By: Alireza Hejazi

A review on recent futurist literature reveals how the futurists helped organizations and how futures studies as a professional practice developed. Here is a brief note of my understanding and I hope you may find it helpful.

The Role of Futurists

A futurist is someone who has become familiar with the futures knowledge. He understands the nature of this knowledge and how to use it to enable others to identify options and choices in the present. The point of studying the future is to move away from a passive or fatalistic acceptance of what may happen to an active and confident participation in creating positively desired futures.

A futurist is a person who has achieved 'futures literacy'. That is, he/she has explored the futures domain and become competent in its ideas and methods. A futurist has studied the futures literature, knows how to use some of its ideas and methods and is able to help others use futures ideas, knowledge and methods. A futurist is likely to take an active interest in a professional futures organization such as the World Future Society or the World Futures Studies Federation. He is likely to communicate regularly with other futurists around the world and attend futures conferences. He will actively help others to understand and respond to forward views. It is not possible to become a futurist simply by appropriating the name (although unfortunately some still do this as the present time).

The Development of Futures Studies

The FS discipline presently goes by a number of names, including Futures Studies (the academic field's most common term in the English-speaking world), foresight and strategic foresight (common in Australia and the UK), prospective studies (Europe), prospectiva (Spain and Latin America), prognostics (Eastern Europe), futuribles (France) and a range of lesser-used synonyms (futurology, futuring, futuristics, etc.). The term futurology, coined in the mid-1940's, is rarely used by practitioners in the English-speaking world today, though it may be found in both English-language encyclopedias and in some European countries. The phrase "future studies” (in singular) is also rarely used by modern practitioners, though it remains common in lay writing.

 

Two factors usually distinguish futures studies from the research conducted by other disciplines (although all disciplines overlap, to differing degrees). First, futures studies often examines not only possible but also probable, preferable, and "wild card" futures. Second, futures studies typically attempts to gain a holistic or systemic view based on insights from a range of different disciplines.

 

Futures studies does not generally include the work of economists who forecast movements of interest rates over the next business cycle, or of managers or investors with short-term time horizons. Most strategic planning, which develops operational plans for preferred futures with time horizons of one to three years, is also not considered futures. But plans and strategies with longer time horizons that specifically attempt to anticipate and be robust to possible future events are part of a major sub-discipline of futures studies called strategic foresight.

 

The futures studies field also excludes those who make future predictions through professed supernatural means. At the same time, it does seek to understand the models such groups use and the interpretations they give to these models.

 

Reference:

Introduction to Futures Studies, Retrieved from:

http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Futures_Studies