April 2024

A bit of FS culture / Future Fostering

• Digging in the archives, I found the repository of The Systems Thinker old publications. And in it, a very comprehensive (and useful for fresh futurists) article about Foresight: The Art of Foresight: Preparing for a Changing World, by the World Future Society. No date.
• Another interesting paper on Foresight, written by authors outside of the FS field, explores How can foresight help us imagine the future? Reading it is a good way to evaluate the 'permeability' of the field and to consider whether futurists are capable of effectively communicating about their discipline, so that non-futurists can understand and apply the main concepts?
• Four foresight methodologies (mostly used in the English-speaking world) are illustrated in this case study related to the Future of Marriage in the Journal of Futures Studies : Alternative Futures, Scenario Planning, Three Horizons and Causal Layered Analysis (CLA).
• A important paper for 'operational foresight / prospective opérationnelle' by a 4th-generation futurist, Yasemin Arikan , that emphasizes the key-role of the levers: Finding the way forward among alternative futures. (2020)
• Here is French paper that is not directly related to foresight, but to science fiction. The author, a young researcher with a PhD in social sciences, Julien Wacquez , walks around the future through science-fiction and futures studies, at the planetary scale. Another hybrid product of the 4th generation... L’inversion de monde. Comment un roman de science-fiction déstabilise les coordonnées de la pensée?? (2024)

FUTURE WASHING

After the Green Washing, here is the Future Washing. There are many good reasons for this, like the fact that because futuring is trendy, many looking-for-business people claim themselves futurists and practice an intellectually-cheap foresight.

So denigrating the real experts in the field is part of doing business...

That the FS field [1] needs to improve is self-evident, as are all fields of knowledge, which are dynamic by nature. And even more so when we are going through one of the Great Transitions in the history of humanity, and we need to reset our paradigms. The temptation is great to wipe the slate clean and start again from scratch, which contributes significantly to a number of movements, such as wokewashing and bashing. So we need to make a distinction between future washing, on the one hand, and futures studies bashing, on the other.

Want to go deeper in this FS bashing? Read the pro The field of #futures has a eugenics problem and the con Joice Preira, decolonizing futures by countering “futureswashing”.

About the "colonization of the future[2]", a must-read is the following paper by Donovan Triplett, who is not a futurist but describes very well the phenomenon of the cultural colonization in this mind-opening paper What we’re losing in the blinding whiteness of advertising. This story describes one of the aspects mentioned by SARDAR, although limited to the United States and the black/white positioning, but still all too present 30 years after SARDAR's seminal article.

[1] Cf my LinkedIn articles on foresight / French prospective: Becoming Futures Literate..., X.0 - En finir avec la dystopie, La prospective, communauté épistémique

[2] Ziauddin Sardar, Colonizing the future: the ‘other’ dimension of futures studies, Futures, Volume 25, Issue 2, 1993, pages 179-187, https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(93)90163-N.