Futures Thinking

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What is Futures Thinking?

Futures Thinking is the habit of treating the future as plural, and of using more than one image of it before you commit.

There is no single future “out there” to be predicted. There are many alternative futures to be anticipated and pre-experienced to some degree.

Jim Dator wrote that in 2009, in the Journal of Futures Studies. He was describing the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, in the political science department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The future in that sentence is not a place you can visit, but a set of images people already carry. The habit gets more than one image into the open, and lets the set change a decision you can still make. The everyday picture is a bag packed for a week that may be hot or stormy. You do not pack only for the average afternoon. You keep one layer that still works if the storm comes, and you leave the snow boots if neither picture has snow. Scenario Thinking builds a small set of contrasting stories, often forward from today, so one strategy can be stressed against more than one of them. On this site, that page is the home of the Shell line, and Futures Thinking is the prior stance. More than one future stays in play, and a scenario set is only one way to fill the table. Backcasting names one future worth reaching and walks backward to test whether that future can exist. Futures Thinking keeps several images, including ones you would not choose, before any single end-point is locked.

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Futures Thinking in 3 Depths

• Beginner: The cue is a plan that contains only one future, often a sentence with “will” in it. Write a second future in which the main assumption fails, before you spend the money or the week.
• Practitioner: For a decision that has a date, write four short futures: continued growth, collapse, discipline, and transformation. Mark one as preferable and one as probable. Leave with one move this month that still helps in two of the four.
• Advanced: Dator writes that in the long run the four generic forms have equal probabilities, and so they should be considered with equal sincerity. That sentence is his rule for the exercise, not a chance counted from a sample. A preferable image that cannot exist is a wish, and a probable image you reject can still be the one that arrives.

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Origin

Futures Thinking enters the public record as an argument that the future can be studied. The later habit keeps that argument and refuses to treat the study as one prediction. In 1902, H. G. Wells gave a Royal Institution lecture, The Discovery of the Future. A 1913 reprint calls it a discourse delivered there. In The Future in America (1906), Wells writes that the lecture sits in Nature, volume 65, page 326, and in the Smithsonian Report for 1902. He separates a mind turned toward the past from a mind turned toward what has not happened yet. That hope of discovery is the ancestor of the habit, and it is not yet the later refusal to predict a single future. Mario Kessler’s 2007 biography records a letter dated 29 October 1942. Ossip K. Flechtheim asked John Herz about turning from the past toward the future, and he proposed the name futurology. In September 1945 Flechtheim published “Teaching the Future” in The Journal of Higher Education (volume 16, pages 460–465). In Der Spiegel on 23 July 1967, he wrote that he had coined futurology in 1943. The letter and the essay do not share one year, and this page does not collapse them. In that essay he also wrote that Bertrand de Jouvenel rejected the word, because it seemed to promise a certainty of prediction that cannot be had. De Jouvenel convened Futuribles in 1960, an international committee funded at the start by the Ford Foundation. L’Art de la conjecture appeared in 1964 (Éditions du Rocher). The English edition, The Art of Conjecture, translated by Nikita Lary, appeared in 1967 (Basic Books). In the Spiegel essay, Flechtheim described futuribles as a made word from “future” and “possible.” The product is a range of futures that could exist, held as conjecture. A conjecture can be argued, and it is not a claim that one line has already been discovered. Wendell Bell set the academic field out in Foundations of Futures Studies. A 2017 reprint of volume 1 says the book was originally published in 1997 by Transaction Publishers, while some catalogs list 1996. The volume is an account of systematic and explicit thinking about alternative futures. Volume 2 goes beyond possible and probable futures to preferable futures. Futures studies, in that usage, is the field, and it is not a second name for this habit. Dator’s 2009 essay, “Alternative Futures at the Manoa School,” is the working account of four images. He writes that he started by assuming good data would reveal one true future. Conflicting images, each coherent on its own premises, ended that hope. He then grouped the images he could find into four generic futures. The abstract’s labels are continuation, collapse, discipline, and transformation. In the body, the first is continued growth, and he calls it the official view of governments, schools, and organizations. Each image, he writes, has features some people want and features some people do not, and none is a best case or a worst case by itself. High, medium, and low variations around one forecast are a different exercise. He also sets an order. Look at the past of the group, air the present, and forecast what may be new, often on a horizon of about 20 to 50 years. Experience the alternative futures before anyone draws a preferred future. Only then decide what to do now, and in what order. He asks groups not to skip a step, and not to limit the room to leaders. He distinguishes this use from scenario planning. The four images are a coarser sort, and their job is to stop the official future from being the only one in the room. A related capability is futures literacy, the name Riel Miller gave work developed at UNESCO. UNESCO’s public page describes it as learning to use the future, including futures that are probable, preferable, or reframed, inside participatory laboratories. Miller’s book Transforming the Future: Anticipation in the 21st Century (2018, UNESCO, also issued by Routledge) is the book-length account. The book says the UNESCO project started in late 2012. One chapter says that since 2012 over 36 novelty laboratories had been run in more than 20 countries, while the introduction’s figure is “more than 30” experiments. Those are counts of laboratories in that book, not a measured change in decisions. Later brochures give higher counts, and this page does not blend the tallies. Foresight, as UNESCO uses the word beside futures literacy, is the professional practice. Futures literacy asks why one uses the future, not only how to plan, and neither name replaces Futures Thinking on this page. Two public offices show the same stance inside an institution, without a measured effect. The Parliament of Finland describes the Committee for the Future as a standing committee established in 1993. Its stated mission is dialogue with the government on major future problems and opportunities. Singapore’s Centre for Strategic Futures says it was established in 2009, inside the then Strategic Policy Office, to work on blind spots and open-ended long-term research. On 1 July 2015 it became part of the Strategy Group in the Prime Minister’s Office. A committee and a centre keep the future on an official agenda, and they do not, by themselves, show that the habit changed a result.

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Key Points

Futures Thinking pays when one official future is doing the deciding, and when you can still change a present action. It stalls when the extra futures never touch that action.

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Applications

Use Futures Thinking when a decision still has more than one future that would change the move, and when you can name that move. A single number that a rule will grade is a different job.

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Case Study

A documented comparison that keeps future alternatives in view, and then scores what followed, is the corporate foresight study led by René Rohrbeck and Menes Etingue Kum. They published it in 2018 in Technological Forecasting and Social Change (volume 129, pages 105–116). The same year, Rohrbeck, Kum, Tymen Jissink, and Adam V. Gordon issued a benchmarking report from the Strategic Foresight Research Network at Aarhus BSS. The report presents that study. Preparedness is the 2008 score, and performance is from 2015. The question was whether a firm whose foresight practices matched the pace of change around it later showed different results from a firm that did not. The report says earlier evidence had stayed anecdotal, because foresight is hard to separate from other useful work, and from what competitors and the industry do in the same years. Future preparedness, in their model, is not a raw count of workshops. It compares the maturity of foresight practices with the need for them, judged from how complex and how volatile the environment seemed. The report gives the sample. They invited 467 firms. 135 took part. 52 returns were incomplete or inconsistent, which left 83. The questionnaire used 35 items for foresight maturity and 10 items for need. It was offered in English and German, and the incentive to answer was a tailored benchmark of the firm’s own foresight. Profitability could be retrieved for 70 firms from S&P Capital IQ. Market-capitalization growth from 2008 to 2015 could be matched for 42 publicly listed firms. Vigilant firms, the ones whose maturity matched need, averaged 16 percent profitability. The report calls the comparison point an overall industry average of 12 percent, and says the vigilant group was 33 percent more profitable than that average. The report’s chart of market-capitalization growth marks +200 percent on the vigilant comparison. On the shortfall side, the executive summary says firms one level short of vigilant proficiency, labeled vulnerable, had 37 percent lower profitability and 39 percent lower market-capitalization growth than vigilant firms. Firms two or more levels short, labeled in danger, had 44 percent lower profitability and negative growth. A later findings paragraph groups neurotic firms with vulnerable firms at that same 37 percent profitability gap against vigilant firms. The “one level short” label in the summary is the vulnerable group, not every firm off the vigilant bar. The report describes three skills a firm builds if it is to reach the vigilant score. It perceives change, through a scan wide enough to notice and deep enough to interpret. It prospects, with tools such as scenarios, so a looming shift has a time attached. It probes, with a budget set aside to learn in a market that does not yet pay the way the current one does. Those skills are an organization doing, over years, the thing this page asks a person to do on one decision. More than one future stays in view, and a present action follows. The boundary is the design. This is a longitudinal comparison, not a trial that assigned Futures Thinking to some firms and withheld it from others. The firms that answered had a reason to want a foresight benchmark. Seven years is long enough for many other causes of profit and of market value. The authors treat preparedness as a predictor, and the report says the link is hard to isolate. Do not cite 16 percent against 12 percent, or the 33 percent gap, as a personal return. The 37, 39, and 44 percent gaps, and the +200 percent chart mark, are the same kind of comparison. A workshop, a household meeting, or one afternoon with four futures is a different object.

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Boundaries and Failure Modes

Futures Thinking fails when the choice is already closed, when a rule demands one number, and when the sheet never changes a present action. The first boundary is a closed choice. The train leaves in ten minutes, or the dose is already prescribed. Four futures will not create a fifth track, and the time spent writing them is a cost. The habit belongs upstream of a decision that still has branches. Dator’s horizon of about 20 to 50 years is a planning horizon for a community or an organization. A Thursday deadline borrows the stance, not that horizon. One extra future, and one move, is the small form. The second boundary is a number a rule will grade. A tax line, a clinical dose, or a budget that has to close needs a calculation someone can check. Futures Thinking does not replace that calculation. It asks which future the number assumes, and what would still be worth doing if that future failed. A forecast can sit inside the habit as the probable column. The forecast becomes a misuse when it is allowed to erase the other columns. The common misuse has two forms. One is four posters and no present move, so Dator’s sequence stays unfinished until someone decides what to do now. The other is to read the firm study as a personal profit rate. The percentages describe firms scored in 2008 on organizational foresight, relative to the change in their environment, and measured again in 2015. They do not describe a student, a household, or a two-hour meeting.

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Common Misconceptions

Three confusions travel with the name. The habit gets mistaken for a scenario workshop, for a sharper forecast, and for any look at a distant or a failed future.

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Related Concepts

These neighboring pages cover plausible stories, one chosen end-point, later consequences, imagined failure, the next effect, and chances.

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One-Line Takeaway