London Futures Symposium: #1 Introduction to Futuring

Yesterday I had the chance to spend all day at the 2nd London Futures Symposium organised by Stephen Aguilar-Millan from the European Futures Observatory. A programme of informal speakers / lectures was offered along with a chance to do a bit of networking - not an easy thing to find for this professional area - and around 30 people attended.

From my perspective, I’d characterise the day as of two fairly distinct parts; with the morning offering themes to help guide people on some of the key techniques and methodologies underlying strategic foresight work and the afternoon blending some personal research insights and a description of a recent case study.

Firstly, Stephen himself gave “An introduction to Futuring” (which I’ll cover in more detail below) followed by  The Future Studio’s Adam Gordon offering a comprehensive “Introduction to Scenarios”. Post lunch, Dr. Trudy Barber (Portsmouth University) discussed her long-term research in “The Future of Gender, Media and Identity” and, lastly, Francesca Birks (Arup) talked us through the process behind a recent project on “Eco-resorts of the Future”.

Stephens opening presentation - “An introduction to Futuring” sought to illustrate 3 key themes: (1) what is future studies? (2) what techniques can we use to generate images of the future? and (3) what resilience can we give to the results?

To address the first, Stephen began by asking us to consider some of the relationships between time and determinism: namely, whether we conceive of the future as probable, possible or preferred and also how we sense temporality (the past moving into the present, ideas of ‘pushing’ and ‘pulling’ future perspectives either from the present forward or from the future backwards). He then offered us 3 generic sets of techniques to use; time-series models, causality models and what he - unhappily described as - inner-essence models (”… it’s not the right term”, he asserted and offered recognition to anyone who can profer a better one).

Most of the remaining discussion focused on looking briefly at the key tools attributed to each technique. As it’s Stephen’s intention to post his presentation slides at some point I won’t go into any further level of descriptive detail here; I’ll just publish the link when available.

However, I think one of the key points for me - and perhaps one worthy of greater future emphasis - was understanding the contextual appropriateness of each technique given the specific ‘futures’ issue faced, that is, how and when practitioners should select a particular ‘tool’. To be fair, Stephen offered quick guidelines, so time-series models should be used when seeking to project from the present; causality models when considering what may evolve from current trends and inner-essence models when seeking to understand the causality which may have evolved and how that may change in the future. Also, these were presented (necessarily) as mutually distinct responses to be used on an individual and discrete basis and I did wonder afterwards if we could have looked at whether -in practice - that is always the case or also considered what potential transition issues could occur if you had to swap-out techniques during a project with evolving issues or changing client needs.

I don’t want to overstate that as at the outset Stephen indicated the presentation was designed to offer as broad a perspective on future studies as possible rather than a ‘deeper’ one and in that regard he succeeded. I felt this was a useful and comprehensive overview that provided the right kind of insight into the range, versatility and general applicability of the strategic foresight toolkit. Lastly, given the size of the toolkit (9 were explicitly mentioned) it should remind us of the complexity of any investigation of the future.

More tomorrow.