Abstract
Five academic programs in futures studies and strategic foresight collaborated over the 2012–2013 academic year for the purpose of investigating what they were teaching, and particularly what was common among the programs. Each of the five programs presented its curriculum to the other programs and answered their questions. Peter Bishop from the Houston program and Jim Dator from the Hawaii program synthesized the results with a special focus on a comparison of their two programs. Bishop presented the results at the biannual meeting of the World Futures Studies Federation in Bucharest, Romania, in July 2013.
Background
After many decades of attempts to deal with the long-term future, Futures Studies (also known as Strategic Foresight) appeared on the scene in the 1960s. Best sellers like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, and even Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey introduced the nascent discipline to the public and opened many of the debates in the field. Jim Dator and Wendell Bell started teaching about the future at Virginia Tech and Yale, respectively, and the World Futures Society was founded by Edward Cornish.
The 1970s brought more books and more organizations, notably Donella Meadows et al.’s Limits to Growth and the World Futures Studies Federation (WFSF). Two academic programs were also founded in that decade—the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the Studies of the Future program at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. Today, there are somewhere between a half dozen and a dozen graduate programs in futures studies around the world.
Forty years later, it is now time for these programs to share what they are teaching as they prepare foresight professionals for careers in the field. Are they teaching the same thing? If so, what is it? If there were a significant overlap in their objectives and curriculum, could they proceed to develop a common curriculum which each could modify to suit its mission and its students? The idea of a common curriculum had been discussed at meetings of futurists for many years. In 2005, then-Federation President Fabienne Goux Baudiment asked Peter Bishop from the University of Houston and Peter Hayward from Swinburne University of Technology to consider developing an undergraduate curriculum in futures studies. As one of the Federation’s objectives is to “introduce futures-oriented thinking in all branches of knowledge and action . . . ,” it was only natural to continue to try to introduce futures-oriented thinking to schools. Bishop and Hayward did develop a first draft of concepts and terms, but they did not develop a full curriculum.
In 2011, Bishop made a second attempt to investigate commonalities by inviting twenty academic futurists to participate in a series of online conferences called the University Foresight Network. The idea was to meet for a few months online and then face to face at the Federation’s conference in Panang, Malaysia. There they could compare their learning objectives and curriculum in extended work sessions. Unfortunately, the Federation meeting was canceled before the online meetings convened so that attempt stalled as well.
Bishop restarted the initiative the next summer (2012) with the encouragement of John Smart of the Futures Education and Research Network (FERN). Eight academics responded positively, and the first online meeting was held in September 2012. In the end, the Network conducted seven monthly meetings through March 2013. The first meeting established the mission of the Network, five more gave five programs the chance to describe their learning objectives and curriculum, and a final meeting discussed next steps. The list of the individuals and programs participating is included in Table 1.
Participants in the 2012–2013 Meetings of the University Foresight Network.
In the meantime, the Federation was invited to hold its next meeting in Bucharest in June 2013 where Bishop presented the results.
Results
The primary result of the meetings was to confirm what the group suspected from the beginning—that programs were teaching essentially the same basic material, albeit with different emphases depending on the background of the faculty and the needs of the students. This outcome in itself was worth the time and effort expended. An emerging discipline, like Futures Studies, has a hard time identifying and articulating what it knows and therefore what it teaches. The differences among practitioners and among faculty and programs are obvious and often discussed. The common elements among them, however, are implicit and rarely considered. Therefore, finding common ground was not only gratifying, it also showed that the discipline is based on a common core that it can build on and share with students and clients alike.
The group adapted a curriculum model called Understanding by Design 1 to characterize the different curricula. The model is quite complex so the group decided just to describe what they taught using four elements of the model:
Big ideas—the most important concepts, terms, and their definitions
Enduring understandings—the most important propositions about the field
Provocative questions—key questions for discussion and discovery
Professional skills—key competencies for foresight professionals.
As it turned out, only the concepts and terms received enough attention to be presented at the Bucharest meeting. Further work on professional competencies is currently being done by the Association of Professional Futurists.
Theories, Ideas, Concepts, and Terms
As Bishop and Dator were presenting the results at the Bucharest meeting, they developed the material, subject to the review of the rest of the Network. They decided to compare their own programs which they knew better than the others. How much commonality would the two programs have?
In fact, the Houston and Hawaii programs may not be a representative comparison because they have much in common. They are both located at state universities in the United States. They were both founded in the 1970s and headed by two white males with social science degrees obtained in 1959 and 1974, respectively, both of whom are now retired.
Nevertheless, there are some important differences:
The states of Hawaii and Texas could not be more different politically.
The Houston program is a stand-alone degree where the Hawaii program is embedded in a political science degree.
Houston teaches eight master’s level futures courses per year; Hawaii teaches fewer.
Hawaii’s MA program requires a paid internship. Students take one year of futures classes and then a yearlong internship at some established futures consulting firms, such as the Institute for Alternative Futures, the Institute for the Future, and the like. The Houston program requires a one-course master’s option that may be a thesis, a project, or an internship.
The Hawaii program includes a doctoral degree; Houston does not.
The Hawaii program is a leader in “experiential futures,” including rooms, full of artifacts, sounds, smells, people, and activities representative of each of the four generic futures of the Manoa School, so that clients in effect “experience” several starkly different futures before envisioning their preferred futures. The Houston program offers one-week and four-course certificate programs for working professionals.
The Hawaii program enjoys the support of the state for its research activities; the Houston program does not.
Jim Dator is a founder of and remains closely associated with the WFSF, whereas Peter Bishop is a founder of and remains closely associated with the Association of Professional Futurists.
There are probably more differences. Nevertheless, the comparison showed that the ideas and concepts taught in each program are remarkably similar (See Online Appendix). 2 Houston does have more concepts and terms in its list than Hawaii does, but the overall structure of the two lists is similar. The Houston list is longer because
Houston offers eight graduate futures courses per year,
all the courses are online and taught by a range of faculty so the material needs to be quite explicit, and
Bishop’s undergraduate background in scholastic philosophy makes him a natural cataloger and list maker.
Both programs, however, pay considerable attention to the top-level categories in the list—theoretical orientations in the field, systems thinking, attributes and types of change, theories that explain social stability and change, and forecasting and planning methods. Hawaii spends more time on the orientations of culture, such as considerations of language, nature of time, and a culture’s conception of the future (or not). Houston teaches a broader set of explicit ideas and concepts for forecasting and planning than Hawaii does.
Nevertheless, Dator and Bishop never disagreed over whether a certain idea or concept should or should not be taught. Houston’s curriculum is more explicit whereas Hawaii’s curriculum is more implicit, but both are covering essentially the same ground. They are preparing foresight professionals with a somewhat different emphasis, but both graduate them with the same core knowledge and skills.
Generic Framework Processes
The commonality was even more striking when comparing the Houston and Hawaii generic processes for conducting foresight projects. Both begin with research and a focus on the past and the present. They then move to describe the future although Houston makes the Expected or Baseline Future explicit where Hawaii does not. They both teach about scenarios, of course, but Hawaii teaches the four generic futures of the Manoa School from which students then develop four specific alternative futures and one or more preferred futures, whereas Houston introduces students to many forecasting and scenario techniques from which they develop their own scenarios. Both frameworks then move onto the action side of foresight with visioning, planning, and change management. That may sound like common sense to experienced futurists, but documenting that from two of the leading foresight programs gives the profession something to call a common core.
Dator first introduced his process at the Federation conference in Bucharest 3 and then more recently in the Journal of Futures Studies, 4 and finally as a chapter in a book on leadership. 5 Bishop introduced the Framework Foresight process at a futures conference in Prague. 6 Then he and Hines published the Framework Foresight process in their book Teaching about the Future 7 and most recently in a journal. 8 Despite the different times and venues, however, the two framework processes are quite similar, showing again the Houston and Hawaii are teaching from the same core.
What is more, two other scholars, this time from Australia, have also published generic frameworks—Joseph Voros from Swinburne University of Technology 9 and Sohail Inayatullah from the University of the Sunshine Coast and Tamkang University. 10 There are undoubtedly more such processes taught in other programs, but it would be a surprise if they differed significantly from these four which are published and taught in different parts of the world.
Methods Lists
All programs in the Network teach a number of foresight methods. The number of methods published, however, is much more than any one program can cover. So the authors used the opportunity of the Bucharest presentation to examine lists of methods that have been published. They found five lists—the earliest one from John McHale et al. 11 and the latest the compilation of foresight methods by the Millennium Project. 12 There are undoubtedly more; yet comparing these lists is still instructive.
The first thing to notice is that there is very little overlap among the lists. Fully three-quarters (75%) of the sixty-one methods listed are mentioned by only one author. That does not indicate much common ground! Therefore, it might be more instructive to review the ten methods that were mentioned by at least three of the five authors consulted in Table 2.
Methods Listed by Three or More of the Five Authors Consulted.
Seven of the ten are qualitative methods, not surprising because foresight practitioners pride themselves on their ability to use qualitative methods in a rigorous and helpful manner. More importantly, quantitative methods require the assumption that change occurs continuously from the present to the time horizon. Discontinuous change disrupts that process and often makes the underlying model invalid. While many aspects of the future do not change at all (constants) or change smoothly in predictable ways (trends), many do not. In fact, a major aspect of the foresight mission is to anticipate discontinuous change by developing scenarios that are not continuous.
The qualitative methods run the gamut from individual, euphemistically named Genius Forecasting that relies on the practiced intuition of knowledge experts, to group processes like the Delphi survey, expert panels, gaming, and role-playing. The “Manoa School” emphasizes technology–society/environment interaction, trend analysis, emerging issues analysis, and age-cohort analysis. Houston stresses systems thinking, theories of social change, primary and secondary research, and expected and alternative futures (scenarios) along with approaches to influencing change, such as visioning, strategic planning, and change management.
In the end, this list might be a good candidate for a common set of methods to be taught in foresight programs. An interesting follow-up would be to survey the programs to find out how many are taught and how much time is devoted to them.
Conclusion
One year of working with the University Foresight Network is just one step at the beginning of a long journey. Many steps remain. Some of the next steps could be to
receive feedback on the materials developed,
recruit more programs and educators to another round of presentations,
develop a website, probably a Wiki, to further develop the material collaboratively,
put the material developed into a form for new courses and programs to use,
help others establish new courses and programs based on this material,
form an association of foresight programs (eventually), and
offer to accredit foresight programs (even more eventually).
A real discipline requires a common set of concepts and propositions that all or most programs teach and that all or most professionals use. Such a common set would support the credibility and legitimacy of the field, namely, that a set of recognized professionals are offering a service based on sound principles. What better place to look for that core than the academic programs? They are introducing students to the field every day. In the process, they have developed the knowledge of frameworks, processes, and methods that work.
Footnotes
Author’s Note
Presented to the Biannual Meeting of the World Futures Studies Federation Bucharest, Romania, June 2013.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biography
Notes
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