futurists

What do futurists really do?

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My elevator speech, unfortunately, takes more than the ten-floor standard height of a downtown Washington DC building to get across. I should move to Manhattan or Kuala Lumpur. The reason is, I need more time to gently but clearly clarify things for folks who have in their heads a direct, sure, and understandable idea of what a futurist should be. Their idea is wrong, but that’s not their fault nor is it their problem.

I start my elevator speech saying I help people in organizations understand how the world is changing and what it could mean to their business. They say, “so you mean like predicting technology and stuff?”

“Yes,” I say, “but not only that. My role is to look across the sweep of change shaping our world, and explore how social change, and technological change, and economic change will come together and create our future.”

If they are still with me, they ask: “So what is the track record for your predictions?” or, “Did you predict the Internet?”

Here’s where the dogma of my field leaps to action. “Futurists don’t predict the future,” I feel myself beginning to say. I stop, I try again. (The elevator has long since stopped at the top, and I have to hold the door open to finish my point. so there’s an alarm going off, figuratively, and maybe literally, too.)

“Futurists explore the range of possibility for the future. We can’t know the future, with certainty, so we don’t try to make specific predictions.” At this moment, they sometimes get a gleam in their eye: “How clever” they think, this guy can’t get caught being wrong!”

I soldier on: “But we can help people understand much better how change is unfolding, and what the possible and probable outcomes could be.” Here the fair-minded will nod and give me a sense that they don’t hate or pity me, which is nice.

But what some people hear in this is “I have no idea what the future will be.” Usually now they are looking around for someone else to talk to, or perhaps for an emergency exit.

So what do futurists really do?

Futurists spend the time, have the tools, and bring skills and experience to explore change. They observe, detect, and explain what changes are unfolding and the possible and likely outcomes of them. If they do their work well, the bring to this an ability to help people understand things better: they offer frameworks for understanding and interpreting change. They “put the story together” showing not just what forces and trends are at play, but how they could add up: they portray whole futures: of sectors, of regions and community, of aspects of life.

Futurists keep a sense that there’s a range of possible outcomes in our future, but they also get close to making predictions: they share ideas on things that are rather sure to happen. I have been in my profession since 1987. Twenty-five years ago, when I was new in the field, we were exploring the power of the Internet. We were talking about miniaturization of electronic devices and about ubiquitous computing and communications through things held in the palms of our hands. We were talking about the wave of Baby Boomers passing through the American population and the impacts of an aging society that would emerge. We talked about conflict over resources and the rise of Asia.

We talked about these things and the alternative potential outcomes, but got our clients thinking about the changes that in fact, emerged. We were right because we took a broad view. We were useful because we changed minds about the future.

We’re at your floor now, thanks for listening.

A typology of futurists

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I had the pleasure, recently, of collaborating with five other futurists at a 2-day workshop. We had a superb time and I am sure we delivered a ton of value to our client, who has taken up a significant new strategic exploration.

Spending time with my colleagues, some of whom I have known for years, and others I met through this event, refreshed my thinking on what futurists do and what they represent. We each brought different things to the event–we're different kinds of futurists. So, risky though it may be, I am experimenting here with some “types” of futurists. I know that many of my colleagues and me in my work, stretch across several categories, so having a set of “types” doesn’t mean I plan to or want to pigeonhole anyone.

So here goes:

The reframer – Adept at, and intent on changing the way any given situation gets looked at. This futurist will give you new ways of thinking about your business, issues, what technology means, and so on.

The coach – The futurist who works to help others get better at exploring the future, through how-to workshops, advice, consulting, and writing.

The mind-changer – The thinker/communicator whose greatest effect and routine habit is to work to get people to change their minds about a critical issue, challenge, or opportunity.

The consciousness raiser –  This missionary uses facts, stories, ideas, and new concepts to raise consciousness around trends and issues, and to give people the very clear sense that things are changing and they ought to pay attention.

The researcher – This futurist consumes and commands enormous amounts of information, and uses it to validate, explain, and give the rationales for ideas about the future.

The entertainer – The futurist who makes the future a form of entertainment and an experience–but it's fun with a purpose: change minds

The specialist – The futurist who works in depth and intently on a specific field, technology, subject, etc.

The exemplar – The futurist who uses him or her self as an experiment, an intensive technology user, a walking cyborg, an alternative lifestyle liver, etc. Colleagues in the transhumanist movement are great examples of this.

But most of us are blend of these things. So here’s my personal recipe:

35% coach (as emphasized in this blog)
25% reframer
20% mind changer
10% researcher (down from a much higher rate)
10% entertainer (or am I fooling myself? 
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100% Futurist!

How to succeed in foresight with your otherness

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Being a black sheep is goodDoes a persona of “different” help you drive more foresight in an organization? It can. Chances are, if you’ve been pressing your colleagues to open their minds to new ideas, if you’ve been rethinking things, reframing how you talk about them, reconsidering the conventional wisdom, you’ve already gotten personally branded for your “otherness”. If that’s so, go with it. Make the most of it. Be different.

Over my years working as a consulting futurist, I’ve met some amazing people who are on the front lines of foresight, working inside big organizations to get futures thinking through to more people. I remember some of them especially for their “otherness” which they wore with pride, or which at least came to define them for their colleagues.
 
One I remember well, Charlie Prather, worked at DuPont in the R&D Center. Over time, he found himself increasingly feeling and being seen as different from his R&D colleagues and the company culture. He came, just like many of his colleagues, out of chemical engineering or another technical specialty. But he found his talents really flowered when he worked internally as a consultant on creativity. By the time I knew him, he’d built an “idea room” at R&D headquarters, near the cafeteria. It was a small room, chock full of ideas on big post-its. He even re-did his business card, making it distinct from the normal ones in the company. It had bursts of color, the word “creativity” and what I saw as an overall creative joy. This was in the 1980s, and that was a distinctly “other” message. He could drive new kinds of creativity in his organization by being different. These days, Charlie leads an innovation consultancy, Bottom Line Innovation.
 
Eva Niewiadomski is a remarkable woman I met at the Catalyst Ranch, a creative meeting space in Chicago. Eva had had a similar experience to Charlie’s when she was at Quaker Oats. Over time, her office became a distinct space, full of whimsy and mind-stirring objects, colors, and images. She brought those touches to meetings she planned. Everyone kept asking her to help them plan more creative, inspiring meetings and workshops. Her otherness helped her be more valuable to her company. Unfortunately for them, before too long, she spun herself off, and now runs the Catalyst Ranch, where organizations can come and break down some mental habits of their own.
 
I also remember distinctly meeting a guy pulled back from retirement to join a small innovation team at an industrial company. My client there explained each of the roles on the small team. One was a “bean counter” who knew how to make things happen, and how to work the bureaucracy. Another chosen for the team was a “new grad” a newly-hired employee, they wanted because he was not yet caught up in the company’s way of thinking about things.
 
What I remember best, however, was the guy they brought back from retirement for the team. As they cast around to decide who might join this innovation team, people kept remembering this old colleague who, they said, “was always different, never really fit in, but we loved him anyway.” He rounded out the team—they needed different—they needed otherness.
 
Each of these people was an insider and an outsider in their companies. They discovered in themselves, and cultivated, aspects of who they were that were distinct from the corporate culture, and made being different a success in their companies. Their “otherness” was an asset.
 
As an outsider (I am a consulting futurist), I have the luxury of being separate from the corporate culture, and no one expects otherwise. In my work, I try very hard to understand (but not adopt) the culture and worldview inside the organizations I serve.
 
People who do what I do from the inside have to balance their otherness with fitting in, at least to a point. But I urge those of you in that position to let yourself be the one with a different take on the situation. Nurture in yourself the ability to take a fresh and distinct look at things. If you need reassurance, find a few allies in the organization, or find some on the outside, who are in a similar situation. Share your “otherness” stories with them.
 
This quote my friend and fellow futurist Cindy Frewen Wuellner shared with me celebrate the spirit of otherness:
 
“But then they danced down the street like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes ‘Awww!’”  –Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1957
 
I recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s November 10, 2008 New Yorker piece “The Uses of Adversity” which explores some similar thoughts on outsiderness. In that piece, Gladwell shares a quote from Anthropologist Brian Foster about commerce in Thailand:
 
“A trader who was subject to the traditional social obligations and constraints would find it very difficult to run a viable business. If, for example, he were fully part of the village society and subject to the constraints of the society, he would be expected to be generous in the traditional way to those in need. It would be difficult for him to refuse credit, and it would not be possible to collect debts … The inherent conflict of interest in a face-to-face market transaction would make proper etiquette impossible or would at least strain it severely, which is an important factor in Thai social relations.”

Image: pasotraspaso, via Flickr, cc: attribution license. 

They’d use stardates if they could

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Long Now\'s date notation style
The Long Now Foundation, and increasingly lots of others with an eye to the future, humanity’s prospects, and so on, use 5-digit dates, e.g. May 26, 02008. The Long Now website, notes: “The Long Now Foundation uses five digit dates, the extra zero is to solve the deca-millennium bug which will come into effect in about 8,000 years.”

That’s a bit tongue in cheek. In my view, they very much want to think about the deeper future, and to “leave room” in date notation, for humanity to exist beyond the year 9999.

You might also look for who uses this form of date notation to get a sense of their attitudes and ideas about the future. Anyone can choose to write the date that way, but so far, it probably identifies people as part of a loose affinity group.

I make note of this newish phenomenon first, because you might see it and wonder, and second, because I admire the positive sense it gives, but also the way it conveys so much in such a small way, about thinking about the future. You can have a deep and fruitful conversation about something as basic as how we write a date. Try it with a friend, you’ll see what it brings forth.

Fighting back for foresight

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With great regularity, journalists and other writers pen pieces on the decline of futures or on failed predictions. Our professional futurist colleagues have often boiled this down to a shorthand: “where’s my flying car?”

We have often joined our colleagues in the Association of Professional Futurists (www.profuturists.org) to compile responses to these pieces. The World Future Society (www.wfs.org) also works hard to counter misperceptions about futurists and foresight work. Most in the field feel that the field is doing well, and that attention to the future is improving around the world. That many of our colleagues in organizations have futures job titles and responsibilities is good evidence for that.

At Leading Futurists LLC we believe foresight is doing well, but that we have more battles yet to fight. The value proposition of the field is changing from provocative “out there” thinking to ideas about change that organizations can respond to today.

Foresight and futures thinking tools are becoming part of everyday strategy making in organizations. Futures-minded people serve on or consult to teams as the people who understand the inevitability of change and what it means to the organization. They bring a knowledge base about the future to bear on an organization’s strategies and actions.

But though foresight is gaining ground, in too many organizations short-term thinking reigns, and it dominates in society overall. We battle the widespread conviction that what is relevant is the immediate scene; this quarter’s performance and today’s issues. Short-term thinking is a condition of organizational life, and it will drive out habitual foresight, if we let it. So let’s get to work on the problem.

Making foresight a daily habit of more people in more organizations is a new kind of work. It is different from just being provocative and wowing an audience with gee whiz ideas about startling new technologies. Here’s what we need to do instead:

  • Keep the future on the agenda, bring up trends and themes of change in work meetings and planning sessions
  • Change what people expect when you talk about the future from the gee whiz, to useful, actionable ideas about emerging challenges and opportunities
  • As you get a new insight on the future from your scanning, think about who the 5 or 6 people in your organization are who you know should see it. Send it along to them with a comment or interpretation. Any busy colleague will appreciate it.
  • Show people how to think about change. Model this by giving people an image of the future that relates to a question they are grappling with. For example, in the packaging sector, you imagine for them a near term future in which every package has a radio-frequency ID tag on it for automated inventory and checkout.

These are some of the things to do to normalize foresight and make it a daily habit in your organization. They are steps toward truly having a Foresight Culture.

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