Thinking about the Future distills the expertise of three dozen senior foresight professionals into a set of essential guidelines for carrying out successful strategic foresight. Presented in a highly scannable yet personable style, each guideline includes an explanation and rationale, key steps, a case example, and resources for further study. The 115 guidelines are organized into six sequential categories that mirror the phases of a strategic foresight activity, namely Framing, Scanning, Forecasting, Visioning, Planning, and Acting. Executives will find both the guidelines and the framework invaluable for understanding what it takes to successfully explore the future, while analysts who actively carry out strategic foresight projects will find the book an indispensable reference that they turn to again and again.
Andy Hines is Lecturer and Executive-in-Residence at the University of Houston's Graduate Program in Futures Studies, bringing together the experience he earned as an organizational, consulting, and academic futurist. He is also speaking, workshopping, and consulting through his new firm Hinesight (www.andyhinesight.com).
Before that, he was Managing Director of Social Technologies (now Innovaro), and served as an Adjunct Professor with the university for five years. Hines enjoyed earlier careers as a consulting and organizational futurist. He was a partner with Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a think tank and consulting firm that specialized in the study of the future. He was also Futurist & Senior Ideation Leader at Dow Chemical with a mission of using futures tools and knowledge to turn ideas into new business opportunities. Before that, Hines established and ran the Global Trends Program for the Kellogg Company.
Hines is motivated by a professional hunger to make foresight practical and useful, and he believes that foresight can help deliver the insight that is so needed in today's organizations and the world. His goal, he says, is to infect as many change agents as possible with this message. Thus, he has honed a skill set designed to make foresight more actionable in organizations.
In this pursuit, he co-founded and is currently on the Board of the Association of Professional Futurists, and has co-authored three books -- Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight (Social Technologies, 2007)," 2025: Science and Technology Reshapes US and Global Society (Oak Hill, 1997) and Managing Your Future as an Association (ASAE, 1994). He has also authored dozens of articles, speeches, and workshops, including the 2003 Emerald Literati Awards' Outstanding Paper accolade for best article published in Foresight for "An Audit for Organizational Futurists" and the 2008 award for "Scenarios: The State of the Art." In the last year, he has appeared on several radio and television programs, including KRIV-26 News talking about the future of libraries and the CBS "Early Show," to talk about a study MTV commissioned his team at Social Technologies to investigate: "The Future of the Youth Happiness."
