Futurist

For other meanings of this term, see futurism.

Futurists are those who look to and provide analysis of the future.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces earliest English usage of the term futurist to 1842, referring to Christian scriptural futurists. The next usage occurs with the Italian and Russian Futurists of the early 20th century (1900's-1930's), an artistic, literary, and political movement that sought to reject the past and rather uncritically embraced speed, technology, and violent change. Curiously, early modern visionary authors like Jules Verne, Edward Bellamy, and even H.G. Wells were not characterized as futurists in their day, but rather as philosophers of foresight, a closely related term.

The use of futurist and its synonym futurologist in the modern context of thinking about and analyzing the future began in the mid-1940's, when German professor Ossip K. Flechtheim coined the term futurology and proposed it as a new science of probability. Flechtheim argued that even if systematic forecasting did no more than unveil the subset of statistically inevitable processes of change and charted their advance, it would still be of crucial social value.

Also in the mid-1940's the first professional "futurist" consulting institutions like RAND and SRI began to engage in long-range planning, systematic trend watching, scenario development, and visioning, at first under WWII military and government contract and beginning in the 1950's, for private institutions and corporations. The period from the late 1940's to the mid-1960's laid the conceptual and methodological foundations of the modern futures studies field. Bertrand de Jouvenel's The Art of Conjecture in 1963 and Dennis Gabor's Inventing the Future in 1964 are considered key early works, and the first U.S. university course devoted entirely to the future was taught by futurist Alvin Toffler at the The New School in 1966.

Today the term futurist most commonly describes authors, consultants, organizational leaders and others who engage in interdisciplinary and systems thinking to advise private and public organizations on such matters as diverse global trends, plausible scenarios, emerging market opportunities, and risk management.

More generally, the label includes such disparate lay, professional, and academic groups as visionaries, foresight consultants, corporate strategists, policy analysts, cultural critics, planners, marketers, forecasters, prediction market developers, roadmappers, operations researchers, investment managers, actuaries and other risk analyzers, and future-oriented individuals educated in every academic discipline, including anthropology, complexity studies, computer science, economics, engineering, evolutionary biology, history, management, mathematics, philosophy, physical sciences, political science, psychology, sociology, systems theory, technology studies, and other disciplines.

Futures thinking

Main article: Futures studies

Futures thinking or futuring is often summarized as being concerned with "three P's and a W," or possible, probable, and preferable futures, plus wildcards, which are low-probability but high-impact events, should they occur. Even with high-profile probable events, such as the fall of telecom costs, the growth of the internet, or the aging demographics of particular countries, there is often significant uncertainty in the rate or continuation of a trend. Thus a key part of futuring is the managing of uncertainty and risk.

Futurists and futures studies

Not all futurists engage in the practice of futures studies as generally defined. Preconventional futurists (see below) would generally not. And while religious futurists, astrologers, occultists, New Age divinists, etc. use methodologies that include study, none of their personal revelation or belief-based work would fall within a consensus definition of the futures studies term as used by most practitioners.

Futurist types

The Acceleration Studies Foundation maintains a list of what they consider key developmental types of futurists and futures thinking. Depending on context, any particular futurist might be engaged in a cluster of these types:

Social Types

1. [Preconventional futurist]. One who thinks about the future in relation to self (ego, personal vision), but without a broad understanding of the conventions and norms of society.

2. [Personal futurist]. One who uses foresight to solve problems primarily for themselves, within the conventions of society, and whose current behavior is oriented to and influenced by their future expectations and plans.

3. [Imaginative futurist]. One who habitually develops future visions, scenarios, expectations, and plans in relation to self and others, knowing but sometimes breaking the conventions and norms of society.

4. [Agenda-driven futurist]. One who creates or works toward top-down developed (received, believed) ideological, religious, or organizationally-preferred agendas (sets of rules, norms) and their related problems, for the future of a group.

5. [Consensus-driven futurist]. One who helps create or work toward bottom-up developed (facilitated, emergent), group-, communally-, institutionally- or socially-preferred futures.

6. [Professional futurist]. One who explores change for a paying client or audience, who seeks to describe and advance possible, probable, or preferable future scenarios while avoiding undesirable ones, and who may seek to help their client or audience apply these insights (manage change).

Methodological Types

7. [Critical futurist]. One who explores, deconstructs, and critiques the future visions, perspectives, and value systems of others, not primarily to advance their own agenda, to achieve consensus, or for payment, but as a methodology of understanding.

8. [Alternative futurist]. One who explores and proposes a range of possible or imaginable futures, including those beyond one's own, and one's organizations' and culture's conventional and consensus views.

9. [Predictive futurist]. One who forecasts probable futures, events and processes that they expect are likely to occur, in a statistical sense, both as a result of anticipated collective personal and social preferences, and for autonomous processes that appear independent of alternative possibilities of human choice.

10. [Evolutionary developmental (Evo-devo) futurist]. One who explores evolutionary possibilities and predicts developmental outcomes, and attempts differentiate between evolutionary (chaotic, unpredictable) and developmental (convergent, statistically predictable) processes of universal change.

11. [Validating futurist]. One who seeks to evaluate, systematize, and validate the completeness (for critical and alternative futures) and accuracy (for predictive and evo devo futures) of methodologies used to consider the future.

12. [Epistemological futurist.] One who investigates the epistemology (how we know what we know) of the future, and seeks to improve the paradigms of foresight scholarship and practice.

See Futurist (definition): Types of Futures Thinking for further discussion of these types.

Famous futurists

See Futurists and foresight thought leaders.

External links

• Futurist (ASF definition) Twelve developmental types of futures thinking.
• Global Change 50 videos, 500 articles and many presentations on world trends.
• longbets.com Bets on future events.
• Shaping Tomorrow 12500+ organised future links, 1700+ trends.
• predicto.net User generated predictions of future events.
• Futurismos A student program