Verne Wheelwright's blog

That’s the title of our pre-conference workshop at the World Future Society conference in Vancouver next month (C-8 on July 8), but what does that title really mean? High-falutin’ words, but will there be substance?
We (workshop leaders Ufuk Tarhan and Verne Wheelwright) think so. This workshop will take you places you’ve thought about and wanted to explore, but haven’t taken the time to actually tackle.

A regional business newspaper, the Valley Business Report, is sponsoring a Foresight Workshop for business people in May in Mission, Texas. This will be about futures/foresight methods and how to apply those methods in business, particularly in small business. This is a four-hour workshop, which allows business people to attend in the morning and be back in their offices in the afternoon.
The format that I’m planning is a personal futures approach, then a discussion of how each tool or method can be applied in a small business. As a result, I’m working on a supplemental workbook for small business.

In February, I’ll be attending a conference in Mumbai (Bombay), India. The conference is the “World HRD Congress” for Human Resource Development professionals.
Why is a futurist attending a conference for HR professionals? Because the organizers have asked me to speak about how Personal Futures can help them train leaders and potential leaders in their organizations in long term thinking—foresight. The title of my presentation is “Leadership and the Long-Term Perspective.”

For some time, I’ve been working on an updated version of the Personal Futures workbook. I am just about ready to post the new edition (4th) at www.personalfutures.net. I’ve sent out some review copies to check for errors, but will have the new workbook posted by the 15th.

What’s new?

If you’ve followed the three previous blogs or the Personal Futures Workbook, you should have a personal strategic plan for the next ten years. Your plan includes three parts:
• A vision— a mental image of your life ten years from now.
• An action plan composed of strategies and a timetable for execution of each strategy.
• A contingency plan—actions to take when a low-probability, high-impact event occurs.
Now is the time to do some analysis before you put your plan into effect.

This third step could be titled Personal Strategic Planning, because it follows many of the same steps used in corporate strategic planning. But… personal strategic planning is a much simpler process, and it works!

The second step toward your personal future involves exploring multiple alternative futures. This is the scenario method, in my opinion the heart of futuring.

Personal Futures is simply a system for applying futures (or futurist’s) methods to individual lives. These methods have been used (quite successfully) by corporations and governments around the world for decades. It’s just a matter of scale. And simplicity.

When I started my research, scaling down was THE challenge. Not so much for the futures methods, they scale easily. The problem was the research, the basic information about each individual’s life. Where does an individual (you) start? What are the driving forces? What are plausible and probable events in your future?
In building a systematic approach to personal futures, I arrived at three major steps:

I was frankly flattered when I was invited to write in this space. I read the work of some of the other writers/bloggers on this site, so I feel I’m in distinguished company.
But— fair warning— I won’t be writing about the future. I will be writing about YOUR future. How to understand it. How to explore it. How to plan for it. How to achieve your vision of your future. This is personal futures.

Since I am introducing myself and personal futures, let me guide you toward more information about personal futures.