Andy Hines

Designing Foresight and Foresighting Design Opportunities for Learning and Collaboration via Scenarios

Foresight and design are growing closer together. The two fields are sharing a key tool: scenarios. The piece opens by highlighting the growing relationship between the fields. It compares the generic process frameworks they use. It then reviews the expanding roles of scenarios in design. It concludes by suggesting there is an opportunity for futurists and designers to learn from one another’s use of scenarios and that pressure on both fields to expand their scope and capabilities suggest even more collaboration between the two in the future.

Setting Up a Horizon Scanning System: A U.S. Federal Agency Example

Managers and policy makers are continually working toward a desired future within a context of rapid and turbulent change. To be effective in this context, they must look ahead to anticipate emerging trends, issues, opportunities, and threats. Horizon scanning is a foresight method that can help managers and policy makers develop and maintain a broad and externally focused forward view to anticipate and align decisions with both emerging (near-term) and long-term futures. This article reports on the design and early stage development and implementation of a horizon scanning system established for the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), Strategic Foresight Group, and developed cooperatively with the University of Houston Foresight Program. The goal of the project is to develop an ongoing horizon scanning system as an input to developing environmental foresight: insight into future environmental challenges and opportunities, and the ability to apply that insight to prepare for a sustainable future. In addition, the horizon scanning system is supported by volunteers from within the Forest Service. By including participants from throughout the Forest Service, the project seeks to foster a culture of foresight within the organization, and eventually to develop a more forward looking organizational structure for the USFS and other natural resource management agencies. Lessons learned from the experience to date are shared as well as future challenges for keeping the horizon scanning system in good working order—current, relevant, and consistent.

An Integral Futures Lens on Future Security Issues

Conventional analysis of security issues tends to take a disjointed approach through tightly focused tactical lenses. Increasingly, however, security issues are embedded in a wider and diverse range of factors that may escape conventional analysis. An integral futures perspective to exploring security issues is proposed that provides a wider lens by taking an integrated holistic approach that explores individual and collective aspects of emerging issues from both an interior (e.g., motivation, culture) and exterior (e.g., behavior, systems, and infrastructures) perspective. We believe this approach provides a fresh way to identify issues as well as providing a more holistic explanatory framework.

Can I Get a Job as a Futurist

The most frequently asked question I get in speaking with prospective foresight students is “can I get a job as a futurist?” I will make a case in this article that the lack of jobs and a career path in foresight is harming our long-term prospects as a field, and suggest a few things we can do about that. Three reasons are offered for why jobs are important to futurists: (1) Jobs are a way for us to influence organizations and the future, (2) jobs are a key consideration on the mind of those seeking to enter the field, and (3) jobs are a way to attract talent into the field. The current status of the job market for futurists is reviewed. The article concludes with five suggestions to improve the job prospects of futurists and, in turn, help build the field: (1) engage the jobs issue as a field, (2) build a profession, (3) develop a career ladder, (4) strengthen the academic base, and (5) promote the field. Preparing for our future is not a hobby, or a part-time job, but arguably the most important job that is drastically underfulfilled. The time is ripe for thinking about our own future as a field to achieve our common purpose of spreading foresight and doing our part to help make the world a better place.

Shifting values: hope and concern for ''waking up''

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to take up the challenge of Slaughters Biggest Wake‐up Call in History to look for solution in the interior aspects of the Integral perspective by focusing on long‐term patterns of changing values in individual interior (the upper‐left “intentional” quadrant of the Integral matrix).Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies the authors research on long‐term patterns in individual values changes. It takes a developmental perspective, suggesting a consistent direction of change in individual values, drawing on an analysis of 20 values systems described in the literature.Findings – The findings suggest that the long‐term values changes offer both hope and concern for addressing the global emergency. The hope comes from development in postmodern and integral values, suggesting that the rise of postmodern values could lead to greater awareness of the global emergency and that the rise of integral values in particular could lead to greater action in addressing it. A...

Models of Change

This chapter introduces some of the key concepts underlying foresight, and provides a brief overview on methods. These concepts and methods permeate the curriculum and will reappear throughout the text. They are important enough to merit a separate treatment.

Perspectives on the Future

This chapter covers material for a proposed new course. As the foresight field grows and evolves, it becomes more difficult to fit new material into existing courses. Eventually a new course becomes necessary, presenting a challenge to an already full core-curriculum. Thus, the material here will likely find its home as an elective, and fills a role of holding tank for some of the newer perspectives, skills, and content that has emerged.