by I was recently asked about the state of professionalizing, and realized it has
been a while since I has reflected on it. I am a supporter of professionalizing foresight. I think having a robust core of professionals helping to spread foresight perspectives, methods, and tools is a good thing. And I think the activities involved in “professionalizing” are useful and helpful things for futurists to do anyway (even if not aimed at professional status). A real quick summary of some of the key activities:
- 2002: Association of Professional Futurists (APF) was founded and the next year develops scenarios exploring the futures of futures.
- 2012: APF launches a “Future of Foresight” project (which coincides with my own exploration professionalization as part of my dissertation)
- 2013 APF commissions a Professionalization task force, in which I lead a team of two dozen members to identify steps on the path to professionalization:
- 2015: APF publishes a Foresight Competency model, in which I lead a core team of four people doing the bulk of the work.
The question that sparked this reflection had to do with whether the “field” would continue to exist or whether it would be amortized or absorbed by other more robust disciplines. A fair question. One we addressed back in the 2003 scenarios that explored the possibility of what we called “McKinseyization,” basically the absorption scenario. Other fields adopted our tools and we gradually faded away.
The bullets above help me to feel confident that we are on a thoughtful, patient journey to a future in which the field and its professionals are valued. Perhaps one benefit of not every having “caught fire” as a field is that we don’t have to deal with the inevitable cooling off. I don’t want to name names, but we can probably think of examples where fields close to us had their day in the sun and then kind of faded. We’ve never had to deal with takeoff of popularity and have continued to trudge along and slowly but surely spread foresight thinking. Of course, another scenario possibility we identified back in 2002 was the popularity one. It would present some challenges, and I think the more work we can do now to bring our field together, the better prepared we’ll be for that scenario. It could happen! – Andy Hines
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