Customer Reviews

Futuring: The Exploration of the Future

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If you're new to the study of the future and want to find out why it's important, what methodologies it uses, and how it's applied in the real world, this book is an excellent place to start, and it includes an extensive bibliography for further study. If you've already done a lot of reading on futurism, much of this will be familiar, but it will still provide good background and historical perspective.
The early part of the book, particularly chapters 2 and 3, is reminiscent of the writings of Alvin & Heidi Toffler, discussing the history of technological revolutions and outlining six "supertrends" that will shape the future. The book takes on its own unique trajectory starting in chapter 4, which addresses trends, cycles, patterns, and the tension between stability and change. Methodologies are outlined in chapters 6 through 8, including expert polling (such as the Delphi process), gaming, modeling & simulation, "visioning," scenarios, and their variants. I was hoping for a bit more depth in this part of the book, but at least it gives a first look at the nuts-and-bolts of futuring. Other sources are available to supplement this.
I found chapters 11 through 14 to be an interesting trip through the futurist movement of the past century, highlighting key individuals, organizations, and their effect on societies in different parts of the world. Chapters 15 and 16 end the book on a more philosophical note, arguing that our duty to coming generations requires us to actively cultivate our futuring skills.
The most important points that I came away with:
1) It's a mistake to simply resign oneself to whatever comes and view futurism as little more than science fiction. To do so is to forego the opportunity to shape the future.
2) Futuring is not about predicting specific events or future conditions - it's a way of framing an array of probable futures to help reach those that are desirable and be prepared for those that are not.
3) A multidisciplinary approach is essential. Complex interactions between various technologies, economic developments, geopolitical conditions, etc., must be taken into account to the extent possible.
In my job, I do a lot of research and writing that could be construed as futurist work. Customers typically have no problems with the first two points above, but the third one is a hard sell. People want to know what's likely to happen in their technology, their market, their area of operations, but often care little for other seemingly irrelevant activities. That's like driving a car with dim headlights, no mirrors, and no vision out the sides of the vehicle. Cornish's book is like a driver's education course that addresses those deficiencies.

Time's arrow points ever forward, the past irrevocably gone, the future only a guess. We temporal beings spend many of our present moments in thought about the future - predicting, planning, worrying. But few plans survive contact with reality. Is time spent thinking about the future time wasted? Should we just live for the present and let the future take care of itself?

Edward Cornish of the World Future Society makes a forceful case for future-oriented thinking, or "futuring", in this interesting book. More than predicting the future, his argument is that by thinking about it and planning for it, we gain power to change the future and make our dreams real.

The book covers a broad swath: prediction techniques and idea mapping, classification of trends and 'supertrends', the recent increase in the rate of change, and people's desires for stability. Cornish suggests areas where the techniques of the book may be helpful in the personal realm, as well as on the large scale. Perhaps the most inspiring chapter is historical - a discussion of the significant changes of the 20th century.

The past 100 years saw vastly more technological progress than any before. But the supreme optimism and belief in progress at the beginning of the century was transformed through wars, nuclear terror, and environmental degradation into strong doubts about progress, and the prevalence of much more pessimistic views about the future. Cornish makes a strong case that success, both individually and as a society, depends on having a positive vision of the future and striving to make it happen.

The book does not try to make its own predictions, rather showing how they are made and can be used. Some of Cornish's specific examples seem not as well thought out as one might expect - for example he lumps energy resources and the environment together in a degradation "supertrend", when they really need to be treated quite distinctly.

A long bibliography section gives brief summaries of well over a hundred books on the subject, only a few of which I had heard of before. An updated list and much more can be found on the World Future Society website at [...].

Thinking ahead is the great need of our times as the rapid pace of technological and social change affects work, home, education, health, amusements, environment and even religion. Futuring helps to understand trends, identify opportunities, and avoid dangers; it is a powerful way for individuals and organizations to create a better future. We cannot predict the future in detail but long-term shifts in population, land use, technology and governmental systems provide vital clues. We can all benefit by doing what futurists do, namely:
- preparing for what we will face in the future
- anticipating our possible future needs, problems and opportunities
- identifying possible situations that might be encountered
- expecting the unexpected
- thinking long-term as well as short-term
- dreaming productively
- using even poor information if that is all that is available
- learning from our successful predecessors
Futurists have identified many trends but for simplicity Cornish limits discussion to six super trends shaping our future:
- technological progress
- economic growth
- improving health and longevity
- increasing mobility
- environmental decline
- increasing deculturation
Assuming no big surprises these super trends allow us to create a picture of what the world might look like under a 'continuation scenario'. This picture of the future is not a forecast but a way of thinking how we might prevent certain things happening and how we might create a better future.

We tend to feel powerless and that we have little control over our future. Chance or even trivial events can have enormous consequences and the possibility that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could cause a tornado in Texas high lights the chaotic world we live in. The butterfly effect also highlights the enormous effect even our simple actions can make to the future. Once we recognize our power over the future, we have the responsibility to exercise that power as well as we can. We must seek to understand the possibilities of the future and how to work toward influencing events in a way that will be beneficial. Myriad potential futures lie before us; we can only imagine them and many lie beyond our wildest imagining. Reconstructing humanity's response to his environment and the astonishing number of ways in which different groups of people express themselves in language, music, art, objects of worship, food and housing would have been beyond our most creative brainstorming sessions. Yet each cultural pattern represents a series of choices that a given people has made during its social and cultural evolution. Each people has carved out a different destiny for itself. Likewise, we have enormous freedom to shape our lives. We must abandon the notion that we must have absolutely certain knowledge before we can act; we must base our actions on probabilities and highly uncertain knowledge. We need to train ourselves to think realistically and creatively about the future by simplifying complexities and imagining a much wider range of possibilities than we are in the habit of doing.

The goal of futuring is not to predict the future but to improve it. We must try to prevent the crises of tomorrow so we can avoid disasters. We must mobilize people ahead of time through a democratic process whereby groups of people create their own vision of the future. Edward Lindaman saw how Kennedy's awe-inspiring vision of putting a man on the moon mobilized people to achieve a miracle and he organized citizen groups to create visions of desirable futures for their communities. Clement Bezold outlines five stages in building a vision:
- identification of problems
- identification of past successes
- identification of desires for the future
- identification of measurable goals
- identification of resources to achieve those goals
The vision must be widely shared because people must really believe they can shape their future, commit themselves to doing it, and be prepared to do the hard work involved.

DEGEST - an acronym for demography, economy, government, environment, society/culture, and technology - is a tool for understanding the world around us and bringing us to the threshold of the future at which point futurists use scenarios or conjecture about what might happen in the future. "Scenarios give us an excellent way to think in an orderly manner about future possibilities, assess their probability and likelihood, and evaluate strategies that we might employ to achieve a chosen goal. But imagining scenarios is a challenge to our creativity: We need to come up with lots of ideas about what might happen in the future, since we cannot expect the future to be simply a replay of the past." Scenarios are particularly useful in dealing with wild cards - events that we do not expect to happen but having enormous consequences if they did and the main purpose of thinking about wild cards is to chip away at the rigidities of ideas about the future and open up a new level of creative thinking. 9/11 and the leaps from horse to car, from pen to typewriter and from typewriter to computer were wild card events and over the course of a century there might be several thousand wild cards so we have to expect them to impact our lives in times of rapid change. New ways of thinking are required to overcome our unwillingness to think seriously about future events thought to be unlikely. Putting a man on the moon demonstrated human ability to shape the future. Just as Thomas Edison trained himself to produce one minor invention every ten days and one major invention every six months, so we can train ourselves to prepare for the future and this book is an excellent place to start.

Ed Cornish is a leading thought leader in the futures industry and has written an excellent overview to understanding what futures work is all about. As a practicing futurist who also teaches futures forecasting, this book has been valuable for my clients and students to better understand theory, practice and methods. I would highly recommend this book for business, social or public leaders who want to know how to use the futurist lens to better understand what's next. This book is an invaluable tool for examining the how futures practice can empower yourself, your organization, company or nation. As we move into the 21st century we need books like this to enable our civilization to chart a new more positive future for humanity.

Dr. James Canton
CEO & Chairman
Institute for Global Futures

An excellent read...........hard to believe that you can get a book for a college class for under $20 new and for it to be such an enjoyable read.

Edward Cornish is editor of The Futurist Magazine, and while his Futuring: The Exploration Of the Future could easily have been featured in our nonfiction columns, it's recommended here for science fiction fans used to considering the future. Cornish's focus is upon the trends, ideas, and innovations driving the world: his Futuring envisions the job of exploring the future as a trailblazing pioneer of prediction, considering how futures are influenced, how they change, and the patterns of choice, chaos and cycles which influence them. Hard to easily categorize, but any science fiction reader interested in future worlds will relish Cornish's approach.

First, I want to say that the topic of "futures" is not for all people. One must want to be able to think beyond and use available tools in the area of forecasting. Cornish's Futuring - The Exploration of the Future is one of those tools. Cornish truly has written a book that assists the Future's reader in forecasting the future via exposing risk and the effects of that risk on one's managing or potential management of either their own life's future or that of their respective organization..
Second, Cornish's Futuring - The Exploration of the Future is written in an understandable format that could draw unsuspecting readers in to future forecasting by providing the foundation for folks to remove their inhibitions about controlling their future.
This book is more than just about scenarios, offering a convincing and comprehensive understanding of how scenarios can and should be used as a form of strategic management.
Along the way, the reader is treated to clear and helpful explanations of such things as "the history of futures explorers" (ch. 1), "the great transformations" caused by change (ch. 2), "the six supertrends shaping the future" (ch. 3), and "various futures methods of change" (ch. 6), among others.
Overall, methodologies such as scenarios are examined and understood by Cornish (the founder of the World Future Society and the editor of its "flagship" publication the Futurist Magazine), are useful tools. They are foremost forecasting tools which are best used by both organizations, as well as the solitary planner at their workbench.
If you want to understand how the future can be more accurately perceived (though not predicted) then this is a worthy addition to the library of any management strategist or student of the future.

Sponsored by the World Future Society, this book brings into one volume dozens of the world's "experts" in many areas of life and science and religion and technology and government to project their visions and scenarios of the next 25 years. I find their opinions hopeful, and, although very "man can do anything" in outlook, encouraging. We can create a better future than previous generations could dream of. "While it would be pleasant to envision a world free from the pressure of material want, a more realistic projection, based on the evidence, is of a world in which generation after generation thinks it needs only another 10 to 20 percent more income to be perfectly happy."--page 32.
My future will be great! Because I am grateful for the past.
Jon

It certainly sounded exciting. Unfortunately, it's mostly a bunch of long winded articles on vague ideas that you've already thought of a hundred times. That's not to say that the ideas aren't important. I was simply expecting something a bit more focused by an author willing to take some risks. On the bright side, the book won't become dated for quite some time.

I think this book lacks so many aspects. A case is presented, but facts and statistics easily hide important parts that are totally left out. Partly caused by a lack of space, but it feels like he didn't bother find out all the facts.

I also miss supertrends. I think that for exemple empathy is a supertrend that should be on the list.