by I’ve heard variations on the following come up periodically when talking about the future: “Not all futurists are in the business of serving clients.” One place is in teaching in the Foresight Master’s program, where we have an emphasis on “preparing professional futurists.” The question sometimes comes up as “but what if we don’t have clients?” I guess it depends on how one defines client. In the dictionary, client is defined as: “A person or organization using the services of a lawyer or other professional person or company.” It’s not clear that “using the services” involves payment, but it at least implies it. So by that definition, I suppose you could argue that we don’t all have [paying, at least] clients.
But I’d like to use a broader interpretation of “using the services” and include non-paid work. And go a step further than that and suggest that we may not know who are clients are, but we still have them. Using that approach, then we might say that all the foresight work we do, at least to some degree, has a client – even if we’re not sure who they are yet. I think that’s a helpful perspective to take, since it then puts us in the frame of mind of producing a product for someone. In class, we’ll sometimes suggest making up a client as a way to make it more tangible. I think it helps students to have a mindset that the work is for someone.
Another point is that I’d like to ease what I sometimes see as a stigma placed on those who work for paying clients – in some cases I see that painted as “bad” and those who do work for “the public” (or non-paid) are doing “good.” This is not widely held, but it pops up now and then. I think that we’re all working for someone and in some cases it’s paid and in some it’s not. In both cases, we are trying to influence “someone” to think about the future differently (or just to think about it in the first place). Seems like this perspective could not only help us produce more relevant work, but also bring us closer together as a field – we are all in it together, after all! Andy Hines
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