Futuring

Since the beginning of my studies on Strategic Foresight, I’ve been compiling a list of mind-challenging questions that can be raised as research topics and may be addressed by the students of foresight or futures studies at MA and PhD levels.

One: Enjoying science fiction is not the same thing as doing science or making science policy.

Two: Indulging in wish-fulfillment fantasies is not the same thing as analysis.

Three: Extrapolating from speculations and stipulations mistreated as factual data will yield serially failed predictions, few of which amount to foresight.

The World Future Society was saddened to learn last week of the death of our longtime volunteer and consultant, Howard F. Didsbury Jr. He died of pneumonia, following a long illness, on March 17, 2012. He was 87.

For me, 2011 was highlighted by two events. The first was a trip to the global HRD Conference in Mumbai to talk about Leadership and the Long Term Perspective. This was very well received and I came home with a plaque, trophy, video and terrific memories. The second event was in July when I flew to Vancouver for the WFS conference and The APF meeting. A great time with old and new friends in one of my favorite cities.

V. Futurity is a register of freedom, "The Future" another prison-house built to confine it. Futurity is the openness in the present arising out of the ineradicable diversity of calculating, contending, and collaborative stakeholders who struggle to make and remake the shared world, peer to peer.

Come to the WorldFuture Conference in Toronto this July, and you’ll meet innovators and experts from far and wide, all gathered to present on where the world is heading. Here are a few of the many great minds you’ll get to see.

ONE -- Just because futurologists tend to be both foolish and wrong doesn't mean it is always foolish to point out in public places that they are, indeed, wrong.

TWO -- In an era of urgent technodevelopmental quandaries it is actually crucial to understand technoscience questions and their developmental and distributional effects, and every second displaced onto hyperbolic futurological wish-fulfillment fantasizing and disasterbation is a second lost to that deliberation, every techo-transcendentalizing framing of the issues deranges that deliberation from sense into nonsense.

Come to the WorldFuture Conference in Toronto this July, and you’ll meet innovators and experts from far and wide, all gathered to present on where the world is heading. Here are a few of the many great minds you’ll get to see.