by 
The Houston Foresight program kicked off an effort to explore the State of Foresight last fall. The basic question we want to address is “who is actually doing foresight?” A deceptively simple question, right? Not exactly. The foresight field has painfully little data on this question. Professional futurists don’t even know how many of us there are!
You have to start somewhere. Our first crack at it looked at the corporate sector. As you might imagine, it’s challenging to figure that out for the entire sector, so we started with the US Fortune 500. In short, what percent of the Fortune 500 is practicing foresight? Drawing on some incredible work by then grad student and now alum Lesia Fejer, my UH colleague Laura and Schlehuber and I went through the data and came up with a figure. Drum roll, please: 25%. I’ll refer readers to a post we did on the Houston Foresight blog that explains how we came up with that number.
The 25% figure wasn’t a huge surprise to us – going in we assumed it was under 50%. We’re working on an approach now to track that number on an annual basis, and hopefully 5-10 years now we’ll have some solid data to see which way it’s trending. Is it growing? How fast?
Readers of this blog probably know that I like to have answers to basic questions so that we can tell a consistent story on what’s happening with foresight. As long as we’re all guessing, we create confusion in the minds of clients and the public. Now, if someone asks about how many companies are doing foresight, we have a credible basis to start that conversation. It’s not perfect and more work needs to be done. But we’re moving in the right direction.
Going forward, our project would like to one day answer fundamental questions such as:
- How many corporations, government agencies and NGOs, and non-profits are practicing foresight?
- How many professional futurists are there, including consulting, organizational, and academic futurists?
- Once we have a handle on that, then we can explore what they are doing, e.g., what frameworks, methods and tools are they using? How mature is their practice?
— Andy Hines
Id like to help you with that Andy
While it’s a little old now (12 years), the State of Play in the Futures Field report might provide a baseline of sorts for a couple of your questions.
yes, indeed that is a key inspiration for this work!
Hi Andy! Was this report ever released? Curious to hear about the results.