Contents of the Current Issue

Executive Summaries

Strategic Foresight: The State of the Art
by Andy Hines
SUMMARY: A professional futurist consultant offers a framework for helping organizations through the strategic foresight process. The framework, developed with input from many futurists, provides guidance in the key areas needed for foresight to work: Framing, Scanning, Forecasting, Visioning, Planning, and Acting. Each area also contains guidelines within them, providing a multilevel tool kit for understanding and shaping the future.

PLUS: Commentaries and experiences by practicing futurists Lisa Bodell, Edie Weiner, Peter Eder, Drusilla Copeland, and Verne Wheelwright.

Eight Supertrends Changing the Face of Business
by Karl Albrecht
SUMMARY: The strategic landscape has changed, so rather than strategic planning, businesses need strategic evolution. That will require better tools for scanning the landscape of trends. The eight supertrends to watch (spanning the principal sectors of the macroenvironment): (1) Microsegmentation - your target customers are demassifying, but also forming larger virtual groups. (2) Value targeting - honing in on providing the specific solutions to customer needs rather than offering a broad range of one-size-fits-all products and services. (3) Chinafication of the global economy - recognizing the impacts of low labor costs and massive numbers of consumers. (4) "Wave 3.1" - we have moved beyond the Information Era because information itself is losing value; instead, knowledge is increasingly the coin of the realm. (5) Dumb and dirty - mass culture thrives on mindless entertainment, but with this trend come countertrends, such as resurgence of advocacy groups for family values. (6) CyberMobbing - the ability to create communities of culture quickly through communications technologies. (7) Knowledge warfare - between advocates for intellectual property rights and advocates for open-source knowledge sharing. (8) Counter-Americanism - "Made in America" may no longer be cool, and presumptuous U.S. domination in global markets may increasingly spawn hostility.

Religion in the Future Global Civilization
by Thomas R. McFaul|
SUMMARY: The different worldviews and theological assumptions underlying Asian religions (e.g., Hindu, Shintoism) and Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) are as yet irreconcilable, and these irreconcilable differences threaten prospects for world peace in the years ahead. What they do have in common - a set of moral values (compassion, justice, etc.) - could help bridge the gap among the world's religions, thus offering a basis for peaceful co-existence. The author offers three scenarios for peace and justice in the global village by 2050: Exclusivism, Pluralism, and Inclusivism (integration).

PLUS: commentaries by Roy Speckhardt, executive director of American Humanist Association; Harold G. Koenig, associate professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center; and Sister Brenda Walsh, member of the Dominican Order and a futurist.

The Anticipatory Leader: Buckminster Fuller's Principles for Making the World Work
by Medard Gabel and Jim Walker
SUMMARY: The legendary inventor and futurist Buckminster Fuller came to be known as a "comprehensive thinker." So what can a designer teach us about leadership? The authors translate Fuller's approach to life, change, technology, and design into "10 Principles for Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Leadership," including to think comprehensively (start with the universe), to anticipate the future, to envision the best possible future, and to ask obvious or naive questions.

In the Shadow of Pandemic
by Tyler A. Kokjohn and Kimbal E. Cooper
SUMMARY: The looming potential of an epidemic offers a teachable moment for futurists. As bird flu makes its way from Asia around the globe, accurate predictions of its spread and its likely impacts are needed now. Though an epidemic may be unavoidable, actions taken now can offset the devastation it could cause. For instance, more effort put into surveillance could help determine where best to deploy scarce resources such as vaccines.

PLUS: commentary by Daniel J. Barnett, M.D., M.P.H., of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

To order the print edition of the September-October  2006 issue of THE FUTURIST ($4.95 plus $3 postage and handling) or to become a member of the World Future Society ($49 per year).

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