Foresight Challenges: Introducing, Positioning, Institutionalizing

Coming up for air after a couple of intense days engaging with the dissertation. Most of the time was rather frustrating, as it was time for sense-making, and the sense wasn’t being made. Nonetheless, after slogging through this revision, a faint light appears at the end of the tunnel, and an observation emerged that seems worth sharing.

The over-riding question of the dissertation, and really of my professional life as a whole, has been “how do we integrate foresight more effectively into organizations. My wonderful advisor at Leeds Metropolitan, Professor Jeff Gold, has been pushing me to dig deeper into what that question means. I reviewed my relevant prior work and and probed deeper around this question, going through an iterative process of diverging and converging and eventually boiling this question down into three sub-questions. It really drives the point home when taking the client/potential client’s point of view:
• introducing: why should we introduce foresight in the first place?
• positioning: why should we use it, once it’s there?
• institutionalizing: why should we keep it?

Perhaps addressing these questions suggests a research agenda for foresight? At the least, it has presented one for me. Andy Hines

About Andy Hines

Dr. Andy Hines is Program Coordinator at the University of Houston’s Graduate Program in Foresight, bringing together the experience he earned as an organizational, consulting, and academic futurist. He is also speaking, workshopping, and consulting through his firm Hinesight.

Before that, he was Managing Director of Social Technologies/Innovaro, and served as an Adjunct Professor with the university since 2004. Hines enjoyed earlier careers as a consulting and organizational futurist. He was a partner with Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a think tank and consulting firm that specialized in the study of the future. He was also Futurist & Senior Ideation Leader at Dow Chemical with a mission of using futures tools and knowledge to turn ideas into new business opportunities. Before that, Hines established and ran the Global Trends Program for the Kellogg Company.

Hines is motivated by a professional hunger to make foresight practical and useful, and he believes that foresight can help deliver the insight that is so needed in today’s organizations and the world. His goal, he says, is to infect as many change agents as possible with this message. Thus, he has honed a skill set designed to make foresight more actionable in organizations.

In this pursuit, he has authored five books: Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); ConsumerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape (No Limits Publishing, 2011); Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight (Social Technologies, 2007); 2025: Science and Technology Reshapes US and Global Society (Oak Hill, 1997); and Managing Your Future as an Association (ASAE, 1994) and has another in the hands of publishers: Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education. He has also authored dozens of articles, speeches, and workshops, including the 2003 Emerald Literati Awards’ Outstanding Paper accolade for best article published in Foresight for “An Audit for Organizational Futurists” and the 2008 award for “Scenarios: The State of the Art.” He has appeared on several radio and television programs, PBS Houston, KRIV-26 News, and the CBS “Early Show.” He also co-founded and is former Chair of the Association of Professional Futurists.

About Andy Hines

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