The Future of Futurists
While typing in the issue number of this week’s TrendWatcher, I noticed that we’d reached a nice round figure: 300. That cast this week’s commentary in an interesting light. After all, the TrendWatcher, born six years ago this month, was designed to give busy business professionals a quick heads-up about major trends affecting workforce management. It has generally been a future-looking report. In fact, a quick online search reveals that about half of all TrendWatchers published up till now have some version of the word “future” in them.
So it seems fitting that we use this occasion to look at whether futurism itself (that is, futures studies, not the international art movement) has much of a future. Has it, in fact, already failed? That’s a question recently raised in the Wilson Quarterly by David Rejeski, director of the Wilson Center’s Foresight and Governance Project, and Robert Olson, a senior fellow at the Institute for Alternative Futures.
Rejeski and Olson sum up humanity’s current predicament: “Today, with the human species beginning to change the earth on a vast scale – altering climate and genetic structures, harboring weapons that can annihilate the planet – we have forever forfeited our ability to duck responsibility for thinking about the long-term future. But the responsibility to think does not automatically bring with it the capacity to do so.”
They aren’t the first to question futurism’s viability. Others have gone further. Back in 2003, Hope Cristol, who once worked for the World Future Society, wrote in Wired magazine that “futurism is dead” because “the loosely informed, jack-of-all-trades, trend-watching pontificator (read: professional futurist) is obsolete.” Cristol’s editorial argued that futurists are better replaced by risk analysts and niche consultants, experts in their fields.
That sounded somewhat reasonable at the time. But new research indicates that many of the so-called experts do not have a particularly good track record as prognosticators. The book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, authored by Prof. Philip Tetlock of the University of California at Berkeley, is based on 82,361 forecasts from experts and nonexperts alike. These projections addressed a range of political subjects, including economics. A New Yorker book review notes, “The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote” (Menand, 2005).
Apparently, computer programs often do better than the experts. Reporting on Tetlock’s work, Fortune magazine declared that not only were experts no better than nonexperts at prediction but they were inferior to computer programs in some respects: “They weren’t even as good as computer programs that merely extrapolate the past. The best experts could not explain more than 20% of the variability in outcomes, but crude algorithms could explain 25% to 30%, and sophisticated algorithms could explain 47%” (Colvin, 2006).
So, would futurists – whether they specialize or not – have a better track record than the so-called experts? Hard to say. A World Future Society analysis found that those making predictions back in the first issue of The Futurist magazine in 1967 wound up with an accuracy rate of about 68% – not dazzling but better than many critics would have us believe (Cornish, 1997).
And, to be fair, many futurists would argue that futurism isn’t really about correct prognostication but about preparing societies and businesses to cope with a range of different contingencies. Martin Walker (2006), editor of United Press International, coins the term “Quigley’s Law,” named for former Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley. This “law” states that “successful societies are defined by their readiness to allow consideration of the future to determine today’s choices.”
The same might be said about business organizations. Successful companies have ways of staying “mindful” about how the world is changing. The research of the University of Michigan’s Prof. Karl Weick indicates that such mindfulness is related to a number of organizational characteristics, such as distributed decision-making. In some cases, good companies also use techniques favored in the field of futures studies. Rejeski and Olson point out, “Many of the best-run transnational corporations have been developing sophisticated efforts in such fields as environmental scanning, issues management, and scenario-based planning.”
Meanwhile, researchers continue to experiment with novel techniques that might improve the field of futurism. For example, one area that HRI is investigating is that of “prediction markets,” wherein people place “bets” on specific future outcomes and thereby develop markets that harness the collective wisdom of groups. The idea is not only to create better tools for HR strategic planning but to spark more future-oriented HR analysis and find out which participants wind up with the best track records. Once that is known, perhaps the heuristics of the best forecasters can be teased out and documented so that all would-be futurists can become better at looking ahead. Or, at least, that’s one possible vision of the future.
Editor’s Note: For more information on HRI’s work with prediction markets – which is being carried out in partnership with experts at Penn State – please click here. Of course, such markets rely on having a certain critical mass of people involved. If you have any interest in participating in such a marketplace for HR ideas, please contact Mark Vickers at vickers@hrinstitute.org.
For a previous TrendWatcher called “The Promise of Collective Wisdom,” click here.
For more on the series of articles on futurism recently published in the Wilson Quarterly, please click here.
For more on the Wired editorial “Futurism Is Dead,” click here.
For a response to that editorial from The Futurist magazine, click here.
For a New Yorker article on the research of Philip Tetlock, click here. And for a Fortune article on the same subject, click here.
For a link to a PDF article called “Coming to Grips with the Future,” by consulting futurist Joseph Coates, click here. The article outlines, among other things, the skills of an effective futurist and how to set up a futures unit within an organization.
Documents used in the preparation of this TrendWatcher include:
Colvin, Geoffrey. “Ditch the ‘Experts.’” CNNMoney.com [Fortune], January 30, 2006.
Cornish, Edward. “The Futurist Forecasts 30 Years Later.” The Futurist, January/February 1997, p. 45.
Cristol, Hope. “Futurism Is Dead.” Wired, December 2003.
Menand, Louis. “Everybody’s an Expert: Putting Predictions to the Test.” The New Yorker, December 5, 2005.
Rejeski, David and Robert L. Olson. “Has Futurism Failed?” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2006, pp. 14-21.
Wagner, Cindy. “Futurism is NOT Dead.” The Futurist, December 2003.
Walker, Martin. “ America’s Romance with the Future.” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2006, pp. 22-26.
So it seems fitting that we use this occasion to look at whether futurism itself (that is, futures studies, not the international art movement) has much of a future. Has it, in fact, already failed? That’s a question recently raised in the Wilson Quarterly by David Rejeski, director of the Wilson Center’s Foresight and Governance Project, and Robert Olson, a senior fellow at the Institute for Alternative Futures.
Rejeski and Olson sum up humanity’s current predicament: “Today, with the human species beginning to change the earth on a vast scale – altering climate and genetic structures, harboring weapons that can annihilate the planet – we have forever forfeited our ability to duck responsibility for thinking about the long-term future. But the responsibility to think does not automatically bring with it the capacity to do so.”
They aren’t the first to question futurism’s viability. Others have gone further. Back in 2003, Hope Cristol, who once worked for the World Future Society, wrote in Wired magazine that “futurism is dead” because “the loosely informed, jack-of-all-trades, trend-watching pontificator (read: professional futurist) is obsolete.” Cristol’s editorial argued that futurists are better replaced by risk analysts and niche consultants, experts in their fields.
That sounded somewhat reasonable at the time. But new research indicates that many of the so-called experts do not have a particularly good track record as prognosticators. The book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, authored by Prof. Philip Tetlock of the University of California at Berkeley, is based on 82,361 forecasts from experts and nonexperts alike. These projections addressed a range of political subjects, including economics. A New Yorker book review notes, “The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote” (Menand, 2005).
Apparently, computer programs often do better than the experts. Reporting on Tetlock’s work, Fortune magazine declared that not only were experts no better than nonexperts at prediction but they were inferior to computer programs in some respects: “They weren’t even as good as computer programs that merely extrapolate the past. The best experts could not explain more than 20% of the variability in outcomes, but crude algorithms could explain 25% to 30%, and sophisticated algorithms could explain 47%” (Colvin, 2006).
So, would futurists – whether they specialize or not – have a better track record than the so-called experts? Hard to say. A World Future Society analysis found that those making predictions back in the first issue of The Futurist magazine in 1967 wound up with an accuracy rate of about 68% – not dazzling but better than many critics would have us believe (Cornish, 1997).
And, to be fair, many futurists would argue that futurism isn’t really about correct prognostication but about preparing societies and businesses to cope with a range of different contingencies. Martin Walker (2006), editor of United Press International, coins the term “Quigley’s Law,” named for former Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley. This “law” states that “successful societies are defined by their readiness to allow consideration of the future to determine today’s choices.”
The same might be said about business organizations. Successful companies have ways of staying “mindful” about how the world is changing. The research of the University of Michigan’s Prof. Karl Weick indicates that such mindfulness is related to a number of organizational characteristics, such as distributed decision-making. In some cases, good companies also use techniques favored in the field of futures studies. Rejeski and Olson point out, “Many of the best-run transnational corporations have been developing sophisticated efforts in such fields as environmental scanning, issues management, and scenario-based planning.”
Meanwhile, researchers continue to experiment with novel techniques that might improve the field of futurism. For example, one area that HRI is investigating is that of “prediction markets,” wherein people place “bets” on specific future outcomes and thereby develop markets that harness the collective wisdom of groups. The idea is not only to create better tools for HR strategic planning but to spark more future-oriented HR analysis and find out which participants wind up with the best track records. Once that is known, perhaps the heuristics of the best forecasters can be teased out and documented so that all would-be futurists can become better at looking ahead. Or, at least, that’s one possible vision of the future.
Editor’s Note: For more information on HRI’s work with prediction markets – which is being carried out in partnership with experts at Penn State – please click here. Of course, such markets rely on having a certain critical mass of people involved. If you have any interest in participating in such a marketplace for HR ideas, please contact Mark Vickers at vickers@hrinstitute.org.
For a previous TrendWatcher called “The Promise of Collective Wisdom,” click here.
For more on the series of articles on futurism recently published in the Wilson Quarterly, please click here.
For more on the Wired editorial “Futurism Is Dead,” click here.
For a response to that editorial from The Futurist magazine, click here.
For a New Yorker article on the research of Philip Tetlock, click here. And for a Fortune article on the same subject, click here.
For a link to a PDF article called “Coming to Grips with the Future,” by consulting futurist Joseph Coates, click here. The article outlines, among other things, the skills of an effective futurist and how to set up a futures unit within an organization.
Documents used in the preparation of this TrendWatcher include:
Colvin, Geoffrey. “Ditch the ‘Experts.’” CNNMoney.com [Fortune], January 30, 2006.
Cornish, Edward. “The Futurist Forecasts 30 Years Later.” The Futurist, January/February 1997, p. 45.
Cristol, Hope. “Futurism Is Dead.” Wired, December 2003.
Menand, Louis. “Everybody’s an Expert: Putting Predictions to the Test.” The New Yorker, December 5, 2005.
Rejeski, David and Robert L. Olson. “Has Futurism Failed?” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2006, pp. 14-21.
Wagner, Cindy. “Futurism is NOT Dead.” The Futurist, December 2003.
Walker, Martin. “ America’s Romance with the Future.” Wilson Quarterly, Winter 2006, pp. 22-26.