Abstract
We all owe a great debt to Annette Gardner, a professional evaluator at the University of California, San Francisco and an academically trained futurist, and Peter Bishop, one of the lions of the futures field and an inspiring leader of the University of Houston’s Foresight Program, for organizing this special issue of World Futures Review on “Foresight and Evaluation.” Their guest editorial not only is an excellent introduction to the seven essays on that topic but also makes a contribution to understanding the relationship itself.
Formal evaluation of futures work is as rare as hen’s teeth. Many people have looked back at work they or others had done before and commented on it in one way or another, but almost none of them built formal evaluation—especially as professional evaluators do it—into that work before it was undertaken.
A kind of alternative futures approach developed by Pierre Wack and used by Dutch Shell has the status of a Deep Myth of Success in the futures field (Wilkinson and Kupers 2014). By considering several futures, instead of just one, Dutch Shell is said to have avoided some of the worst impacts of the 1973–1979 Oil Crisis that plagued other oil producers who either did not scan the horizon or only planned for a future very much like the present and recent past. The Shell example—and often it alone—is widely quoted when anyone wants to show that foresight pays off. Like many futurists, I am often asked to say when I was “right” or “wrong” in my work, as if it were the job of a futurist to “predict” the future, and as if accurate predictions were the Gold Standard for success. There may be people in the field who believe this, and it certainly is the fervent (and mistaken) hope of many clients that the futurists they hire can tell them what “the future” will be so they can then beat their competitors in making money off of it, but most people in the futures field understand that the value of their work lies elsewhere and should be evaluated accordingly.
For over the decade of the 1990s, the State Justice Institute (SJI), a U.S. federal agency tasked with increasing the efficiency and efficacy of U.S. State Courts, had a funding category, “Futures and the Courts.” The Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies and many others did extensive work with state courts, and by extension, the U.S. federal courts, as well as courts in many foreign countries (Dator 2019). Evaluation was sometimes built into some of those projects but not in most. When the funding category ended after a decade of intense futures flurry, the SJI twice turned down my proposals to evaluate the overall endeavor. And when I tried, twenty years later, to write an editorial about judicial foresight that included the enormous amount of work supported by the SJI, no one at the Institute could point me to any material resulting from the many activities that could help me do that.
In their editorial to this special issue, Gardner and Bishop write, The real problem is that foresight is a consulting field more than an academic one so that little of our work is public and much less makes it into journals for review or citation. It is closer to management and financial consulting where practices are judged by the market as accepted without formal evaluation. At the same, our premise has been that evaluation provides an opportunity for learning—learning not only how well we have done but also what we have done and its consequences. It requires us to examine what we brought to the project—our inclinations, assumptions, biases and values– a process not unlike what we facilitate for our clients. So, it might be time to turn the mirror around and learn about our own practice on the path to be taken more seriously.
That is an extremely important conclusion. It probably is correct that much foresight work is undertaken as an applied, business-like activity by people with master’s degrees—sometimes PhDs—often from foresight programs. This work is frequently secret and proprietary and thus not subject to formal evaluation or academic peer review. However, to the extent that foresight is an aspect of futures studies more broadly, the field also has an academic side for which evaluation of various kinds could provide deeper insights into what “the future” is, and what influence, if any, humans actually have over “it.” I consider the practical, applied side of futures studies and foresight to be praxis that tests and enriches the theoretical and academic side. Formal evaluation of futures work thus plays an essential role for both.
I very much hope that this collection of articles will inspire all futurists to include formal evaluation in their work and to publish the results of those evaluations in World Futures Review and elsewhere. We are indeed in debt to Dr. Gardner and Dr. Bishop for getting that ball rolling. It is up to us now to keep it moving.