Futuring: The Exploration of the Future

Rating:
Summary: Recommended for science fiction fans
Review: Edward Cornish is editor of The Futurist Magazine, and while his Futuring: The Exploration Of the Future could easily have been featured in our nonfiction columns, it's recommended here for science fiction fans used to considering the future. Cornish's focus is upon the trends, ideas, and innovations driving the world: his Futuring envisions the job of exploring the future as a trailblazing pioneer of prediction, considering how futures are influenced, how they change, and the patterns of choice, chaos and cycles which influence them. Hard to easily categorize, but any science fiction reader interested in future worlds will relish Cornish's approach.


Rating:
Summary: vague and dull
Review: It certainly sounded exciting. Unfortunately, it's mostly a bunch of long winded articles on vague ideas that you've already thought of a hundred times. That's not to say that the ideas aren't important. I was simply expecting something a bit more focused by an author willing to take some risks. On the bright side, the book won't become dated for quite some time.

Rating:
Summary: A very important book
Review: Thinking ahead is the great need of our times as the rapid pace of technological and social change affects work, home, education, health, amusements, environment and even religion. Futuring helps to understand trends, identify opportunities, and avoid dangers; it is a powerful way for individuals and organizations to create a better future. We cannot predict the future in detail but long-term shifts in population, land use, technology and governmental systems provide vital clues. We can all benefit by doing what futurists do, namely:
- preparing for what we will face in the future
- anticipating our possible future needs, problems and opportunities
- identifying possible situations that might be encountered
- expecting the unexpected
- thinking long-term as well as short-term
- dreaming productively
- using even poor information if that is all that is available
- learning from our successful predecessors
Futurists have identified many trends but for simplicity Cornish limits discussion to six super trends shaping our future:
- technological progress
- economic growth
- improving health and longevity
- increasing mobility
- environmental decline
- increasing deculturation
Assuming no big surprises these super trends allow us to create a picture of what the world might look like under a 'continuation scenario'. This picture of the future is not a forecast but a way of thinking how we might prevent certain things happening and how we might create a better future.

We tend to feel powerless and that we have little control over our future. Chance or even trivial events can have enormous consequences and the possibility that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could cause a tornado in Texas high lights the chaotic world we live in. The butterfly effect also highlights the enormous effect even our simple actions can make to the future. Once we recognize our power over the future, we have the responsibility to exercise that power as well as we can. We must seek to understand the possibilities of the future and how to work toward influencing events in a way that will be beneficial. Myriad potential futures lie before us; we can only imagine them and many lie beyond our wildest imagining. Reconstructing humanity's response to his environment and the astonishing number of ways in which different groups of people express themselves in language, music, art, objects of worship, food and housing would have been beyond our most creative brainstorming sessions. Yet each cultural pattern represents a series of choices that a given people has made during its social and cultural evolution. Each people has carved out a different destiny for itself. Likewise, we have enormous freedom to shape our lives. We must abandon the notion that we must have absolutely certain knowledge before we can act; we must base our actions on probabilities and highly uncertain knowledge. We need to train ourselves to think realistically and creatively about the future by simplifying complexities and imagining a much wider range of possibilities than we are in the habit of doing.

The goal of futuring is not to predict the future but to improve it. We must try to prevent the crises of tomorrow so we can avoid disasters. We must mobilize people ahead of time through a democratic process whereby groups of people create their own vision of the future. Edward Lindaman saw how Kennedy's awe-inspiring vision of putting a man on the moon mobilized people to achieve a miracle and he organized citizen groups to create visions of desirable futures for their communities. Clement Bezold outlines five stages in building a vision:
- identification of problems
- identification of past successes
- identification of desires for the future
- identification of measurable goals
- identification of resources to achieve those goals
The vision must be widely shared because people must really believe they can shape their future, commit themselves to doing it, and be prepared to do the hard work involved.

DEGEST - an acronym for demography, economy, government, environment, society/culture, and technology - is a tool for understanding the world around us and bringing us to the threshold of the future at which point futurists use scenarios or conjecture about what might happen in the future. "Scenarios give us an excellent way to think in an orderly manner about future possibilities, assess their probability and likelihood, and evaluate strategies that we might employ to achieve a chosen goal. But imagining scenarios is a challenge to our creativity: We need to come up with lots of ideas about what might happen in the future, since we cannot expect the future to be simply a replay of the past." Scenarios are particularly useful in dealing with wild cards - events that we do not expect to happen but having enormous consequences if they did and the main purpose of thinking about wild cards is to chip away at the rigidities of ideas about the future and open up a new level of creative thinking. 9/11 and the leaps from horse to car, from pen to typewriter and from typewriter to computer were wild card events and over the course of a century there might be several thousand wild cards so we have to expect them to impact our lives in times of rapid change. New ways of thinking are required to overcome our unwillingness to think seriously about future events thought to be unlikely. Putting a man on the moon demonstrated human ability to shape the future. Just as Thomas Edison trained himself to produce one minor invention every ten days and one major invention every six months, so we can train ourselves to prepare for the future and this book is an excellent place to start.