The curse of the futurist | Hinesight....for Foresight

The curse of the futurist is “why is this change taking so long?”

A year ago I posted “change is slower that we think.” Perhaps this re-framing will get the idea out there more prominently. We are still so awash in piles of “unprecedented, historic, rapid, fast, VUCA, complex, uncertain, accelerating, chaotic, mind-blowing change stuff.” We have to do better. I hope readers here will agree that horizon scanning works. If you do your scanning homework in a domain, then you will not be blindsided by the unprecedented, historic, rapid, fast, VUCA, complex, uncertain, accelerating, chaotic, mind-blowing change. Rather, you experience a different and much improved problem — you experience the curse of the futurist: WHY IS THIS CHANGE TAKING SO LONG!!!!

It is a really simple idea – if you look ahead, you get a heads-up. That’s it….yet, for myriad reasons, we don’t, get blindsided, and then blame it on rapid change.

This slow speed of change idea has been building in my mind when we re-examined our approach to scanning several years ago. It’s been coming up in client work as we focused more on the Integrated Strategic Approach to the scenario landscape. It really came to a head in the Monitoring work we did for the Forest Service (Stay tuned for a post on that). And we are working on a “movement across the horizons” research paper.

I remember the first time it clicked for me was back in the early 1990s when I was working for Joe Coates. We were at a dinner event for the Washington DC chapter of the World Future Society. The guest speaker talked about today’s rapid pace of change, and Joe, in the audience, rebuked him sharply for that nonsense – in inimitable way that only Joe could do. The audience gasped a bit, but I remember thinking, even though I was a bit embarrassed (since I had invited the speaker), that Joe had a point. It never left me. And now that I have three decades under my belt, I reflect that I have been analyzing so many of today unprecedented, historic, etc. ….. changes for decades. Hurry up already. It’s a curse, I tell ya! — 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.

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The Future Is [NOT] Faster Than You Think | Hinesight....for Foresight says:

July 6, 2022 at 11:02 pm

[…] questioning of this argument: Change is slower than we think or confusing movement with progress or the curse of the futurist. The core of my counter-argument is that when we do our proper foresight homework and scanning, we […]

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