The State of Foresight | Hinesight....for Foresight

For our Spring Gathering last year at Houston Foresight, we explored the topic of “Introducing the Future, that is, how do we introduce people and organization to our work – and how can we do a better job at it. As I’ve pondered the topic since, I’ve become increasingly persuaded that it would be really useful to know the “state of foresight.” How many organizations are actually using foresight and futurists? How many foresight consultancies are there? How many practicing futurists? Put another way, just how big is the task of introducing people to the future? I think we’d all agree there we have plenty of work to do!

I am always conscious of how we tell our story. As a relatively new field emerging from World War 2, we are still figuring ourselves out. We are increasingly cohering as a field. Among some of the more recent developments, we established a professional association, the APF, in 2002. And APF developed a foresight competency model in 2016 that provides a view on the core things we do as futurists. But we don’t have a really good lay of the land in terms of who’s doing what. There are some nice pieces out there. There is global foresight wiki that probably has the best current snapshot. One of the things we’ve been doing at Houston Foresight for the last five years is posting publicly available jobs for futurists that runs just over 100. But those are ones that come to us – surely there are more out there. But how many?

I hear the “just get on with it” argument and do the work. But as one of the handful of graduate programs in the world dedicated to foresight, it seems like something that fits. We just posted a blog story about a student project that is a first step in this direction. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned. – 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.

Comments

John Geis says

November 6, 2019 at 4:58 pm

Andy, should you put the book together, I can help with details about how the Air Force has evolved in this regard from the Spacecast 2020 and Air Force 2025 studies of the 1990s to the Blue Horizons and like programs of today.

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Paolo says

November 25, 2019 at 5:43 pm

This would be of interest to decision makers fro all sectors of society.

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