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[Reviewed in THE FUTURIST, November-December 2004]
Futuring: The Exploration of the Future by Edward Cornish. World Future Society. 2004. 313 pages. $29.95 ($24.95 for Society members). Order from the Futurist Bookshelf.
Perspectives of a Pioneering Futurist
The history, purposes, and tools of futures thinking are illustrated
with clarity and grace by the former president of the World Future Society.
Book review by Wendell Bell
Edward Cornish, co-founder and long-term president of the World Future Society, has put more than four decades of experience as a pioneering futurist into Futuring: The Exploration of the Future. The result is a clear, graceful, and informed account of the modern futures movement, its recent history, its purposes and concepts, and its methods and leading practitioners, all illustrated by examples of futurists' works.
"The future," as Cornish says, "does not just happen to us." What our lives are and what they will be are largely consequences of our choices and actions. Although it is often rudimentary, implicit, and even unrecognized, people in their everyday lives use futures thinking all the time. It is an unavoidable element in nearly all human choices and actions.
Yet most people do not do it very well. Their foresight is faulty, because they think too often in the short term, fail to explore alternative possibilities fully, and seldom investigate the future systematically using evidence, reason, and imagination. Thus, what their future turns out to be is often an unpleasant surprise, less desirable and satisfying than it might have been, and sometimes disastrous.
Cornish describes methods for the study of the future, many of which can be adapted by an individual person making his or her own life decisions--from choosing a marriage partner or a career to making an investment, a business plan, or a trip to the moon. He illustrates the use of scenarios, scanning, trend analysis and projection, brainstorming, modeling, gaming, historical analysis, visioning, backcasting, and other methods.
Take scenarios, for example. Each of us could benefit from exploring and evaluating alternative futures for ourselves. As an aid to setting a course for our own future, we can start by constructing a "surprise-free scenario" of where we would end up at some future time if we simply keep doing what we are doing and things keep going as they now are. Additionally, we can construct both a hoped-for "optimistic future" and a to-be-avoided "pessimistic future." Finally, we can add two more, a worst-case "disaster scenario" and a best-case "transformation or miracle scenario."
For each of the five scenarios, we can specify the probable conditions that would result in that scenario becoming the actual future, including what we ourselves can do to help make it come true--or to prevent it from happening. Such an exploration produces not only a map of alternative futures, but also guidelines we can follow to increase our chances of achieving a desirable future.
Cornish reminds us that H.G. Wells called for a science of the future as early as 1902. In his account of recent work in futures studies, he shows that we have made progress toward fulfilling Wells's vision. Readers unfamiliar with the futures field, of course, may question how assertions about the future can be "scientific," when the future, since it hasn't yet happened, is nonexistent and hence not observable.
But Cornish fully answers the question, showing that there are many observable phenomena that bear on the future. For example, time series data can be used to identify past trends that can be projected into the future. Possibilities for the future are real and exist in the present (e.g., this glass is breakable, and, thus, has a possible future in which it might be broken). Causal knowledge can be restated as contingent predictions (e.g., if you smoke cigarettes, you increase your chances of getting lung cancer). People have present intentions to act in particular ways (such as how they intend to vote, to invest, or to buy), and they can be polled; and organizations and social institutions make known many of their future plans well before the fact (such as when stores will open and close or when the next national elections will be held).
Cornish describes how futures thinking has shaped effective actions in human activities, ranging from military planning, the environment, the assessment of the future consequences of technology, and future population growth to economic policy and business decisions, education, climate change, and space exploration.
He charts the growth of the futurist canon during the last 40 years, and he does a masterful job describing its development. He discusses the contributions to the futures field of authors ranging from Daniel Bell, Clement Bezold, Marvin J. Cetron, Arthur C. Clarke, Bertrand de Jouvenel, and Theodore J. Gordon to John L. Petersen, Fred Polak, Richard A. Slaughter, Alvin Toffler, Allen Tough, and W. Warren Wagar, among many others. He appends to his text a glossary of major futures concepts and a judiciously selected annotated bibliography. All told, Cornish documents the accomplishments and maturation of an important new field of inquiry that ought to be part of every modern person's education.
Yet courses on futures studies are not adequately represented in schools and universities today, despite a few notable exceptions such as Tamkang University in Taiwan. As Cornish says, most "educators are preparing students to live in the past, not the future." Given the rapidity of change in the world today, there is a clear and pressing need to increase instruction in futures studies at every level of education.
Although my judgment of Cornish's book is favorable, I do have three concerns about topics that I think deserve more emphasis. The first is the design perspective. We can predict the future sometimes because we can control it. For example, in the United States alone there were a total of nearly 3,000 rail grade-crossing accidents in 2003, killing on average one person a day. Moreover, we can safely predict that they will continue unless some remedial action is taken. Yet we could eliminate nearly all such accidents simply by redesigning the crossings so that roads and railroad tracks do not meet. Put one underneath the other in an underpass.
Such redesign of the intersections would eliminate the risk of such accidents, while public-relations campaigns to persuade every driver to exercise caution without such redesign do little to eliminate the risk. Similarly, redesigning some of the tools we use and the environments, including the social settings, within which we routinely act can reduce many dangers and create new opportunities for our future well-being. Although often we must accept and adapt to the world as it is and will be, sometimes--more often than is usually believed--we can act to change it.
The second is the self-altering prophecy--both self-fulfilling and self-negating--which deserves to be highlighted. To take only one example, let's say that an urban demographer forecasts the number of school-age children for our city for the next decade and reports that our city will not have enough school places for them. But all such forecasts, obviously, are contingent--in this case, on the assumption that no new schools are going to be built. What if the school board, learning of the forecast, authorizes a building program for additional schools? Then, the demographer's original forecast turns out to be false.
Such, of course, is the fate of many forecasts. Clearly, we never should evaluate a forecast only by its predictive accuracy after the fact, because we use forecasts reflexively as information to act now so as to shape the forecasted event to our desires. Although the demographer's forecast was presumptively true at the time it was made, it turned out to be terminally false precisely because it was useful in making a decision to act in a way that negated it.
The third is some discussion of images of women's future empowerment. Women's worldwide cooperative efforts to achieve freedom, equality, and social justice for women everywhere is one of the most dramatic, compelling, and consequential social movements and visions of the future in today's world. Moreover, it affects us all, both men and women. For, if the role and status of women are changed, the role and status of men will be changed too. This topic ranks right up there in importance with the future of war and peace, the environment, energy, the economy, and science and technology. Thus, Cornish's thoughts on alternative futures for women would have been most welcome.
But these are quibbles. From the perspective of a person who has done as much or more than any other single individual to establish the field of futures studies, Cornish has produced an engrossing and important book. For nonfuturist readers, he summarizes key ideas and ways of futures thinking in understandable terms as an introduction to the modern futures field. For his fellow futurists, he gives insights that challenge and inspire.
Read it. It could change your future.
About the Reviewer
Wendell Bell is professor emeritus of sociology and senior research
scientist at Yale University. He is the author of the two-volume Foundations of Futures
Studies (now available in paperback). His most recent article for THE FUTURIST was the
September-October 2004 cover story, "Humanity's Common Values: Seeking a Positive
Future." His e-mail address is wendell.bell@yale.edu.
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