Tools for Building the Future
One of the missions of the World Future
Society is to help people develop the skills and techniques for understanding change and
its potential impacts. These skills empower individuals, organizations, and communities to
not just predict the future but to create it.
One technique that is very familiar to most futurists is
scenario writing, a form of practical storytelling that helps to communicate either a
vision or the possible outcomes of current trends and unexpected events. In this issue of
THE FUTURIST, business futurists Robert E. Neilson and Debra
Stouffer offer an inside look at a scenario--the story of a National
Transportation Safety Board investigator--to show what specific lessons it may have for
users. (See their article, "Narrating the Vision: Scenarios in Action," the
cover story for this issue.)
Another tool for understanding change is offered by
communications theorist M. Rex Miller, author of The Millennium
Matrix. Throughout human history, our forms of communication have shaped how we think
and behave, work and learn, play and relate, Miller explains. Just as the transition from
oral traditions to print and then to broadcast changed our lives, so will the transition
to a digital culture. In this issue, Miller uses the Millennium Matrix concept to help us
better understand how our communications are altering our futures. (See "The Digital
Dynamic: How Communications Media Shape Our World.")
This issue also provides forecasts developed from these and
other futuring tools. In part two of the special report "Trends Now Shaping the
Future," for example, forecaster Marvin J. Cetron and science writer
Owen Davies examine the acceleration of technological progress and its
impacts on business growth, as well as other major trends affecting all our lives in the
decades ahead.
Click to order the May-June 2005 issue of THE FUTURIST.
