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.
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| Figure 1: the basic 2x2 matrix |
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.
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
