Nominating Most Important Futures Works | Hinesight....for Foresight

The Association of Professional Futurists is about to re-launch it’s Most Important Futures Works campaign. Members are asked to nominate what they feel are important and influential futures works published over the last year. Here are two nominations I submitted.

Verne Wheelright, It’s YOUR Future… Make It A Good One! (2010).

Verne has been doing the heavy lifting in this space for the last decade from his based at the Personal Futures Network. He has adapted strategic planning to the personal level. You do some personal assessment of strengths and weaknesses and then look at trends and potential changes in your external environment. He added in a personal scenario planning activity to bring more of a futures perspective than one gets with traditional strategic planning. So, you create your baseline scenario, where you appear to be heading if present trends continue. And then you look at potential alternatives to that. This leads you to the stage of creating a personal vision– where you want to be in the future. Finally, you craft a plan for achieving that vision. He also has an accompanying workbook that provides exercises and activities to help you think through your future. Incredibly practical and useful resource!

Oliver Markley, A New Methodology for Anticipating STEEP Surprises, Technological Forecasting & Social Change, Volume 78, Issue 6, July 2011, Pages 1079-1097

Oliver provides a much-needed conceptual breakthrough in the wildcard realm. Futurists typically define wild card (a.k.a. STEEP surprise) as a plausible future event that is estimated to have low probability but high impact should it occur. This article introduces what he calls a Type II Wild Card, which is deﬁned as having high probability and high impact as seen by experts if present trends continue, but low credibility for non-expert stakeholders of importance. The addition of credibility as a criterion makes a whole lot of sense. It helps explain how some things which seem obvious to futures (high probability and impact) can be seen as wildcards from the larger social perspective, because they have low or zero credibility. Very well thought through and explained!

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.

About Andy Hines

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