What is the Value of Futures and Foresight?

The Experiential Futures Ladder. Diagram by author. See articles The Experiential Turn (02016) and Designing an Experiential Scenario (2017) co-written with Jake Dunagan

There has been a tremendous expansion in awareness of and interest in futures/foresight work recently, especially those approaches that intersect with the arts, media and design. Projects and publications, courses and conferences on these topics are flourishing like never before.

As Cher Potter and I wrote in our introduction to the collection Design and Futures in 2019:

Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon famously observed: “Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones”.

Designers and futurists, it turns out, have a great deal in common. This mutual recognition is reaching critical mass as each comes to appreciate how their respective traditions have much to offer to making urgent change in the world, and even more so, together.

It is increasingly acknowledged within the futures studies community that operating with a largely verbal and theoretical bent over the past half century has afforded too little impact on actual future-shaping behaviours. Meanwhile, those in the design community recognise a need to interrogate higher-level consequences — the futures, the worlds — that their products, systems and other outputs help produce.

Part of what bringing design and futures into sustained dialogue does is to allow each field to become more fluent in a second language which is the other’s native tongue.

This was published before the Covid-19 pandemic kicked in, but if anything, already established trends in practice have only continued to accelerate since.

In the past handful of years, diverse organisations — cultural ones like the BBC, multilateral ones like the United Nations Development Programme, scientific ones like NASA JPL, and humanitarian ones like the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies — have embraced experiential futures as part of the very different things that they do in the world. The largest futures event ever held, a Futures Literacy Summit hosted by UNESCO with over 8000 registered participants, took place online at the end of 2020. Also late last year, a collection of us spread around the planet launched the UNTITLED futures festival, likewise staged largely online thanks to the pandemic, but planned to iterate annually through 2030. This month, a show called The Great Imagination opened in Madrid, surveying the history of images of the future (and featuring our experiential scenario NurturePod), and a major exhibition by the Smithsonian Institution, FUTURES, for which I served on the advisory Working Group, just opened on the National Mall in Washington DC. In addition, since last year I’ve been collaborating with the World Economic Forum to help explore the integration of foresight approaches, and especially experiential futures, into their research work, as well as convenings such as the annual Global Technology Governance Summit, held for the first time in April.

It was also last year that the United Kingdom’s RSA (royal society for arts, manufactures and commerce) released a report about “realising the value of futures and foresight” called A Stitch in Time? The authors had reached out to me to ask questions on this topic, and I shared some thoughts in reply. Now, since these kinds of issues are arising more and more––and evaluation of foresight work is also a live topic of conversation among professional and academic futurists––here is the full Q&A.

***

RSA: What is the value / distinct offer that experiential / ethnographic futures brings? Are there particular settings they work well in, and how do such approaches land with clients, particularly policy-makers––is it helpful, or seen as wacky?

SC: There are a few threads in this first point. I’ll try to tease them out briefly.

The distinctive value of experiential futures practices comes from how they help people connect to potential realities in waiting as more than just as ideas or thought experiments. There’s a one-pager from The Economist here, a recent piece I wrote for the Cooper Hewitt (Smithsonian Design Museum) here, and for more background and nuance, a journal article from Futures, a deep dive into the design of a card game we created as a distillation of experiential futures ideation, and a book-length exploration describing a kind of foundation for these practices.

Ethnographic futures work is about researching how people actually perceive, think and feel about the landscape of possibilities. Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) is a process for bringing the above two traditions together, so it’s really scaffolding for making people’s images of alternative futures (a) legible, and then (b) graspable using whatever means fit the context — immersive experiences, performance, physical futures artifacts displayed in a museum or sent through the mail, etc. There’s a journal article about EXF here, or an earlier blog post with I think more images.

These approaches are by no means intended solely for consumption by “clients” — they can also augment public conversation, with much wider or more open-ended audiences, which has since we started doing this ~15 years ago always been a priority.

The extent to which the interventions reflect or deepen, vs push back on or challenge, the thinking of the people encountering them varies enormously. I think it’s usefully regarded as one of the main design variables; that is, something you make choices about, not at all something preordained, automatic, or identical across projects.

How do you evaluate foresight work? Is it possible / needed / appropriate?

How you evaluate something depends entirely on what you are trying to do with it. I’ve suggested (in The Futures of Everyday Life) that education, exploration, evangelism (persuasion) and entertainment are among the diverse purposes that might attach to different experiential futures projects or interventions. Naturally you’d bring different evaluative lenses to bear on each.

One of the main evaluative questions that I think is too often overlooked is “how does it affect the people doing it?” as opposed to “how does it affect someone else?”

How does futures work (especially experiential futures) evolve in this “new normal” period when our experience of reality is so heightened and visceral?

One move is to create online experiences. For example, we’ve been staging experiential scenarios online based on published visions in the public domain. Recently we created an immersive experience of the world decades after the Green New Deal has passed into law, based on the book A Planet to Win by Kate Aronoff et al; and another experience inspired by CEO Kickstarter Yancey Strickler’s book This Could Be Our Future; one using Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto as a starting point, and so on. This work hasn’t been written up as an article yet but you can see a bit more about it at the page for this event we ran back in April, The Time Machine: An Anthology of Visions (click “View details”).

I’ve also written a piece about lessons from directing a global online game for pandemic preparedness, called Coral Cross, funded by the CDC, a decade ago.

Is the field gaining traction as a result of Covid-19? What barriers do we need to overcome for its adoption as a valuable asset for decision-makers and planners? Do you see specific opportunities opening up?

Since Covid, people now seem to have less trouble coming to the premise that thinking about alternative futures might be useful for their organisation or context. So actually some of the main challenges I see at the moment are not necessarily “barriers to adoption” per se, because there’s a great deal of uptake and adoption — the demand side is healthy.

It’s the supply side that is bottlenecked, so in some ways it may be more a matter of “barriers to skilful implementation”. There are more people wanting to do this work, freshly trained or newly experimenting with it, than there are really good, experienced futurists to help guide them. This means there’s room for legitimate concern about insufficiently supported, under resourced, or hastily executed work delivered in or to organisations that have less experience — and the risk is less robust outcomes in the short term, followed by disappointment, and then some time will pass before they try again and, hopefully, do what they should have done in the first place!

Do you think there are valuable insights from aligning / working with other fields or disciplines?

Futures is by its nature a transdisciplinary field. It always involves engaging with a range of other fields and perspectives, and this is among its greatest and most distinctive strengths, I think, as well as an important part of what keeps it interesting.

Are you teaching this as a stand alone course, or a module for those taking other courses? And do you find that people with a particular mindset or personal attributes are better at this work or adopt it more easily?

In keeping with the point above: I think it’s useful to see futures/foresight as a set of competencies that anyone can learn and use over time, and that cut across and complement other fields. I see great value, and even a civilisational imperative, in distributing futures fluency or literacy more widely throughout our communities and culture, which is part of the long-run orientation that we sometimes speak about in terms of developing “social foresight”.

There’s certainly increasing demand for futures training in many quarters, yes, including students, and our evil plan to normalise or integrate futures thinking as a part of design has come along in leaps and bounds over the last decade. We also work with a real range of organisations in various capacities, from US Conference of Mayors, the BBC, Skoll World Forum, IDEO, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to the Smithsonian Institution, UK National Lottery, Alaska’s Cook Inlet Tribal Council, and so on. Regarding aptitude, people with a cultural fluency or orientation tend to pick it up really quickly. I especially like working with museums and other cultural organisations, because I think they’re among the best avenues to social foresight — getting wisdom into the water supply, so to speak.

What might you wish for in the further development of this field?

Futures work is highly relational. It’s about not just when, but also who, and where you are. It’s not a compliance process you can just step through automatically, checking boxes; much less a product to buy and be done with it. It’s more like dancing. I expect to see more organisations realising they could use a few dancing lessons, and reaching out for help with that. They will have to be prepared to take risks and missteps, though, or how will they ever learn? And it might seem embarrassing at first, but the sooner they’ll do it, the faster they’ll learn and benefit, and maybe even have more fun. By the way, this seems to be happening quite a bit more quickly in the nonprofit and public sectors than in the business world. To generalise a bit, the former tend to be better equipped for, as my friend Michelle King puts it, “learning in public,” while the latter are often concerned about a commercial confidentiality that can really get in their own way. Over time, though, those two different stances, one more open and the other more closed, seem likely to yield the results they deserve.

We’re writing this short provocation report for a lay audience, the intellectually curious, who are unlikely to be experts in this space. Is it possible to identify the two or three things that you wish everyone knew about the field (or perhaps myths you’d love to bust)?

No one, including futurists, can tell you what the future will be. If someone tries to sell you that, don’t hire them.

Folks in the field generally refer to it, almost interchangeably, as futures (oriented around the subject matter) or foresight (oriented around the competency), not futurism or futurology. By and large that’s almost a litmus test of whether you’re dealing with someone who knows the field or not.

Futures is a container or meta-perspective that includes, classically, multiple modalities to address — and we can simplify a bit here, borrowing a classic typology — possible, probable and preferable futures. Each of these conversations inescapably involves engaging different kinds of knowledge, so the practice is bound to be part art (what could happen?), part science (what can the evidence tell us?), and part politics (what do we value; what should we do?) If that seems messy, just look at how messy the world is.

I would be most suspicious of any perspective that pretends complexity can be simply tamed. Futures or foresight offers the necessary structures and spaces to help integrate reality’s mess with the organisational dialogue. Among other things, it’s an orientation to constant learning. As my colleague Jake Dunagan (now at Institute for the Future) and I are fond of saying, “It’s better to be surprised by simulation than blindsided by reality.”

***

For further reading, here is the full RSA report: A Stitch in Time: Realising the Value of Futures and Foresight.

And finally, just published in the past week by the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies is a report looking at how arts and futures work intersect, including the rise of experiential futures practices: Futures Shaping Art / Art Shaping Futures.

The mediation of alternative futures at various levels of abstraction. Diagram by author.

This post was previously published on Medium.

Related:
> An Experiential Futures Interview
> Design is Storytelling
> The Experiential Turn
> Design and Futures Volume I & Volume II | Full-text book
> Exploring Technology Governance Futures with the World Economic Forum
> Introducing Experiential and Participatory Futures at the BBC
> Adding Dimensions to Development Futures at UNDP
> Using the Future at NASA
> Bringing Futures to Stanford d.School
> UNTITLED: A Bold New Experiment in Public Imagination
> Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF)
> Coral Cross: When Reality Outruns Imagination

Three Dimensions of Foresight

As the covid-19 crisis unfolds, many of us are looking to an extravagantly uncertain future with anxiety, as well as a new appreciation and appetite for whatever brings confidence and clarity to prospection.

How might concerned citizens engage in more effective futures thinking and storytelling?



Columbia University's Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL), led by a veteran experimental storyteller, my friend Lance Weiler, has responded to the pandemic by offering ingenious, collaborative, and free opportunities for hundreds of folks in quarantine and isolation all around the world to come together, imagine alternative futures, and manifest them through co-created digital story artifacts.

The project is called From the Futures. With this effort, Lance, Columbia DSL and team are tending a welcome oasis of collective creativity for our moment.

They invited me to help kick things off with an introduction to a framework related to the experiential futures space that the project inhabits and plots out. The slides embedded above distil that talk, "Three Dimensions of Foresight".

The three dimensions can be seen as corresponding to various manoeuvres or methods in the futures repertoire that typically require quite a bit of practice to master. But even for those trying experiential futures for the first time (which would include many From the Futures participants), they can also be mobilised right away via a series of practical moves towards storytelling more different, deep, and diverse than it might otherwise be:

• Difference : let us seek seeds of change in the present that could be really transformative if they were to grow.
• Depth : let us try to not just think, but also feel, our way into these imagined conditions by devising specific future artifacts and diverse media to bring the imagined possibilities to life as if they came to pass.
• Diversity : let us operate generally in terms of plural futureS, but even if constructing a single scenario or possibility for a particular project, find what is fresh and uncommon for the ecology of thinkable and feelable futures, since a new story may be dramatically more valuable than yet another telling of one that we have already heard many times before.

The framework has its origins in my doctoral project on experiential futures. There I ventured an arguments about the need to build on, and systematically range beyond, the most common practices and methods of previous generations of futurists. I wanted to show that foresight practitioners could and should embrace a range of "experiential" (a deliberately big umbrella) approaches, in pursuit of the requisite realism and resonance to affect how we think and what we do in the present. Often this would mean seeking and evoking depth; making a future's details and implications available and graspable –– tangibly, sensorially, viscerally –– in ways usually lacking from the even most carefully researched, well written horizon scans or scenarios. This approach includes an assumption or acknowledgement that things at later points in time are bound to be as real, complex, and full of contradictions as the present. We should strive then to get "under the skin" of the futures we face, and engage them not in the abstract as intellectual constructs, but through evocative concrete experiences, as potential realities in waiting.

In this connection I wrote about the need for a "mundane turn" in futures practice (The Futures of Everyday Life, 02010, pp. 89–94), by analogy with an important shift of orientation that had already taken place decades earlier in cultural history, tying this quest for modest but evocative fragments, details and textures of worlds to come, to design and discussion in the present of artifacts or experiences that might exist in those futures (hence the phrase "futures of everyday life"). Among other contributors, Nick Foster's perceptive essay The Future Mundane, and Tony Dunne and Fiona Raby's influential book Speculative Everything (both 02013) carried these sorts of ideas further among design audiences. It has been satisfying to see the spread of futures-curious, design-led practices like design fiction and speculative design summoning new explorers and fellow travellers to this terrain.

The three dimensional lenses on futures practice came into sharper focus soon after the dissertation work, and they helped frame our first run of the Strategic Foresight course in the Design Strategy MBA program at California College of the Arts (02010). That course is outlined here. Since then, and refined thanks to audiences and student groups over the years, 3D foresight has become one of the main ways I introduce futures to newcomers.

For those who might like a more methodologically detailed overview of 3D foresight, with additional examples, I recently gave a lecture across campus at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute, How to think about the future.

Our video of the talk to From the Futures participants (via Zoom) has already been shared, and Lance's written accounts of the initiative so far can be found in the posts Designing for immersion in Zoom and From the Futures: experiments in collaborative art and collective wayfinding in a time of ambiguity.

A wonderful sense of the swarming, emergent, hive-mind creativity that this process has helped to unleash, and to guide, is captured visually in the timelapse below. If interested in receiving updates or taking part yourself, head here.



Related:
> The Futures of Everyday Life (pdf)
> About the first Strategic Foresight course at CCA (pdf)
> A Brief Outline of Experiential Futures
> Design for the Next Context (Closing Keynote at 02010 AIGA Conference)
> The Experiential Turn (with Jake Dunagan)
> On Getting Started in Experiential Futures
> Design is Storytelling

Strategic Foresight and the Design MBA

An element of a crowdsourced scenario development exercise
run by guest presenter Noah Raford  |  Photo: Riaz

Last year I was invited to teach a brand new class, Strategic Foresight, in the Design MBA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

A while later DMBA's Chair Nathan Shedroff asked each faculty member to contribute a brief article to a collection serving as a showcase and snapshot of the program -- which is unique in U.S. business education -- two and a half years after its founding in 02008.

That collection, Design Strategy in Action, has now been published. My piece introducing some of the basic thinking behind the Strategic Foresight class can be found here (pdf hosted by ResearchGate).

Feedback is welcome.

I'll take this opportunity to reiterate the acknowledgements appearing in the print edition: I am grateful to Dr Jay Ogilvy for being a delight to teach with, and to guest speakers Jamais Cascio, Napier Collyns, Dr Jake Dunagan, Erika Gregory, and Noah Raford for their excellent contributions to the inaugural Fall 2010 class. I would like to acknowledge Nathan Shedroff and Teddy Zmrhal for providing exceptional support and freedom as I developed the Strategic Foresight syllabus, Dr Wendy Schultz for highly valued input during that process, and finally Professor Jim Dator for his incomparable example as a futures teacher.

  Christie presents an experiential scenario about social media  |  Photo: Riaz

(Update 08aug16: replaced old article link to pdf as published and laid out in book.)

Questioning hyperopia

A roundup of the year's most interesting ideas in The New York Times Magazine at the end of 02006 included an entry on "hyperopia: an excess of farsightedness".

The piece referenced the research of two scholars at Columbia University, whose findings appeared in the Journal of Consumer Research, in an article entitled "Repenting Hyperopia" (available as a pdf here).

Whether the rationale of forgoing pleasure today (for what reasons, the study doesn't discuss) retrospectively contributes to net happiness is a very interesting question. According to these authors, it doesn't. In their analysis, which entailed quizzing subjects about a range of decisions they'd made, the guilt that can result from "myopia" (making decisions for indulgence today) tends to fade over time, whereas the regret associated with missing out due to "hyperopia" (here identified with ascetic choices, described as "virtuous") tended to endure. This, say the authors, contradicts the "classic literature on self-control" which "assumes that consumers regret yielding to hedonic temptations".

An important reason why this could be the case, it seems to me, is because the study contains nothing linking decisions made to consequences experienced. It mainly illuminates the pattern that guilt feelings don't appear to last as long as than the regrets of missed opportunity, which relates to the ways those different types of emotions play out (the former is "hot" and dissipates quickly, the latter "cool" and slow to leave). By contrast, it would be interesting to see a similar study of, say, the retrospective feelings of cakelovers whose repeated choices to eat cake either did (in one group) or did not (in another) lead to obesity and/or heart disease. Similarly, smokers whose daily habit culminated in chronic emphysema might express a bit more indulgence remorse than the one-off decisions made by the groups surveyed in the studies in question. If the incidence rates illuminating the risk associated with "myopic" behaviours (smoking/emphysema; poor diet/obesity) were evaluated against the rate and degree of regret experienced, we might expect to come away with a better sense of how serious a problem "hyperopia" really is.

Also, to bring out explicitly an important point that's implied in my remarks above, one slice of chocolate cake, or one bowl of fruit salad, is hardly grounds for getting worked up. The feelings over time that we experience about single decisions to eat some cake, attend a party, or spend money on winter break (for such is the subject matter of this research) are relatively trivial compared to repeat instances or patterns of behaviour. By and large, we might hypothesise, it's not a one-time indulgence that you'll regret, but the lifestyle. The temporal measure is only superficially about the passage of time per se, what's actually at issue is the accumulated consequences of lots of little decisions.

Turning to the macro scale now; we can see the point more clearly. Global warming is not the result of one car trip. The devastation of rainforest is not caused by eating one hamburger. But multiply these things out by decades, and millions of people, and we all have ample reason to regret those little indulgences. Let's turn it around now. Is it hyperopic not to drive to work on one day because you're concerned about global warming? How about not eating that one hamburger because of the forest?

Agonising over a these minor decisions on a one-off basis might be a symptom of hyperopia. On the other hand, deciding to ride a bicycle to work instead of drive an SUV, or deciding to become vegetarian to avoid the resource intensiveness of remaining omnivorous -- though both evince highly farsighted modes of thought, I would argue they aren't "hyperopic" in a pejorative sense.

In any case, people seem to have some psychological difficulty accepting the cumulative responsibility for incremental negative effects of their decisions; so, research that evaluated the level of their regret as it mapped onto scaled-up consequences (for their health, or that of the planet) could be very interesting. A key issue seems to be whether decision-making effort is expended according to the magnitude of the stakes in question. And that could lead to better measures of myopia and hyperopia -- the extent to which people devote too little, or too much, deliberative effort to the actual risks associated with their behaviour.

One final point, then: in light of the above it's unfortunate that in this research the term hyperopia (literally, "farsightedness") is used here to denote excessive delayed gratification, because it conflates foresightful decision-making (a genus of decision that is made with a view to its potential long-term, including cumulative, consequences) with the problem of overly zealous ascetiscism (a species of largely symbolic rationale with ideological-religious undertones). Their conclusion that "myopia may be farsighted after all" seems particularly susceptible to abuse by anyone who might like to argue that we're better off not thinking ahead, an analogous claim to the one that the market will take care of everything, so there's no need to worry about policy to prevent long-term problems emerging from our collective economic activity. I'm not disputing the research findings as such, but simply pointing out the way they're framed seems consistent with dismissing the value of thinking ahead. That conclusion again: "myopia may be farsighted after all". But surely by definition, myopia is as bad as -- albeit different from -- hyperopia?

So, this research shows that sometimes we're better off, subjectively speaking, indulging ourselves today. I have no problem with that; it certainly comports with my own experience in certain areas (e.g. spending money while travelling). To be able to take that very finding into account, enhances our capacity for looking ahead (as an avenue to choosing wisely), which is in my view an undervalued good in the world of decision-making, and ought to be thoughtfully encouraged and developed. Another term, for the paralysis that can result from thinking too far out -- taking too much long-range responsibility -- is "karma vertigo" (coined by Jaron Lanier); and that's certainly a syndrome we'd do well to avoid in thinking ahead. But I fear that farsightedness is currently in too fragile a state to be given a bad name by dint of semantic carelessness on the part of these researchers. Ironically, this swipe at hyperopia could really exacerbate (what I regard as) already myopic tendencies in society.

Perhaps the problem is simply that their analysis of future orientation in decision-making is missing a category, which is implied but not discussed; the sweet spot between the extremes of excessive farsightedness and shortsightedness: foresight.

On not thinking too hard

Some time ago, one Jose Garcia from a website called MemeTherapy emailed to ask me a couple of questions for a regular feature entitled "Brain Parade". Here's what transpired -- the questions he posed, and the answers I duly supplied:

Q: Putting aside a comprehensive vision of the future, do you have a single "pet prediction" of something that you think might happen over the next decade or two?

A: I think prediction will be widely discredited for evincing, in most cases, an unsound epistemological stance in relation to "the future" (which should usually be in the plural).

Q: Does the increasing willingness by many people to share private information online suggest a shift an attitudes towards privacy or could it be naivete?

A: Both things are happening. Attitudes are certainly changing, but there's also an element of naivete -- behaviour uninformed by foresight -- at play in our evolving info-sharing habits. Many web users don't yet realise the durability of the tracks they leave behind, and much of what people do with the web is not informed by forethought about how (or by whom) it could later be used. The fact that a large chunk of the adolescent generation is leaving records of its social life online may suggest that many would have to deal with some degree of embarrassment in later life, courtesy of all those crazy party shots archived on myspace. Or it may mean that, with more fragments of people's "private" lives readily available in the "public" domain, the content of what's cordoned off in the name of privacy shrinks (and with it, the causes of embarrassment). Meanwhile, we may also develop more sophisticated strategies for managing our electronic personas, similar to (but on a more modest scale than) the way public figures have people to manage theirs. Main point: the technology changes faster, so the attitudes to privacy tend to be negotiated in response, rather than beforehand.

"Function creep" is central here; info collected for one purpose being used in unanticipated ways later on. An offline example: the increasing prevalence of security cameras (in the city of London it's already reaching Orwellian proportions) makes many fragments of one's daily movements available to the various eyes in the sky -- and this is largely accepted in view of prevailing crime and terrorism concerns. Now, a centralised database automatically tracking individuals throughout the day, using facial recognition, generated simply by joining up separate surveillance mechanisms, might not be so welcome. But as it becomes cheaper to link up, and perhaps more costly politically not to be able to track people, the calculus changes. What may once have been unacceptable could come to be regarded as necessary. So too with online information: what I today share with you personally through my gmail account could soon be trawled as a matter of routine by parties I never thought would access it, if the political climate makes that shift viable.

So, current trends suggest that "naive" use of IT is paving the way for changed attitudes, mostly in the nature of a contraction, to privacy itself. (Interestingly, all technology use is naive in the sense that we don't know what surprises are in store will cast current habits in a different light.) I have heard one senior futurist describe privacy as a middle-class illusion and luxury whose days are numbered. However, it seems unlikely that issues framed as personal or privacy concerns would be conceded on a large scale without a fight, which raises the interesting possibility of a backlash.

Perhaps not surprisingly, my response to Q1 has not appeared in the "Pet Predictions" Brain Parade. But since the feature based on Q2 hasn't yet surfaced (Jose has -- much like me, it seems -- been too busy to post anything substantial since mid-November) I wanted to pick up that thread.

This is partly because I've been puzzled about my own reticence about getting started on this blog again after a break. It's not that I'm not having lots of interesting conversations, stimulating work, and exciting experiences. Quite the opposite -- but writing regularly is a hard habit to get into, and an easy one to get out of. So, appropriately, the most recent post on MemeTherapy as I write this is a Brain Parade around the question "Do You Get Writer's Block?" And I've been thinking, there could be a link between the privacy question, and the writer's block question -- which I wasn't asked, but if I had been, the answer would unfortunately have to be an unqualified "yes" -- and, come to that, the prediction question too.

The connection? I think as a blogger you need a certain shamelessness, or disregard for posterity, in order to say pretty much anything online, in a form that could come back to haunt you many years hence.

I spent most of last summer working at The Long Now Foundation on its still-dormant-but-hopefully-not-for-too-much-longer Long Bets project, which is ultimately about holding people responsible for their prognostications. That is, lots of pundits and commentators make predictive statements for rhetorical (or political) purposes that serve their needs in the moment, but that are forgotten over time. They can thus retain the impressive aura of providing incisive, foresightful analysis without being held to account, because by the time the decisive moment rolls around, their earlier remarks have been forgotten. A memorable example of this accountability principle in action (courtesy of the FAIR website -- Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting) concerned Thomas Friedman's "rolling deadline" on Iraq, which sparked an interesting conversation internally at Long Now in relation to redesigning Long Bets.

For the record, it is my expectation that as smarter, deeper search tools become available, predictive statements will become more readily and more closely monitored, and the abuse of future discourse will be harder to get away with (...sure, you can quote me on that).

Even so, it's become apparent to me that whether or not you're in the prediction business, writing for cyberspace is not the same (from an accountability perspective) as writing in an earlier era. As much as I favour tightening the reins on people prone to abusing the ephemerality of public memory with manipulative or opportunistic prediction-mongering; if you think about it too much (and apparently, I do) it's also a little scary that anything you say can be held against you in the court of public opinion; not just now, but at any future time.

A dark lining inside that silver cloud could be the spectre of an informational variation of the Peter Principle, a scenario in which the most inoffensive, non-risktaking, vanilla-dull people who, by virtue of not doing anything very interesting with themselves, contrive to leave no online trace of political or personal indiscretions; and thus are best able to survive their perilous ascent up the ladder of public scrutiny, because they're the ones who have nothing to hide. (Of course it might be argued that there's more than a touch of this triumph of mediocrity in politics today...)

Maybe the key is not to think too hard about what you write, lest you fall prey to the paralysis of excess self-consciousness and karma vertigo; not to be perturbed by the cliches that crowd onto the blank slate before your eyes... (thanks to Jake Dunagan for a nice image that goes meta on writer's block).

Although I'd like to say I have the best interests of future generations at heart, I can't really claim to know what those are. An innocent and progressively well-intentioned remark today could be the stuff of Michael Richards and Mel Gibson levels of embarrassment in years to come!

So I'm blogging for today. And today, that's enough.

Welcome back to the sceptical futuryst.

Barbershop futures revisited, part II

/Continued from a previous post.../

There are many well travelled, cosmopolitan, and highly informed people operating in the futures field, but few can claim to have experienced such systematic first-hand exposure to the many views about the future held across different lifestyles, cultures and geographies, as Maya van Leemput. Her post-doctoral project "Agence Future" consisted of riding around the world (on a recumbent bicycle) conducting in-depth interviews on camera, with some 400 people in 20 countries, over a 30-month period. The common thread of discussion was their attitudes and understandings regarding the future(s). I was delighted when my post "Barbershop Futures" about futures-related conversation elicited a detailed response from her, which I posted under "Barbershop Futures Revisited, part I". Here, then, is part II, being further reflections in light of thoughts Maya offered; not a literal response to her, perhaps, so much as another run at further developing a few of the same ideas.

As I suggested in the original piece, to find oneself talking futures with all sorts of people is one of the core aspects of this line of work. There may be nearly as many differing conceptions about what being a futurist means as there are people who label themselves that way (incidentally, a topic touched on in an earlier post, "The meming of futures"). Attempts to codify and generate consensus on the nature of the profession are many, but as they proliferate, paradoxically they seem to contribute as much to the diversity of the field as to its consolidation. The Association of Professional Futurists provides one take on what futuring is all about. Swinburne University's Strategic Foresight FAQ (especially from Q7 onwards) offers another. I think my favourite statement of what it means to work in this field is HRCFS founder Jim Dator's list of "attributes of a futurist", crowned with the wonderful notion of aiglatson -- yearning for the future -- which can serve as a kind of litmus test for one's readiness to embark on futuring Manoa-style. (If you haven't seen Dator's list, do check it out. It may be that if the intellectual jack-of-all-trades, Renaissance woman conception of the ideal futurist that he describes appeals to you, then you have the holistic sensibility, not to mention the kind of grandiose transdisciplinary aspirations, that ought to serve you well.)

Regardless of the details of one's philosophy or outlook, it is surely an inescapable characteristic of being a futurist that one finds oneself constantly in conversation with all sorts of people about the future, whatever that means to them. Typically they have plenty to say, and as Maya points out, when a chord is struck, folks may unexpectedly open up on all kinds of big themes on the nature of life, the universe, and everything.

Accordingly, one of the necessary (but not, I hasten to add, sufficient) steps to becoming a futurist is simply to declare this early in each conversation with a new person. I don't like being -- or at any rate being seen as -- monomaniacal, but part of the "getting to know you" process typically involves discussing what you do for a living. Put a stake in the ground as a futurist, and you can have a conversation with virtually anyone about their conception of the future. If this is something you enjoy, you'll be delighted to find it's one of the key parts of the job. And I want to suggest that there's a give and take here; the trick to communicating about futures lies not only in finding new ways to describe the field, ways to articulate it that are meaningful and useful to others. It is also about the reciprocal process of gradually mapping in your own mind how your particular interlocutor, as well as people in general, conceptualise it. Consequently, an increasingly fine-tuned awareness of the nuances and variations in attitudes, by psychological, temperamental, professional, cultural, and other dimensions, is to my way of thinking a crucial aspect of developing as a futurist, and an important part of what one takes incrementally and osmotically from the body of conversational data. (Of course, if I'm really not in the mood for a detailed discussion, I find that simply telling people I'm a graduate student in political science is a good way to keep the conversation short.)

In the course of having these conversations, you steadily accumulate a kind of expertise on how lots of different people think about the future. But there is an art to conversation, and as the previous paragraph suggests, both give and take are involved. One part is listening and understanding, probing for comprehension of an aspect of someone's world view that has in many cases never been explicitly or carefully considered by them before. The other is a sort of advocacy for more rigorous, detailed, rich, systematic, creative, well considered kind of thinking about futures. Maya referred to Wendell Bell's mention of the role of advocacy in futures. But I sense that at levels both general and specific there's a balance to be struck with the former process -- inquiry. Although the relative importance of the two is bound to vary according to circumstances, I don't think one can advocate effectively without sensitive inquiry.

Someone recently sent me an article (Andrea Shapiro, "Applying Lessons from Public Health to Organizational Change", The Systems Thinker, September 2003) which usefully nailed the distinction between these two as follows:

In The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook (Currency/Doubleday, 1994), Richard Ross and Charlotte Roberts describe the value of both advocacy and inquiry. To them, advocacy involves expressing a certain position convincingly, forcefully, and clearly; it requires presenting your own assumptions, distinguishing between data and opinion, and articulating the logic and reasoning behind your conclusions. In contrast, inquiry means seeking to understand another's position by listening well and reflecting back what you heard, as well as seeking to understand the data and reasoning behind their conclusions and avoiding imposing your own interpretation on them.

Maya describes the animation and engagement that result when people warm to their future theme. I share her delight in being able to draw that out. At the same time, my original post alluded to the confusions or preconceptions that we futurists often encounter. These are not mutually exclusive; for instance, my experience with Wally the barber had elements of both. While eager to talk about the future, he was somewhat confounded at first by the idea that I wasn't thinking of it principally as a predictive endeavour.

I have found that plural or alternative futures thinking requires a sort of big-picture paradigm shift that some people don't quite grasp right away. Resistance to the plural view of futures is not incompatible with enthusiasm for "studying the future". I've been struggling with the question of what it is psychologically, educationally, developmentally or temperamentally (to name a few possible factors) that makes the difference between people "getting" futures or not -- and I'd love to hear readers' thoughts on this issue. I'm also currently going through some fascinating material on the psychology of counterfactual thinking (see this post for some remarks on counterfactuality, and expect more on that topic to appear here at the sceptical futuryst). Indeed, many of the thoughts presented here revolve around exploring more effective ways to communicate foresight, alternative futures, and long-termism (three interrelated but analytically separable modes of thinking).

But here's the bottom line, if there is one: inquiry and advocacy are both required in the futures communication process. After the quote above, the author continues;"Balancing advocacy and inquiry is especially important when dealing with apathy or resistance." It has been my observation that alternative futures thinking can be useful and engaging for pretty much anyone. However, apathy and resistance are not uncommon, so being able to deal with them in conversation is essential.

It was my own sense that I'd failed to communicate futures to full effect in terms interesting and relevant to a hairdresser which prompted the original piece. And Maya pointed out that I might have tried moving beyond framing the field in terms of its possible economic value to the barber's business to describe the field's big picture relevance. I take her point and agree completely. Yet the tension will likely to remain between, on the one hand, encouraging a future orientation to do better (or cheaper, or for longer) what we already do; and on the other hand, using conversation about futures to move beyond today's problems, and dream big, and construct idiosyncratic or dissenting visions of the individual, family, community, and planet. In the former case, inquiry trumps advocacy, as futures thinking is brought into the service of existing priorities, and its revolutionary potential to transform thought and action is defused to that extent. In the latter case, advocacy can trump inquiry, and if you push its transformative potential too far on a party unwilling to entertain that, they shut it out; increased resistance or apathy (varieties of the same syndrome -- denial of responsibility?) may ensue.

Hazardous and difficult though it may be, one thing is for sure in all this: we need to keep working on the Great Futures Conversation. Thanks to Maya, and to Wally, for the impetus to continue evolving these ideas.

Learning the trade: the futurist's apprentice

I'd like to propose an idea for the futures community. The idea is that each and every professional futurist consider taking on an apprentice to mentor through to independence.

Not a new concept, I hasten to add -- as far as employment is concerned, it's one of the oldest ones there is, dating back to the late middle ages. It is not even a new idea for the futures community. There seems to be plenty of talk about "mentoring" in a broad sense, and many of the futurists I know can name one or two people that taught them "everything they know" -- or at least, most of what they knew at one time -- and with that, the inspiration and example which allowed them to go on to carve their own niche. There may even be future-oriented organisations that have a more or less established mentoring or apprenticeship system. I can't name any, but such may exist, and if this is the case, more power to them.

What I'm suggesting is that this be developed as a more habitual, and more widely known, mechanism for getting into the field -- because assuredly, at this time, getting good training in futures is not easy. And it needs to be easier, in the sense of lowering barriers and providing opportunities, if it is to catalyse the culture-changing work that needs to be done.

I've been contemplating this in light of the recent discussion of "The future of futurism" which suggested to me both that serious futurists aren't getting their message across to journalists and, by extension, the general public as effectively as they might like; and that certain people who are marketing themselves (in some ways more effectively) as futurists are simply making it up as they go along. (The predictive mode is almost antithetical to learning, because if it were really about learning, one of the first things it would have learned is that prediction doesn't work very well.) The upshot is that mechanisms to teach and learn real futures still require our close attention; which is the proximate reason for this piece.

As suggested above, then, mentorship is already a key part of accumulating practical experience in futures. To the extent they're not self-taught (the default situation) many futures practitioners can trace the steepest part of the learning curve to university courses like those at Houston, Swinburne, or Hawaii. Some win their spurs in organisations like GBN, Futuribles, or Royal Dutch/Shell. Some just attend conferences, do a lot of reading, and figure the rest out for themselves. The optimal situation for the neophyte would seems to be to experience a mixture of these. But the sine qua non of doing futures well appears to me to be lots of experience (generating, elucidating and pursuing future possibilities), and lots of conversations with people who know what they're talking about.

This gestures back to the long-standing discussion over whether futures is more an art or a science. To my mind, there's no longer much usefully to say on this: it's a mixture -- try to fit it into one hole exclusively and you miss the other. Is it a profession or a trade? Again, it strikes me as a bit of both. (I'm doubtful that it's worth getting hung up on the distinctions, which can detract from actually doing anything useful. In this regard, I often think of Canadian futurist Ruben Nelson's observation at the 02005 WFSF conference in Hungary, to the effect that "future studies isn't 'the work'; improving the world is the work, and futures is a means to do that").

But the field, to the extent that it's still not entirely consensually clear to itself what kind of enterprise it is at heart, can certainly stand to learn from comparison to more established activities. Take the practice of law, for instance. In law, the principles and content (the stuff you can learn from books) are important, but simply to master this corpus at an academic or intellectual level does not a lawyer make. There's a certain emphasis on content mastery in law -- lawyers are in large measure the gatekeepers of a parallel universe (perhaps I mean a microcosm, although it sure can feel like a parallel universe) ... one of arcane language and complex procedure. But, where lawyers are expert tour guides, who interpose themselves between the client and render safe the incomprehensible-or-even-dangerous unfamiliar surroundings, futurists are more like expedition advisors, because they co-navigate and map with their clients terrain that no one has ever seen. Yet, if they do it well, in the process they'll impart some of their skills. It's more of a collaborative learning process. In law, the lawyer may learn, but as a content "expert" it generally behooves her to keep that ignorance a secret. Lawyers' repeat business is predicated on the unspoken notion that the law is far too complex, and the stakes too high, for regular people to be trusted to do anything much for themselves. Navigating change, while being both as complex and as high-stakes as anything imaginable, is however something that in my experience, many futurists would really like to teach the world to do. A highly desirable scenario for the future of futures may be, I think, one in which designated "futurists" are no longer necessary. (Come to that, so would a scenario in which lawyers are no longer necessary -- but that's another story.) A wise culture, or as Slaughter puts it, a "social capacity" for foresight, would obviate most of the need for a futurist specialisation: but that's some time off yet.

Meanwhile, my point is that aspiring lawyers, who have relatively more content-mastery emphasis than futurists (for whom process is at least as important), are required, in Australia and the UK at any rate, to undergo a period of traineeship or clerkship before they are licensed to practice in their own right.

Now, someone else might like to use this to make an argument for registration and regulation of the futures profession, but that's not my point. I'm suggesting this because it seems to me to be a rather crucial step in "learning the trade". If, as I would argue, futures is more about process than content, but structurally provides fewer opportunities for aspiring futurists to learn process (from example, on the job), then a major chance is being missed. On the other hand, if practising futurists as a group were to put this realisation into practice, the whole field could benefit from making that kind of semi-formal learning opportunity more common.

So why do I make this suggestion? My motivation is largely my own experience of trying to become a futurist. I first encountered the field formally at the World Futures Studies Federation biennial conference, in Brisbane in 01997. It was my final year of high school. I wound up studying for a BA (history and philosophy of science) and an LLB concurrently at the University of Melbourne. Richard Slaughter was unfortunately no longer there, and so there was no opportunity to study the field formally with an experienced academic futurist. In the final semester of my arts degree, I persuaded a lecturer with an interest in the sociology of technology to supervise me in directed reading on futures studies, however my efforts were rewarded with the lowest grade I received throughout the whole degree. It wasn't so much that my essay was awful, although it probably was -- but the lesson I gleaned was that working within a different paradigm is like swimming upstream. It's hard work. Support is as rare as it is valuable.

I attended another WFSF conference, in 02001, and Budapest Futures Courses in 01 and 03, and worked in two futures related projects in England the following year -- on the first, I was a futurist lone ranger in an education-oriented organisation; in the second, I had the privilege to be working alongside Wendy Schultz, an exceptional academic and consulting futurist whose mentorship during the project was invaluable.

It was not until last year that I had a chance to start learning "the content" of futures formally, in Hawaii (which was is no small measure due to Wendy's encouragement and support). But in fact it wasn't so much the content I came for; I had already discovered that this can be learned independently. What I came to Hawaii for was the chance to build on the kind of mentorship I'd briefly experienced in that role in England -- to spend time in a community of philosophically rigorous, alert futures-oriented people, with whom I wouldn't have to patiently explain the basics of futures, and field an hour of questions every time, before getting into deeper discussion. (Working with the unintiated is an indispensable part of the job, but it gets lonely.) So that's what I went to Hawaii for, and that is what, to my delight, I have found; not simply a community, but one interested in improving itself and delving more deeply into the many questions opened up by the unique Datorian perspective on the world.

At the same time, though, I have come to believe that by far the most important part of the learning process occurs in "doing" futures (rather than just reading or talking about it, though these are also essential); ideally under the supervision of someone who's been doing it for much longer. I've been fortunate to find that in Hawaii; but there are so few comparable opportunities, that a broader solution is required. Hence the apprenticeship suggestion. Of course, the problems to which I've alluded are well known, but it sometimes seems that everyone's so busy trying to make a living that they don't necessarily have much time left over to address the structural reasons that make it difficult for them to make a living!

The reasons I see for a more regular futurist apprenticeship scheme are, then, in sum:

- Academic courses don't necessarily involve hands-on work, which I see as self-evidently essential to being a useful, effective consulting/community futurist. (We're upscaling our activity in Hawaii, partly in recognition of the fact that this is the kind of experience students are hungry for).

- Apprenticeship is a sensible pedagogical arrangement, given the commercial in-confidence of much crucial futures work. With a junior futurist present to support the senior one, even in circumstances of confidentiality I believe "the futures field" would learn more effectively, retaining and transmitting "stories from the front" longer and better. Post-client debrief is also one of the best learning experiences for the junior futurist. Without one there, the opportunity to have that vital conversation is, quite simply, passed over.

- Futures consists of a relatively small number of workers, widely distributed around the world. Good quality futures courses (academic or otherwise) are few and far between. Many countries have no such thing, although most would at least have a few consulting futurists: why not capitalise on the learning opportunity that does exist, and thereby help compensate for the relative paucity of university futures programs? This is a sound response to the distribution problem.

- Practising futurists, especially those that don't teach, ought to find some way to at least "replace themselves", without which they may risk becoming an endangered species. The field needs them to do this, and so does the world in general.

- The apprentice would get a chance to absorb the philosophy and practice of a fully fledged futures practitioner, and in so doing, hone their own sense of the field, the dynamics of change, the methodologies, and grow their own priceless reservoir of applied experience.

- The reputation, work and personal qualities of the practitioner play a large part in this line of work (as Peter Hayward, Director of the Swinburne Masters' program in strategic foresight, pointed out in a futures salon given in Hawaii earlier this year). At this point in time, people don't tend to hire "a futurist" generically the way they might hire "an accountant" (nor am I implying that they should -- just observing that they don't). It's a rare enough position, and particular people are usually sought by name. Training with established individuals is a way for the field generally to leverage and broaden the "equity" in their work and reputation.

- It would help legitimate the field, and pass its learning down through time.

- From the senior futurist's perspective, an apprentice would be far more useful and rewarding than simply having a personal assistant. They would need to be paid, of course; but not a vast amount, on-the-job training being the focus of the relationship.

So, who could take it forward? This is an idea that might be benefit from the considered attention of the Association of Professional Futurists, but would undoubtedly touch on the interests of people in the World Futures Studies Federation, the Institute for the Future, the World Future Society, and so forth. Again, I'm not suggesting that there aren't elements or examples of this already afoot -- there surely are, which is a reason to consider making it more widespread and well known; a conventional mechanism to advance an unconventional field.

Details remain to be worked out (the "indentured servitude" model, for example, may not be quite so viable today as in times past; and the traditional seven year period seems like rather a long time) but the essential idea remains viable as it has been for centuries. I'd be interested to know what others make of this.

The meming of futures

The first novel by a former ad-man, James Othmer, has been published, with a soulless corporate bastard as the protagonist. It's called The Futurist. Here's a partial synopsis from a recent book review:

"At one time, Yates was an idealist, an optimist who really believed in the futures he spun for people. But he's become morally malleable and, under the surface, it's starting to bother him."
. . .
"Working the Futureworld conference in Johannesburg, Yates drains the hotel minibar and gives a speech in which he recklessly tells the truth, admitting that he doesn't know anything -- that we don't. He declares himself the founding member of the Coalition of the Clueless."

The Coalition of the Clueless? Sign me up.

To professional futurists, if this book has a broad impact, it may well be seen as largely negative, adding to what some experience as a serious drag of having constantly to reassert their legitimacy against the taint of charlatans and frauds using the same labels. So, two responses occur to me.

First, even if that's the case, there may be a silver lining here, in that the book has apparently been optioned to be made into a film, with screenwriting genius Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich; Adaptation; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) rumoured to be considering the project. Anything with Kaufman's name on it is bound to be worthwhile, even if it inadvertently were to rain disgrace on my chosen profession.

Second -- and for real now -- it opens up the mainly interesting, only slightly arcane debate ("latent tension" may be a more accurate phrase) in this field between those who embrace the term futurist, and those who shun it. For instance, Paul Saffo, with whom I discussed this as recently as yesterday, prefers the term "forecaster" for his own job title, because "futurist" to him implies advocacy of a particular outcome, which he wants to avoid. I'm sympathetic to this rationale, but have a different sense of the two terms. To me a futurist is someone engaged in thinking about futures broadly; while it's forecasters who have a special commitment to projecting "the right future".

Anyway, it's not that I don't understand or even share the strong impulse to dissociate oneself from self-appointed soothsayers and gurus, and to insist on quality and rigour in futures work. (Quite a few of the futurists I know actually err on the side of paranoia about being seen as careful thinkers.) Academic values are inseparable from how I have gone about learning the trade. Professor (of Foresight) Richard Slaughter's article concerning the three categories of depth in futures work, which are vastly different in scope and intention -- pop futures, problem-oriented futures, and critical/epistemological futures -- clearly underlines a need to look deeper than the advertised labels. Futures ain't futures.

Ultimately the qualities ascribed to or associated with the terms must depend to a fairly high degree upon the characteristics and qualities of the people using them. That's the main point: be sure you're doing good work. We'll come back to that. Because I'm not entirely indifferent on the labelling issue. Yes, the contents matter more than the label, the steak more than the sizzle, and the book more than its cover -- but in each case the latter is not so easily separated from the former, and nor should it be. I think it's not good enough for well-meaning "futurists" (whether they like that name or not) to abandon a swath of space -- words like "futures" and futurist" -- which is prime mental real estate in the popular discourse, to cynical corporate drones or syrupy seers. The world needs those words, because the ideas they represent belong to us all. In my opinion, it's incumbent upon thoughtful practitioners and advocates of foresight to take back these memes, refusing to let them be held hostage by whoever it is that they think is giving them a bad name.

I say, take back the meme "futurist", so that unless you're discussing 20th century painting, the meaning "professional futures thinker" eclipses any association with the defunct quasi-fascistic Italian art movement. I say, take the word "futures" back from the corporate world, so it comes to be more commonly associated with the systematic exploration of possible worlds to come, than with contracts to buy and sell non-existent commodities (this link is currently the top google hit for "futures").

Other contenders in the labelling of the field? "Foresight" is apparently becoming a more popular term, particularly in Europe; but I think the privileging of the sight metaphor may be a problem. There's more to the future than "vision"; we have five senses -- and that's not including humour (which frequently trumps the others on the count of usefulness, in futures as in other things). "Futures studies" is fine, but anything "studies" sounds a bit like a hodge podge or a plea for special interests, rather than the mature, coherent perspective in its own right, which futures certainly is if you know where to look. "Future studies"? Singular -- scratch that. It misses what to me is the main point of looking ahead; helping to make meaningful choices between alternatives. "Futuristics" and "futurology" are both so absurdly retro they're actually kind of cool. I might look for chances to engineer a comeback for them in the next few years. Meanwhile, though, my sense is that simply the term "futures" says pretty much everything that needs to be said in a name for the study, invention and design of alternative possibilities.

Now, as implied above, at one level what you call it all doesn't matter. The quality of the work -- including a distinct and deliberate lack of astrology, Nostradamus references, and overblown predictive pontification -- should speak for itself. The big challenge for those of us who would help create a wiser culture through working in this field, whatever you call it, lies partly in earning respect by doing good work. The other part of the puzzle is in lending that reputational capital to the (I trust we all agree) wrongfully and unfairly discredited enterprise of thinking ahead, by not avoiding the use of perfectly good words, like futurist. There seems to be a complex economy at work here, whereby the prestige and content of the name, and the work carried on under its auspices, are in tension. If being a "futurist" were universally regarded as vacuous and silly, then the charlatans wouldn't bother using the term. But to the extent that they do, it may deter good thinkers from referring to themselves that way. The meming of futures (whatever) remains unfinished, with perhaps frustrating results at times; but paradoxically it can be taken as an encouraging sign that it's resisted disciplinisation, ossification, and is to that extent still a conversation space worth exploring.

Zia Sardar (editor of the top scholarly journal Futures) observed at the WFSF conference in Budapest last year, that futures is much like philosophy, in that anyone can do it, and there's no formal patrolling of the label; yet there's evidently a world of difference between the best and the worst. You can't stop bad philosophers from using that job description, even as the geniuses and world-shaping intellectuals use it too. Language being as irreducibly treacherous as it is, the best we can do may be to ensure the quality of our work makes the case for us.

So, I look forward to a chance to read this new novel, and to the many future conversations that it is sure to feature in, ready or not, if a film adaptation gets made. And if it were to wind up promoting widespread contempt for self-proclaimed futurists; well then, misconceptions, unfortunate though they may seem in one respect, always present a great learning opportunity. At least it would make futures a more prominent subject of discussion. Oscar Wilde: "There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."