Working on the Future

The older I get the less I feel the need to define for everyone else and the more I become comfortable with just defining for myself.  For some time I have been thinking about the things that distinguish professionals who call themselves “futurists.”

Futures studies is one of those unknown academic fields.  Indeed, even within the field there are those who argue that it is not, perhaps, a true field yet.  In any case, the label given to students emerging from futures studies is unfortunate: futurist.  Like “democracy,” “democratization,” and “strategy” this is a term that is terribly overused and misused, adopted by a very wide cast of consulting/speaking/thinking characters out there in the wild world.

Those coming out of futures studies are concerned with understanding change, with anticipating change, and with helping people to shape change.  But because the field is currently so… unregulated, and in fact may never become strictly regulated, the variety of methods, preferences, and degree of training among those claiming the title of futurist give rise to an extremely wide array of practices and objectives.

As a trusted colleague frequently points out, there is a considerable body of literature now built up around futures studies, so often grad students or newcomers end up reinventing things that they simply hadn’t been aware of beforehand.  While I risk doing the same thing, I have been occasionally returning to the exercise of trying to sort and distinguish between the various professionals who tend to work specifically and explicitly on the “the future.”  This is a schema based on my current thinking.

Let’s sort individuals according to two spectra: the purpose of their work and the underlying approach of their work.  Purpose can be thought of as the intent or objective of the practitioner.  Approach refers roughly to the sources of information and the ways of knowing upon which they build their work.  Using both spectra as axes we create a typical 2x2 matrix.

Figure 1: the basic 2x2 matrix

Purpose runs from anticipating change on one end to shaping change on the other.  The extreme left of anticipating change would be sincere attempts at prediction; more tentative or careful forecasts would fall to the right of that.  Crossing over the Y axis, efforts at shaping change would run from light efforts to shake people out of their assumptions all the way to grand attempts at social change.

The Y axis of approach runs from methods that rely entirely on participant knowledge and responses on the bottom end to the upper end with work that is entirely dependent on quantitative data (and likely disdains most intuition not based on “facts”).

Using these two axes we can play with plotting a variety of methods that are commonly used by “futurists”.  This is just a sample, to be sure; if we were to plot methods common to, say, urban planners, the quadrants would probably fill differently.  And this is just a quick generalization.

Figure 2: common methods plotted

Now, to follow classic business management practice, let’s give the quadrants labels and identities.  We’ll call the Data-Driven/Anticipate Change quadrant the Analyst quadrant.  The Analyst’s domain is about explicit models and information, and it’s about needing to understand.  Below that is the Intuitive/Anticipate Change quadrant, which is the domain of the Sage.  Merriam-Webster.com defines sage as “wise through reflection and experience,” and that aptly describes the methods and motivation within this domain.  To the right we have the Intuitive/Shape Change quadrant which we label as the domain of the Provocateur.  The Provocateur’s work is to shake people out of their assumptions and their complacency.  Finally, we have the Data-Driven/Shape Change quadrant, which is the domain of the Planner.  By definition, Planners want things to happen, and they lean towards information and structure to accomplish that.

For added fun, we can perhaps start to overlay archetypes, and specifically the brand-related use of archetypes developed by Mark and Pearson in The Hero and the Outlaw.  The Analyst domain is probably where the Ruler archetype feels most comfortable.  The Sage archetype would fit the Sage domain.  We might place the Magician in the Planner domain and the Outlaw and the Jester might both fit into the Provocateur domain.

Figure 3: the four quadrants

Knowing many actual trained futurists as I do, and having met a great many people who otherwise call themselves “futurist” or whose work focuses on the future, I think individual professionals have preferences or biases that tend to draw them into one quadrant more than others.  I myself was trained very much from the Provocateur’s domain, yet naturally gravitate towards the Sage quadrant (but higher in the quadrant and closer to the Analyst domain), while consciously wanting to explore the Analyst domain more.

Of course, what becomes obvious once you start staring at this matrix is that a really good futures or foresight process will glide across more than one quadrant.  While some engagements are wholly within a single domain (say, a futures-driven creativity/ideation workshop resting comfortably in the Provocateur domain), many probably do, and all probably should, move across multiple domains.

A process could begin in the Analyst domain say with some Emerging Issues Analysis, dip over into the Provocateur space for some Manoa scenario process, and then conclude in the Planner quadrant some Participatory Action Research (example 1).  Alternatively, it could start in the Sage mode with some Forecasting by Analogy, move to the Analyst mode for validation and additional perspectives from Learning Curves (and maybe some technology adoption curves), then end in the Provocateur mode with participants oriented for creating new products/services through morphological analysis (example 2).

Figure 4: processes across the matrix

In fact, you could probably develop this further to make it an easy-to-use process develop framework.  Aligning your project with client needs (archetypes) and making sure to include strengths from each of the quadrants would seem to always be beneficial.  This would just be a framework to help someone do that.

Well, this is not exactly where I had planned to end up when I started this post, but this is an interesting place to pause for now.