by 
Aren’t futurists already professionals? Well, sure, depending on how strictly one defines a professional. The Association of Professional Futurists has used an operational definition of earning your living as a futurist, along with several criteria relating to writing, speak, educational background, etc. A key missing ingredient (if you will) is public recognition and acceptance of professional status. I suspect few of us would argue that futurists are widely recognized and accepted as professionals by the public. In practical terms, one could say that the lack of professional status is an obstacle to our work becoming more widespread. Becoming a recognized profession is no guarantee of a multitude of clients, and some colleagues question whether paying attention to become a professional (professionalization) would really make a difference. It’s a legitimate and fair question. As I have thought about this issue, I’ve come down on the side that it would be helpful and worth some effort on our part. It won’t solve all our problems, but it could help. Taking the long view, my bias is toward doing things that improve the prospects for future futurists. But being very respectful of not wasting time on this, I’ve committed to looking for a path to professionalization that includes doing things that benefit the field regardless of whether we eventually become recognized as a profession or not.
The APF initiated a “Future of Foresight” project back in 2012, which included working papers, Town Hall meetings, and a Professional Development Day. Building on that, I proposed a “Professionalization Task Force” to the Board and was given the okay to explore what professionalization means to APF and what we might do about it.
Over the last year, a team of 23 APF members has been working on this task. The first part of our work involved creating a working definition of professionalization. We explored the literature around professions and adopted a set of six criteria that we felt made sense for APF:
- Develop a foresight competency model
- Define the “specialized work grounded in a body of theoretically based, discretionary knowledge & skills” at the foundation of foresight
- Develop a professional development pathway to provide qualifying credentials
- Develop a set of practice expectations
- Develop a set of professional standards
- Develop a map the foresight ecosystem
With that in hand, we formed teams around the criteria to explore and recommend what we might do to fulfill these criteria. The teams came up with 16 recommendations which we organized into a three-phased approach. We reasoned that there were some activities that made sense to do straight away. For instance, the first phase is envisioned as a single, foundational project with a competency model at its core. The second phase is likely to consist of several projects, such as mapping a professional development pathway (working the Professional Development Team). The third is focused more on the future, including a recommendation to undertake a new project on the future of the field.
I personally believe that this is really important work that will help solidify the long-term future of APF and be a significant benefit to the foresight community as a whole. Part of our “growing up” process is getting clearer on who we are and what we want to do, and I think this effort will play an important part of this process. Andy Hines
Leave a Reply