by I recently did an interview on coolhunting: weak signals, trends, and fads for icoolhunt. I can imagine some of my professional colleagues being horrified by acknowledging a relationship between futurists and coolhunters. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we futurists might define our field as we grow and mature (aka, been working on the dissertation). I’m inclined to the notion of a foresight ecosystem. (yes, I like plain old “foresight” as the name for the field – but that’s a topic for another day). I do think we need to clarify the core of who and what we are, but that would still enable us to have loose and fluid dotted lines to lots of other disciplines. I think we could agree on what a professional futurist is or does, and then note our relationships to say, strategic planners or technology assessors, perhaps competitive intelligence professionals and even coolhunters.
This will not be any easy discourse — it has not been so far. Some hold that futurists should only deal with the big questions facing the globe, and barely disguise their contempt for futurists doing work for commercial firms. I sense that organizational futurists (working “inside” for a single organization), who I see as our great source of growth and influence going forward, may not quite be thought of as the equals to the full-time consulting or academic futurists. I have played all three roles — consulting, organizational, and academic — over my career and see no reason why we can’t all get along. I think it’s great that we have a diversity of views about who and what futurists are and should be, and I don’t want us all to converge to a single role. Even though I’m inclined to being an “insider,” I think it’s great that we have futurists on the outside calling “bullshit” and warning against getting co-opted. Bravo! What I do hope is that we can acknowledge our commonalities and differences and learn to co-exist and thrive together. Andy Hines
Yes Andy! And I we add “design” as one of the disciplines with which futures has very strong ties. I’ve often said that futures does its most powerful work when it runs as a program in the background of other disciplines, acting as a guiding hand and philosophy to corporations, organizations, and academics.