What exactly is a Futurist , and How Can I Become One?

What exactly is a Futurist, and How Can I Become One?

by Ben Parsons

You've probably heard me throwing the world "futurist" out there to describe myself fairly frequently in the last few weeks, months, or even years, and might be wondering if I'd possibly lost the plot, or had maybe even traded my teaching textbooks for tarot cards and tea leaves. Well, I'm happy to inform that that's hardly the case. Actually, I think I've always innately been a futurist, despite having only recently realised it, and I believe many of you reading this article are futurists also, perhaps without even knowing it. This article will explain what a futurist is, why I think it's the most important role in a democracy, and how you can become one too, if you aren't one already.

Put simply, a futurist is a person who, using a combination of research, statistics, imagination, and intuition, analyses and makes educated projections and predictions about the future. These projections and predictions can be pretty much about anything: from evolving demographic patterns, to technological trends, to health issues, to trends in education, and to predictions relating to our physical environment. While early futurism began with Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematicain 1967, believe it or not, the concept of modern futurism has its roots with early 20th century science fiction writer H.G. Wells, author of the classic futurist novelsWar of the Worlds and The Time Machine.Futurism as a concept was then propagated and continued by subsequent sci-fi writers well into the 20th century, such as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, and others. Midway through the 21st century, futurism branched out into other fields, and became a bone fide occupation, existing in some form in a range of other professions. In fact, most companies probably employ futurists without even knowing, and have them perform some of the most vital roles in the organisation.

In fact, Candy & Schultz (Acceleration Watch) have identified at least twelve different kinds of futurists from a range of fields and disciplines in two major areas.Social Futuristsgenerally tend to predict and project future states for the self, society, and the environment, whereasMethodological Futuristsfocus on the tools of prediction and projection, and how we can claim to make those social projections:

2. Personal futurist:One who uses foresight to solve problems primarily for themselves, within the conventions of society, and whose current behavior is oriented to and influenced by their future expectations and plans.

3. Imaginative futurist:One who habitually develops future visions, scenarios, expectations, and plans in relation to self and others, knowing but sometimes breaking the conventions and norms of society.

4. Agenda-driven futurist:One who creates or works toward top-down developed (received, believed) ideological, religious, or organizationally-preferred agendas (sets of rules, norms) and their related problems, for the future of a group.

5. Consensus-driven futurist:One who helps create or work toward bottom-up developed (facilitated, emergent), group-, communally-, institutionally- or socially-preferred futures.

6. Professional futurist:One who explores change for a paying client or audience, who seeks to describe and advance possible, probable, or preferable future scenarios while avoiding undesirable ones, and who may seek to help their client or audience apply these insights (manage change).

8. Alternative futurist:One who explores and proposes a range of possible or imaginable futures, including those beyond one's personal, organizational, and cultural conventional and consensus views.

9. Predictive futurist:One who forecasts probable futures, events and processes that they expect are likely to occur, in a statistical sense, both as a result of anticipated personal and social choices, and for autonomous processes that appear independent of human choice.

10. Evolutionary developmental (Evo devo) futurist:One who explores evolutionary possibilities and predicts developmental outcomes, and attempts differentiate between evolutionary (chaotic, reversible, unpredictable) and developmental (convergent, irreversible, statistically predictable) processes of universal change.

11. Validating futurist:One who seeks to evaluate, systematize, and validate the completeness (for critical and alternative futures) and accuracy (for predictive and evo devo futures) of methodologies used to consider the future.

12. Epistemological futurist:One who investigates the epistemology (how we know what we know) of the future, and seeks to improve the paradigms of foresight scholarship and practice

More recently, however, I think I've fallen very much into the realms ofimaginative futurist, critical futurist,andpredictive futurist.Recently, I wrote a dissertation for my Master's Degree in English that dealt with all three. To put things simply, I argue that science fiction allows readers to better imagine and understand the complex science of climate change, better imagine and understand the potential, abstract, future consequences of climate change, and hopefully imagine the required social, political, and economic transformation that is most certainly going to be required in humanity is to avert climate catastrophe.I also recently delivered a TEDx Talkon the subject, and plan to deliver more.

In my education career, I think I've apredictive futuristquite a lot recently. As an advocate of STEAM and educational technology, and have spent a lot of time researching, training, teaching, and deploying a range of educational technology I see as being the future of education, such as Minecraft, Computer-Aided Design, and 3D Printing. Hopefully, in the coming years, I can delve more into the other schools of futurism.

What kind of futurist are you?

Nothing can possibly matter more than the future. We are literally setting the foundations today for the world our kids and grandkids will inhabit tomorrow. Humans are fully capable of perceiving and realising the consequences of short-term phenomena: if we drop poison into a river, we almost immediately see dead fish. If an oil tanker sinks, we almost immediately see the consequences for surrounding sea life. But, in terms of climate change, how can we perceive the consequences of present-day actions that occur so far into the future? How do we begin to perceive and imagine the social, political, and economic consequences of something as seemingly abstract as releasing an invisible gas, carbon dioxide, into the atmosphere over decades, or even centuries? Animaginative futuristcan provide compelling visions of those consequences, and through science fiction literature, can compel readers to take action. Morecritical and predictive futuristslike myself can explore these visions, analyse them, and write about them, as I'm doing now. As a meta-prediction, I predict that futurism will be one of the defining skills of the 21st century, one that every organisation will need to not just survive in an automated and changing world, but thrive.

Happy futuring, all!

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What exactly is a Futurist , and How Can I Become One?