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I’m sure there a mixed feelings at a conference when it’s time for the futurist session.
- What is a futurist anyway?
- This might be fun!
- Is this going to be some gee-whiz technology celebration? Or an environmental gloom-and-doom story?
- Is this going to be relevant at all to my job?
- What time is lunch?
I’ve done my share of conference talks, workshops, and all sorts of venues where I’ve been responsible for introducing people to the future. For this post, I’ll share where I’ve landed on a generic approach the keynote/short workshop. The basic components in roughly equal modules
- A few concepts/tools for thinking about the future (e.g., Framework Foresight, Three Horizons)
- Two to four content modules of drivers and/or potential disruptors/discontinuities. Each module consists of a brief review of 5 or 6 items, followed by “table talk” in which participants rank them for impact and identify implications; then on to the next module and table talk, etc. The implication can be very simple or with more time we might do a futures wheel
- “What’s it mean/what might we do” wrap; time permitting, might have them do elevator speech responses; or show of hand votes, or just me distilling what I heard.
This seems to work well for the audience, a mix of tool, content, and process. And it’s more fun for me, too.
What sparked this post [and maybe at some point a deeper look into the “Introducing the Future” topic…] was that my friends at the Society for Marketing Professional Services recently published a write-up of a session along the lines that I described above: Don’t Be Surprised by the Future: ©Marketer, The Journal of the Society for Marketing Professional Services, February 2018, www.smps.org.
I’m curious to hear how you’ve been introducing the future to people!!! – Andy Hines
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