Futuring: The Exploration of the Future (Kindle Edition)

by Edward Cornish (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

An engrossing and important book...Read it. It could change your future. -- The Futurist

An exciting book, that most agreeably combines readability and practicality with the best American scientific tradition. -- Pro Zukunft (Austria)

An ideal text for students and any friend you want to interest in futuring. -- Future Times (New Zealand)

Cornish...makes a forceful case for future-oriented thinking or 'futuring' in this interesting book. -- Huntsville Times, August 15, 2004

For clear scenarios of what may come, you need to call on Edward Cornish. -- Ode Magazine, September 2004

This clearly written book ... can expand the outlook, as well as encourage a proactive interest in the future. Highly recommended. -- Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, October 2004

Product Description

The most important thing happening today is not reported in newspapers or on the TV news. It’s a global transformation of technology and society that is creating an age of hyperchange.
Since the future is hurtling toward us at breakneck speed, foresight is the great need of our times. We must think ahead if we are to cope with the hurricane-force changes now bashing at every aspect of our lives. This acceleration of change brings enormous opportunities as well as great dangers.

Most of us know better than to drive down a highway at eighty miles an hour without looking at the road ahead. But when it comes to steering our careers and businesses, we hardly ever consider what’s coming toward us. We often wind up in a nasty "crash" that we could have avoided if we had better anticipated possible developments.

This is where futuring can help.

Futuring is the art and science of exploring the future. It offers methods and techniques that can help you understand trends, identify opportunities and avoid dangers. Futuring can help you understand possible future developments, make better decisions, develop worthwhile goals, and find the means to achieve them. Futuring is a powerful way to help you and your organization to create a better future.

Virtually anyone can benefit from learning the skills and perspectives of futuring:
* Businesspeople can anticipate profitable new markets and innovative products.
* Investors can be ready to get in on the ground floor of emerging industries and new technologies.
* Educators and parents can help ensure that young people are properly prepared for the new world they’ll inherit.
* Students can plan out careers in highly rewarding professions.
* Concerned citizens and policy makers will find practical ways to help guide their communities and organizations to a successful future.

Futuring will open your eyes to the world of the future and how you can prepare for the opportunities and risks ahead. In addition, Futuring will guide you through the history of serious thinking about the future, including the development of the idea of progress in the seventeenth century to the disillusionment with progress that came in the twentieth century.

You will learn how far-sighted military planners, trend-watchers in business, and scholars in think tanks developed ways to think scientifically about the future so that leaders in government and business could prepare for the opportunities and risks ahead. Now you, too, can benefit from their discoveries.

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 575 KB
• Simultaneous Device Usage: Unlimited
• Publisher: World Future Society (October 3, 2005)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B002CQTLG4
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #58,323 in Kindle Store (See Bestsellers in Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great introduction to thinking ahead, December 26, 2007

By	James A. Vedda (Alexandria, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Futuring: The Exploration of the Future (Paperback)

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.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Case for Future-Oriented Thinking, September 14, 2005

By	Arthur P. Smith (Selden, New York USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Futuring: The Exploration of the Future (Hardcover)

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 [...].

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very important book, May 7, 2004

By	DAVID-LEONARD WILLIS (Thessaloniki Greece) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Futuring: The Exploration of the Future (Hardcover)

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.