by Our ProSeminar class had a visit last week from a dozen Norwegian students studying under futurist Derek Woodate. We did a joint exercise on personal futures planning. The activity is drawn from Houston Foresight alum Verne’s Wheelright’s very success Personal Futures approach. ProSeminar is a capstone cours
e that is designed as a launching point into the real world (well, 2/3rds of our students are working professionals already), thus we spend a week on personal futures, and another week on personal branding and marketing.
Like many, I really like this idea and I’ve been working in a bit more personal reflection/insight into the curriculum – we do a “know yourself” module in Alt Perspectives in the Fall. And throughout the program we talk much more about how “who we are” influences our work. [I thank Richard Slaughter, Peter Hayward, Joe Voros and the gang in the Swinburne Foresight program for bringing that to my attention several years back.] And I am about to test a day-long version of personal futures for an external client (drawing on and crediting Verne’s pioneering work).
I think Verne’s approach is ideal for the new-to-futures group. In ProSeminar we discussed how we might build up a customized version for those already familiar with foresight approaches. My original exposure to personal futures planning concept came from a full, semester-long course – Work-Life Planning – taught by the late Bob Wegman, when I was a student of the Foresight Program back in 1989. What a course! We studied the labor market, learned the basic job-hunting skills, and did some personal planning. One of my all-time favorite books came from the course – Do What You Love, and the Money Will Follow.” We really dug in, and I mapped out a general direction of my future that has turned out amazing close to what has turned out. One shift, which happened about a year after the plan, was I decided there wasn’t going to be a market for a futurist journalist (which explains why I’ve always been pretty committed to writing no matter how insane my work life has gotten).
One aspect of Verne’s work that really crystallized for me this year was the role of the non-work factors in career planning. When we did our study of Student Needs 2025+, one of our key conclusions was that it was getting increasing difficult to separate out the various aspects of our life – they’re all blending together, but our institutional approaches like the segmented and siloed.
My immediate need is to sharpen up the Seminar version of personal planning. Beyond that, maybe a one-day or half-day module aimed more at futurists (or futurizers). And beyond that…hmmm? Andy Hines
Hey Andy, Cody here. I’ve been a fan of Verne’s model since it was in draft. Something I’ve struggled with over the years was the wide-open autonomy in determining one’s personal preferable future. That was a problem I had in the program overall, to be honest.
I was never able to use Verne’s model directly because I struggled with the idea of complete self-determination in the context of faith and other philosophical contexts to which one may have become voluntarily committed. Because we are relational beings, we must balance the personal and the relational and recognize the partial claim that others may have on us. For those of us that take vows for a “consecrated,” or “set aside” life, those of us who willingly submit ourselves to the claims others have on us, or those of us who embrace a framework of “shoulds” that place boundaries on our autonomy, we need a different framework for personal futures planning.
Influenced by the program, Verne’s work, and my own experience of Christian discernment in the context of marriage and family relationships, I’ve developed a retreat format that is a prayerful version of the personal futures planning method. I’d love to discuss it with you or participate in a forum that compares and contrasts personal futures models.