Abstract
I cannot really say that my journey has been “as a futurist.” It would be more accurate to say “My journey toward becoming a futurist.” In other words, I always find that life makes a lot more sense in hindsight than in foresight. Although we seem to have a path laid out for us, it never seems to work that way. But when we look back, the twists and turns take on a different meaning. Whether that meaning is really there or whether it is the product of our capacity to see patterns in whatever data we have, who knows? I will leave that to those better than I.
My early life was not particularly remarkable: Catholic, middle-class; father a sales manager for Shell Oil in St. Louis, Missouri; mother at home; one sister and one brother, both younger; mostly Catholic elementary schools and then St. Louis University High School with the Jesuits. I entered the Jesuit seminary right after high school where I got my undergraduate degree in philosophy with extra courses in math and physics and did one year of teaching math in the other Jesuit high school in St. Louis before switching from physics to sociology with an interest in social change. Graduate school at Michigan State, first teaching job in sociology at Georgia Southern College, then University of Houston (UH)–Clear Lake to teach research methods and statistics to behavioral science students, stumbled on Studies of the Future there, joined up and started running the program in 1983, moved the program to UH in 2005, and retired from there in 2013, now running a non-profit called Teach the Future whose mission is to introduce futures thinking into schools and colleges around the world.
Not much of that story had much to do with becoming a futurist, except three things. The first was what I call “waking up in the world,” becoming aware of the wider world outside family, school, community, and so forth. My first experience of how the wider world affected people was in 1952. I was 7. We watched the husband of my mother’s high school friend get out of a helicopter after being held as the highest ranking prisoner of war in Korea. Other events struck me—the Suez war in 1954, the Hungarian revolution in 1956, and then of course, Sputnik in 1957. The country went crazy! The high school debate question in 1959 was whether the Soviet or the American systems of education were better. And finally, of course, the assassinations of John Kennedy and later of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. I switched from physics to sociology in 1968–1969 while I watched the world change right before my eyes—civil rights, Vietnam, rock and roll, drugs, men walking on the moon. That seemed a lot more interesting than bouncing electrons off each other in a cyclotron, and it has been.
I was a student of social change during my graduate school at Michigan State (1969–1973). While I was opposed to war, poverty, and discrimination like most people at the time, I did not have the courage to really put my body on the line. Rather I hung on the periphery, watching others create change. My Master’s thesis was a survey of students on their way to Washington, D.C., to protest the war. For my dissertation, a colleague and I educated (politicized?) a group of citizens to assert their rights in running a health planning agency.
There has not been a time like that since. We thought we were changing the world; we thought that things would never be the same. And they have not, and yet they have. We are more sensitive to civil rights and discrimination then we were then, but powerful people still run the world. The future turned out differently than most people expected, but it still looks remarkably similar in many ways.
How did these things happen? What were the causes? What were the effects? I was not particularly interested in prediction at the time, just in understanding. Much later, the feeling of sudden, disruptive change crystallized for me shortly after one of the founding faculty members committed suicide at UH–Clear Lake. Reality was like a movie screen, and once in a while, someone from behind would rip through the screen with a knife!
The second big influence was the Jesuits—strong, intelligent men who were doing something worthwhile in the world. The outcome for me? Curiosity, logic, analysis, critical thinking, intellectual honesty, open-minded (I hope) with broad, general interests.
My seminary class was one of the last to experience an isolated seminary experience. Today, seminarians live close to college campuses and take classes there. We lived in the country. Ironically, it was only a few miles from my house in suburban St. Louis, but without telephone, radio, newspaper, or television, and only a half-a-dozen afternoons with my family a year, it might as well have been in Siberia. (We did have electricity and running water!)
The seminary was run according to the rule and spirit of Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits in 1521. For all intents and purposes, we were living in an institution that had been created in the Renaissance and had stayed largely the same. Many years later, I came to realize that I had participated in a form of “time travel”—leaving a middle-class, Midwestern life in the twentieth century, living six years in a sixteenth-century religious order, and returning again to the twentieth century. I suppose those who live for long periods among indigenous people might have the same experience.
Since then and, I believe, because of that experience, I have been fascinated with the incredible social change of the last four hundred years—the really big changes like the Protestant Reformation, the invention of the scientific method, the rise of industrial society, democracy, individualism, and the rest. So when futurists claim that the Internet is the biggest change in human civilization since the factory, I go, “Whoa, wait a minute! Do you realize how much change you are talking about? Everything changed then—religion, knowledge, work, government, culture. The Internet is important, but, in my experience, not the same magnitude at all.” Today my course on social change is an exploration of those really big changes and the various ways we explain them to ourselves.
The third major event in my journey (at least as I reconstruct it here) was the books I read and the classes I took in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The first was Marshall McLuhan. I do not even know which book it was, but he impressed me with how technology can change society. And he was just talking about television; computers were still room-sized machines. I saw the first satellite television broadcast of the 1960 Olympics in Rome bounced off a satellite crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
I read the optimistic Toffler (Future Shock) on how computers would create a third wave of fundamental change and the pessimistic Meadows et al. (Limits to Growth) on how the current economic system would use up and despoil the planet. I could not tell who was right, nor did I try. They both seemed like plausible futures, and yet they were both right and wrong in their own way. We have yet to realize the utopian information society that Toffler predicted, yet a lot has changed in how we live and work as a result of information technology. I was using punch cards to run computers when I read Toffler, now I am typing on a personal machine that is more powerful than the university computer was then. The Limits to Growth grew out of the nascent environmental movement. Their standard model, based on no real change in the global economic and political systems, had economic growth peaking in the 2020s followed by a precipitous decline. Some parts of the environment are cleaner and safer now than they were then, but global changes to the atmosphere, resources, and species continue apace.
Philosophy in the seminary was Thomistic, the philosophy of the Middle Ages and the basis of Catholic theology. Among a few good courses outside that curriculum was the course in epistemology taught by a brilliant, but doggedly Thomistic philosopher. I wrote my term paper on the Copenhagen Interpretation, the epistemology of quantum mechanics advocated by Neils Bohr. The intellectual battle in quantum mechanics at the time was the attempt to resolve the wave-particle duality of matter. Bohr basically said, “Give up the fight. It’s both; it’s neither, and you will never know what it really is.” That epistemology became my intellectual foundation—we do know although we do not know how close our knowledge is to reality. It also became the basis for my class in social change, my contribution to the UH–Clear Lake currently in which we review ten to twelve historical and contemporary theories of social change with the understanding that all are valid to some extent, yet none are complete. And what a great preparation for futures studies that is all about what we can know and not know about the future!
The single most important book I read in graduate school was C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (1959). In there, Mills provided me a life-long mission: The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues. The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances . . . and organize a response. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of man’s capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of “human nature” are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.
And so I drew the following lessons from all this: (1) social change is real and important, (2) it can happen suddenly, (3) the outcomes are unpredictable, and yet (4) a lot has stayed the same. And all that before I stumbled on the futures program at UH–Clear Lake.
I went to teach sociology at Georgia Southern College (now University) right after graduate school. I had left the seminary in graduate school, but retained my desire to follow my teacher/priests as a teacher, if not as a priest. I did not learn much of the sociology that they tried to teach me in graduate school. (With all that going on, who could?) But when I thought about standing up in front of thirty bored undergraduates, I had to figure out what I was going to say and do so I would not embarrass myself or them with my incompetence. I specialized in social problems, as close to social change as I got during those years and for many thereafter.
I was recruited to UH–Clear Lake in 1976. A member of the American Sociological Association was running a team of sociologists from southern colleges and universities in a project to improve undergraduate teaching in sociology. He came to Clear Lake in 1974 and had me apply two years later. They did not teach social problems because Clear Lake was an upper division school, and social problems is a sophomore course. So I took over the research and statistics course for psychology and sociology students.
Not much social change or futures studies in the classroom at the time, but a lot outside it. The first faculty at UH–Clear Lake were all people like myself, rejects from the late sixties and early seventies who had been frustrated by the inertia of the academy. We were going to do something different, start a university unlike any other, offer all those cool courses we wished we could have taken—interdisciplinary, experiential, useful! Our visionary dean encouraged our dreams, and we set to work. It was the sixties all over again! Until . . .
You do not want to know the details, but by 1981 or so, the dream had died. The university was well on its way to becoming a decent, regional university serving the southeast part of Houston and the greater Gulf Coast. We may have been revolutionaries, but the rest of the faculty, almost all of the students, certainly their parents, their employers, the university administration, the State of Texas, did not share our revolutionary zeal. They wanted a decent, regional university where they could get a decent education and graduate with decent degree so they could get a decent job and get on with their lives. So much for social change at the university level!
At about that time, I had pretty well conquered the research and stat course (it was good!), but I did not want to become a full-time statistician. I had been attending faculty meetings of this strange group of faculty in futures studies, and I approached them one day with the request to teach their course in forecasting. Even though graduate schools in social science do not teach forecasting (do you believe that?), I thought I could do it with a little preparation, and I was right. It was not t tests and analysis of variance, but it was still making inferences using observations and data based on assumptions, something I had been teaching in research and stat all along. I had a little trouble getting a handle on this “alternative futures” thing (I thought they were just copping out by not picking one future as the “right” future!), but eventually I came to embrace that to.
The Clear Lake program had begun almost as a version of the humanities rather than the social sciences or even the applied social sciences that it has become. The intellectual battles raged in the 1970s about the limits to growth and about the quixotic idea that Houston might choose a slow or no growth path to save the planet. Jib Fowles, the first chair of the program and a committed contrarian, took the pro-growth side against almost all other faculty and the bulk of the students.
That version of the program began to fade in the late seventies, however, as the value of the liberal arts began to decline in the face of growing careerism throughout higher education. Oliver Markley came to the program from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) in 1978 to turn the program more toward professional preparation. Not that the intellectual debates were not thrilling, but I agreed with the turn after I got involved as I believed that a cohort of well-prepared graduates would advance the cause of futures thinking more than debates within the academy. I would like to think, therefore, that Clear Lake struck a nice balance between rigorous intellectual training in systems thinking, social change, and now alternative perspectives such as integral futures, causal layered analysis and spiral dynamics and practical methods courses on the nuts and bolts of forecasting, planning, and change management.
Other futures programs were teaching much the same things, as we discovered in a round of teleconferences in 2011–2012, but each with its own flavor. 1 Hawaii was more internationalist given its location midway between North America and Asia and the international experience that Jim Dator brought to that program from six years in Japan and as a leader of the World Futures Studies Federation. Swinburne (Melbourne) focused more on worldviews and paradigm change, taking its character from Richard Slaughter, the program’s founder, and Sohail Inayatullah, a leading multi-cultural futurist in Australia. OCAD University (formerly the Ontario College of Art and Design) has been teaching both design and strategic foresight in the same degree program, and Regent University hosted a foresight degree with a religious orientation. The core of each program was the same, but each had a distinctive character—a nice mix all the way around.
Thirty years later, I retired from UH in 2013 having been teaching in and chairing the Studies of the Future program at UH–Clear Lake and then the Futures Studies and now Foresight program at UH. It has been, in every way, the reason I chose sociology over physics because it has allowed me to satisfy the curiosity sparked in the 1950s by getting to look deeply into society as it changes. It has given me the opportunity to carry on a full university life and maintain a private practice of speaking, training, and facilitation that I would never have achieved with sociology or with physics. It has given me the chance to help people understand the historical context they are in, to anticipate likely and unlikely changes they are facing, and to influence those changes to create a somewhat better future than they would have absent their effort.
My only regret is that I wish that more people were pursuing futures studies as an academic discipline. (Our first dean, Calvin Cannon, quipped at our initial meeting, “We teach the past don’t we? Why can’t we teach the future, too?”) When I joined up, the futures program had three or four tenured faculty who were teaching regularly in the program and another half-dozen teaching occasionally. By 2000, I was the only one. Before then, there were identifiable futures programs and futures faculty members at the Universities of Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, Akron, Minnesota, Southern California, and Portland State. After that the Hawaii and Houston programs were the only ones, and both were staffed by a single, aging futurist. On the other hand, Melbourne, Australia has an excellent program, and other programs have sprung up elsewhere in the world.
And all the while, the ideas that futurists pioneered sixty years ago are becoming acceptable, even common, today. The term futurist is now accepted where it was a term of ridicule. People talk about visioning and scenario planning. Strategic planners and strategists now realize that their plans have to take a changing world into account. Graduates of the Clear Lake, Hawaii, and other programs have formed the new Association of Professional Futurists, an organization that will give a home to the next generation of futurists just as the founders retire. So go figure—the perennial death and rebirth in this strange cycle we call life.
And where to from here? For myself, rather that golf or fish (neither of which I do), I chose to take my experience, my reputation, and my knowledge of the field into a visionary venture, called Teach the Future, 2 to bring futures thinking to secondary schools and colleges around the world. Kay Strong, a graduate and then a visiting professor in Houston, and I began offering in-service courses to teachers in and around Houston in 2009. Then and even today, the amount of time spent on the future in schools is so small as to be effectively zero. We teach a lot about the past, as we should, but students are not going to live in the past (though some of their parents might wish they could!). No, we are supposedly preparing students for the future, but we are not telling them anything about the future they are heading toward or even giving them a little heads-up on how to anticipate and influence the winds of change heading their way. We now know how to teach the future. We have been doing it for forty years at the graduate level and within corporate seminars. Isn’t it time we included young people in the conversation?
That, of course, is a multi-generational or even a multi-century mission that none of us will ever see, even if it succeeds. If it does, then what we now call strategic foresight, with its attention to assumptions, inherent uncertainties, alternatives, contingencies, and the agency that each individual has to influence the future within a sphere of influence will be the commonplace, default way that everyone, individuals and organizations alike, will use to deal with the future. However, if the profession fails to inject futures thinking into schools when young people are forming their most fundamental ideas about the future, then the field will continue to be marginal and somewhat odd to most people.
The field to date has focused on the decision makers and the policy makers, as it should, because that is where the money is and where the people are with the ability to take action today to improve the future. But if adults continue to be the sole focus, then generations of futurists will still be explaining futures studies and strategic foresight to their great-grandchildren. The education of youth is a long-term play, but that is what we are supposed to be good at. Preparing students for the future by engaging them with the future is not urgent nor is it profitable, but it is a vision worthy of a field dedicated to creating a better, long-term future.