present

Futurists are presentists: The true purpose of a forecast

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The other day my friend Holly asked me about my track record as a futurist. Holly is a journalist and has a knack for asking quiet, incisive questions.

I had told her about co-authoring a book in the 1990s about the year 2025. [2025 : Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology] Holly’s question got me thinking about the purpose of my work.

It’s reasonable for people to expect futurists to predict the future. But accurate prediction is not the real value of our work. What futurists do is very much about today. Forecasts should show the range of and directions of change that get us started toward a desired future. The forecast endpoint is not the point.

There is little point in framing an idea about the future and then waiting ten or fifteen years to see “Did you get it right?” Today is where foresight has its power. 

The best question I could ask when we get to 2025 is: Did people who read 2025 in the late 1990s act differently because of the ideas in the book?

Why did we write 2025? To help business people in the late 1990s understand change and potential for the future in that year. So my book, 2025, published in 1996, was for people in 1996 to understand future possibility.

As the year 2025 approaches, I still expect to be embarrassed about where we were wrong. Most often that will be about what we did not forecast at all and where we were too optimistic. But I should forget about it. That was not the point or the purpose of the book. 

How should you think about this?

When you work with a futurist or engage with the future, know your today reasons. Allow the process to range imaginatively over future ideas. But don’t worry about certainty and accuracy at some future date. Explore what those ideas tell you about what to do now.

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For some further thoughts on this, see What do futurists really do?

Is your focus past or forward?

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This blog post from a couple of years ago Are You a Paster, Presentist, or Futurist? offers a nice thought experiment on the idea that people may be focused past, on the present, or toward the future.

It’s not deeply developed in the piece, but the idea is one worth exploring, and it fits my discoveries about myself, and others.

I’ve found that I have an innate focus on what will happen next or later, and once something has taken place, while it’s interesting to think about why it happened, I don’t obsess on that. And sometimes I get peevish when people won’t let go of something that happened, or should have, in the past. I want to say, “never mind, water under the bridge, eyes forward.” I want to play with ideas about what may happen next, maybe get that right.

And this, of course, is helpful to my work as a futurist.

The unrecognized present

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Foggy sceneFuturists, by definition, are supposed to talk about the future. So this is a little embarrassing. I’ve recognized, for some time now, that a lot of my work is about showing people what’s already going on. That’s about today! Yet, it’s enough to blow their minds, sometimes, though I’ve not even begun to tell the about the future.

The lesson in this is to make your efforts in exploring change about any change that matters to the people and situations in front of you, whether people are behind the times, and catching up, or pretty much up to date, and needing to understand what they can about what’s next. So don’t worry about the differences, or force distinctions between what’s true now versus what might be in the future.

In fact, you can use the “unrecognized present,” pointed out and explained, to get people to more fully understand what lies ahead. Doing that could be as simple as showing them the leading edge of change, the early adoption of a technology, the first examples and experiments on things, a leading place that is a bellwether for change, and so on. Your advantage: you may be able to bring forth a witness, a video, or pictures of that poorly-understood present, and make it real to them. It’s like showing people the future–almost!

Tip of the pen here to my colleague Katherine Green, an expert in workforce futures. She made me capture and write down the phrase I’ve taken here as my title, and promise to write about it.

Image: sumidiot, via Flickr, creative commons attribution license

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