement foresight knowledge into your daily activities so you become an 'automated futurist'.
Another set of somewhat daunting characteristics comes from Jim Dator, Director of the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, who says:
To be a good futurist, you need the:
- widest possible knowledge of the history and present condition of as many cultures and civilizations as possible; you must know more than one culture, and thus more than one language, intimately,
- widest possible knowledge of all aspects of all the social sciences,
- widest possible knowledge of current and emerging developments in the natural sciences, and their emerging sub disciplines and transdisciplines, for example, evolutionary systems theory, chaos theory, and brain science,
- widest possible familiarity with developments in engineering (especially electronics and genetics), architecture, and space sciences,
- widest possible familiarity with philosophy, ethics, morals, and religions, and certainly the ethical discourse of as many different traditions as possible,
- widest possible familiarity with law and planning,
- an active awareness of esthetics and the esthetic element in all aspects of life; a continuing experience of esthetic expression in some, or preferably many, modes,
- creativity, imagination, the willingness to think new thoughts, to make unmade connections, to be ridiculed, laughed at, and to laugh at yourself,
- ability to synthesize, combine, invent, create,
- willingness to be politically active, to test out new ideas on yourself first and while trying actually to create a better world, or some portion of it,
- ability to try to anticipate the consequences of actions before you act, but also the willingness to risk failure and to learn from mistakes and criticism--indeed to seek out and provoke criticism--but to keep trying to do better, and constantly to relearn what 'better' might be,
- insatiable curiosity, unbounded compassion, incurable optimism, and an unquenchable sense of humor and delight in the absurd.
All of this can be described in one word--'Aiglatson'--which is 'Nostalgia' spelled backwards and is a word ... to symbolize the yearning for things to come; revering the future; without being disrespectful to the past (remembering that once it was all that was humanly possible), preferring the dreams of the future to the experiences of the past; always desiring to try something new; to go where no one has ever gone before in all areas of human - and non-human, and, soon, post-human - experience.
Beware some people who call themselves futurists, or worst still, futurologists! I read a web site recently where one futurist said they were successful at predicting the future about 85% of the time. To me, this is perhaps just a tad short of arrogance, because no one can predict the future - well, okay, unless you are talking about the short-term future, maybe five years away. Then, you can indeed use information about current trends to be fairly confident in stating how a trend will continue to evolve. But, go out into the future about 20 years, or 50 years.
Wait, before you do that, think back 20 years or 50 years and what the world was like then. For example, 20 years ago, I worked in a job where computers were only just beginning to be introduced into offices. They were big and clunky, and we used them for word processing. We had a separate computer where we stored our student records - that had a 20MB hard disk! We didn't have the internet (that we in the general population knew about anyway), we didn't have mobile phones or ipods, and globalisation was just a speck on the horizon. Given the amount of change in the last 20 years, it is a brave person indeed who says today they know 85% of the time what the future will bring. We can guess, and we can explore, but we can't predict.
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Anybody can call themselves a futurist, but just adopting the title does not make you one. There are a number of things you need to do to become a futurist, including studying a postgraduate course, learning how to effectively use a futures methodology, and just immersing yourself in the futures field - learning about it, and eventually contributing to its development. Richard Slaughter once said (more or less!) that you have to work out what part of the futures conversation you are going to participate in, and then work out how you can contribute. It's good advice.
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