Thoughts on "Futurism is Dead"

After re-reading Hope Cristol's Wired article declaring that "Futurism is Dead," I have more mixed feelings about the piece, the significance of its criticism, and questions about why Cristol wrote it. The World Futures Society, which takes the brunt of criticism of the piece, has issued its own reply; in this piece, I try to cover some different ground.

Substantive issues first. Cristol arges that futurism is dead for three reasons.

For starters, we now have a plethora of niche consultants and a booming field called risk analysis, which uses proven actuarial methods. "Everybody's more specialized, so there isn't a market for someone who can speak about very large, holistic matters with any authority," says Mike Marien, a recovering futurist and an outspoken critic of the field.

Certainly there are a variety of specialists who rely on specific, usually quantitative methods to do projections of market sizes and the like. Indeed, prospective clients are often surprised to find out that the Institute doesn't do mainly quantitative work, but focuses on qualitative studies aimed at helping clients understand how new technologies and trends will affect the character and texture of the future world-- the feel of life ten years out. And there are some businesses who like the apparent certainty of numbers.

(A side note: Mike Marien is editor of Future Survey, and works at WFS. Certainly he's critical of the field, if Unbound Spiral's blog entry describing Marien's talk at the recent WFS conference is accurate; but "recovering futurist" might be a bit of a stretch.)

Further, we've wised up to the fact that futurism as a discipline is something of a con: Futurists don't have a crystal ball. They examine trends and play out what-if scenarios. Any hausfrau with gumption and a dialup connection can do it. "Does intelligent thinking add up to a futurist field? I don't think so," Marien says.

Indeed, futurists "examine trends and play out what-if scenarios." This has been how much of the field has operated since the 1970s, when attempts to do computer simulations of the future started to run out of steam, and scenario planning-- as pioneered by Pierre Wack and his group at Shell-- took off. From what I can tell-- all happened when I was still in elementary school, so I've had to reconstruct it from various sources-- this shift was driven by three things.

First, in the 1960s there really were people who thought that with big enough computers and the right tools, you could predict the future, really nail it down. By the early 1970s, it was starting to become clear that these methods weren't going to pay off; talking about a range of likely futures became a way of hedging, but still doing something useful.

Second, the institutional niche of leading futures work changed. As futures work began to be used in corporations, it shifted from being a public policy-like discourse, to one more tightly connected to strategy. In the former, you could write big reports, put out some press releases, and hope your work is taken up by people who can act on it: the Club of Rome report was a good example of this genre. In the more intimate and action-oriented world of futures work in the 1970s, in contrast, the challenge was to get your audience-- planners, executives, division heads, executive VPs-- to really engage with your research, so they could act on it. Scenarios were a better tool for promoting that kind of engagement. They still are.

Third, some futurists began to argue that their work should be measured not in terms of how correct their specific predictions were, but how useful they were in getting readers (clients) to think about the future, to understand the strategic choices they had to make, and to be well-prepared for lots of different futures, not overly prepared for one wrong one. This school of thought was summed up in Winston Churchill's declaration, "The plan is nothing. Planning is everything." Perhaps it sounds counterintuitive, but this is how a large amount of military planning works: you try to anticipate every contingency, but recognize that the battlefield is going to follow its own disorderly logic, and that the most valuable thing your planning will give you is an ability to improvise when the moment comes.

One can argue with the value of any or all of these claims. Indeed, "Futurism is Dead" would have been a better article if it had.

Should the fact that "Futurists don't have a crystal ball" come as a surprise? Not to us, or to our clients. At the Institute we regularly tell clients that no one can predict the future, and that the what we offer is a view of a range of likely futures. This gets to the paradox of futures work: that as the world becomes more uncertain, knowing the future becomes both more attractive and more difficult. A world in which the future is knowable is one that is not going to change-- and hence one in which knowing the future is of trivial value.

Finally, futurism is obsolete because it now has a past: Forty years of failed predictions should be enough empirical evidence to turn even the true believer into a skeptic.

Futurists are the first to say that futurism isn't about telling the future; it's about examining trends and fleshing out scenarios. Yet they consistently spout predictions, somehow confident in their authority as futurists. The logic here is circular: Futurists insist that their scenarios, as exercises in creative thought, should be exempt from success-measuring metrics. But should one of those shots in the dark hit its target, they credit their "scientific" methodology.

It's absolutely correct that lots of predictions haven't come true, and that most scenarios haven't come to pass. And even in Silicon Valley, a place that is famous for its respect for failure, few futurists will tout their errors: no one will say, "Boy, I had NO IDEA that the Web was going to be a big thing." It is human nature to remember successes more prominently than failures.

Yet if my own experience is representative of the general attitude, Cristol's claim that "should one of those shots in the dark hit its target, they credit their "scientific" methodology" is incorrect. I find that when my peers call something correctly, they're pretty modest about it: it's not offered as proof of the brilliance of their methodology, but proof that every once in a while, things break their way. Making a correct prediction is a bit like a chance meeting with a rock star: it's a lucky break, not proof that you're the next Phil Spector.

Finally, a warning bell went off when I saw (thanks, Google!) that Hope Cristol used to work for the World Futures Society. (Full disclosure: I'm not a member of the WFS, and I don't think anyone at IFTF is.) With this in mind, I re-read the piece, and was immediately caught short by the opening:

Ed Cornish, founder of the World Future Society and its president since 1966, leans back from his computer - a DOS machine that doesn't do email, the Net, or Windows.

Clifton Coles, assistant editor of the society's flagship magazine, The Futurist, pokes his head into his boss's office: "A Seattle radio station called, wants to know if you have some predictions for next year." Cornish, 76, strokes his nipples in a circular motion, stares off for a second, and says, "I can't think of anything in particular."

Is it just me, or is this a weird, cruel piece of writing? The ancient computer is a metaphor for the obsolescence of futurism, the staring into space represents the intellectual vacuity at the heart of the field, I get all that; but "strokes his nipples in a circular motion"? This is a detail that's very jarring, and utterly without a point-- other than to embarass its subject in a particularly crude way. (Imagine it written about a woman. The line never would have seen the light of print.)

Cristol's status as an ex-WFS employee, and the strangeness of its opening, makes me wonder if some WFS internal politics shaped the piece. There may be no hidden agendas, no settling of scores; but the fact that the article doesn't mention Cristol's former affiliation with WFS makes me-- and, I suspect, would make any reasonably intelligent and slightly suspicious reader-- wonder what was going on.

Comments

[Jerome C. Glenn]

Futurism?

What? do people still use the term "futurism?" It is a school of art that robotized style around 1900 in Italy. Futures Research is trying to open

alternative thinking, not close it down into some "-ism."

Jerome C. Glenn, director

Millennium Project

American Council for the United Nations University

http://acunu.org

[askpang]

It is a curious use of the term, I agree. I suspect that the term "futurism" was used before Marinetti et al got hold of it-- but don't really know.

And as Stewart Henshall's latest post shows, the term "futurist" is also one that many people are not comfortable with. For whatever reasons, it's taken on more the connotation of a political affiliation (e.g., being an anarchist) than a professional identification (e.g., being a dentist). Hardly anyone at the Institute for the Future uses it.

I use the myself occasionally, but only because 1) it's in wider circulation than "technology forecaster," and 2) I'm trained as an historian, and thus can usually describe myself as "an historian and futurist."