Instructor's Approach and Futures Toolbox

Instructor's Approaches and Futures Toolbox

-- a university of arizona course on methods and approaches for studying the future

There are four parts to this summary -- 1) general and probably familiar approaches, 2) generally unfamiliar approaches, 3) my basic approach as a checklist, and 4) a futures toolbox. Also talk a look at a what others have learned about studying the future and my own thoughts on what I have learned.

1. Familiar Approaches
2. Possibly Unfamiliar Approaches

• Chaotic behavior and organizations
Chaos may be more ordered than we think and too much organization is confining. Chaordic organizations are marked by flexibility, innovation, adaptability and inclusiveness.

• Dealing with uncertainty, ignorance, and change.
One cannot predict the future! Therefore we have to learn to deal with change and uncertainty, and most importantly to learn to deal with what we don't know (including how to know when we don't know it).

• Scenarios and images to broaden the possibilities
Scenarios are like a "scene" in the theater - they weave the necessary and the unnecessary along with what is known and what is fantasy into different settings. Good products might produce 4 or so different scenarios of the future but you cannot tell which is more likely or desirable because of the cleaver designs. However, you learn a great deal about the topic during this process - which is the purpose of scenarios.
3. My Basic Approach and Checklist

• Use a multi-step process every time - omit certain steps only if unnecessary for the project scale
- Research an issue from multiple perspectives and review existing knowledge to gain historical context
- Recognize the few but significant paradigm shifts underway - both receding and advancing
- Understand major emerging and receding trends, and their clustering into driving forces for change
- Build (a few) scenarios to better understand how to react to combinations of events
- Make conclusions that can be modified, are flexible, and allow for wild card events
- Recognize times change and revisiting conclusions developed in another situation is a worthwhile effort
- Keep it simple, share results in a format and within a context familiar to your audience
4. The Futures Toolbox and How to Use It

• What do futurists do and what are they like?
- Anticipate change and react to it.
- Part historian, part scientist, part feet on ground part feet in air.
- Interest in a broad range of subjects, some curiosity, and a sense of the "big picture"
- Mostly integrator with sense of the whole and comfortable with uncertainty.

• What is in the toolbox of techniques?
- It is more than forecasting, predicting, or palm reading.
- Tools are drawn from many disciplines - pick the ones that fit the job at hand.
- Examples: context setting research, assessments, possible wild cards, focus groups, trend and scenario analysis.

• Reviewing a good approach to study the future?
- Develop anticipatory skills and maintain awareness of current and potential changes
- Know what to look for and separating important events from noise
- Use a radar approach rather than a vacuum cleaner approach to data gathering
- Know what tools are available and when to use them and when not to use them
- Prepare to react early to new changes while allowing for flexibility for error as more is learned
- Don't place undue trust in experts or in non-experts (or yourself)
- Watch out for the bandwagon effect (safety in numbers ) or group think (fear of standing out)
- Be wary of unstated assumptions or simplistic statements; the seemingly obvious may not be right
- Implement foresight knowledge into your daily activities so you become an "automated futurist"

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Prepared by Roger L. Caldwell