Futures 2.0: rethinking the discipline

Abstract

Purpose -This paper seeks to be a thought experiment. If the field of futures were invented today, it asks, what would it look like? What would be its intellectual foundations? Who would it serve and influence? And how would its ideas and insights be put into practice? Design/methodology/approach -It reviews the literatures on experimental psychology and neuroscience to identify biases that affect people's ability to think about and act upon the future, studies of expertise that map the limits of professional judgment, and recent work on the nature of critical challenges of the twenty-first century.Findings -It argues that futurists could develop social software tools, prediction markets, and other technologies to improve the individual and collective accuracy and impact of work. Choice architectures and nudges to lengthen ''the shadow of the future'' of everyday choices made by ordinary people could also be used.Research limitations/implications -The paper argues for new directions in the practice of futures, to make the field better-suited to deal with the challenges confronting an increasingly complex, chaotic, and contingent world. Practical implications -The development of tools to augment professional activity, and adoption of choice architectures and nudges as media for communicating about the future, could improve futures work and its impact, but lay the foundation for other methodological innovations.Originality/value -The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about where futures should go.

ICT and the Foresight Infrastructure of the Future

“…Gordon et al 2005;Pang 2010). The Internet is already increasingly being used for foresight collaboration (Gheorghiu et al 2009) and a rising number of processes are now being supported by ICT-based infrastructure.…”

Foresight 2.0 - Definition, overview & evaluation

“…Furthermore, meta-level analyses with Delphi studies show that expert opinions often become increasingly divergent, the further away the time horizon for the prediction to be made [28]. These findings suggest to not blindly trust expert opinion, since even experts are "just" humans without precognitive abilities [29]. A study of Hong and Page also shows that group heterogenity beats individual ability, at least if the research question is well defined [30] (the best answers are obtained if the group does consist mainly of experts but there is a high heterogenity in their fields of expertise).…”

“…This database lists all tweets (messages on Twitter [57]) that contain the keyword "future". Even if it is just a gimmick so far, this would be a valuable addition to more academically sound Foresight 2.0 processes to collect base data, as Pang suggests [29], to add new predictions fast and effortlessly to an initial screening database. This idea has also already been implemented by the platform wefutr 7 which used the HashTag #predictions to filter predictions and number of retweets to prioritize those that had been found.…”

“…According to Pang [29], the web can be useful to professional forecasting (respectively Foresight) in three ways: (1) Social Scanning, a systematic approach to pattern recognition in freely accessible, openly available data that Futurists have listed on the web for a broader Foresight community to analyse and evaluate (see [34]). (2) Prediction Markets, which help to aggregate expertise through participation and (3) Reviewing Forecasts, which serve the evaluation of the broder utility and output of applied Foresight methodology.…”

“…for collective intelligence and the architecture of the framework should be able to capture interrelations between future factors. Since one primary goal of Foresight is the systematic reduction of complexity, the decision-making frameworks of Pang [29] should be considered when developing digital collaborative Foresight applications. This would ensure a strong collaborative creation of future images, even for amateur participants.…”