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Sanal
R. P., sanalnair@hotmail.com
Published
in Science India Vol. 6,
No. 2, pp. 25-31 (February 2003).
Futures
studies has been a serious academic and consulting activity for more than thirty
years, worldwide. Have YOU never heard of it--or at least know so little about
it? If not, this article will introduce Futures Studies to you.
A
sense of future not only pervades all good policies; it also underlines every
decision of human beings. We eat expecting
to be satisfied and nourished-in the future. We invest our energy, our money,
and our time because we believe that our efforts will be rewarded in the future.
We educate our children on the basis of forecast that they will need certain
skills, attitudes and knowledge when they grow up. I short, we all make
assumptions about the future in our daily lives.
To
meet the challenges of the future, we need to find out what we can plausibly
expect in the years ahead so we can understand what our options are. We can then
set reasonable goals and develop effective strategies for achieving them. Many
people believe it is impossible to know anything about the future, so future can
be simply ignored. This is a serious mistake. It is true, of course, that we can
know only a little about the future, but that little is extremely important,
because a knowledge of the future-even when it is uncertain-is critical in
making wise decisions.
The future is full of uncertainty. Much more
than in the past it involves trend breaks, sudden new phenomena and
developments, which are beyond our capabilities to influence. What we can do is
to be aware of them as far as possible, and to make the best of our own future.
It involves adopting an active attitude towards the future, the one of governing
our own future. In futures studies, several different methodologies and
approaches have been developed to do that. "We" can be a company, a
municipality, a public organization, a non-governmental organization, etc.
Ultimately a family or an individual making conscious decisions about his/her
own future.
It seems probable that during the next few decades we will see powerful trends
and
turbulent phenomena. These will have an impact upon our societal structures, and
policies, upon the ways we as researchers and citizens comprehend the world
around us and, in the deepest sense upon our values, and also upon the ways we
understand the concepts of development and progress. New paradigms and tools for
understanding our world deeply enough to make well-argumented scenarios of the
future are also needed. We need a paradigm shift from the old Newtonian way of
understanding reality as one mechanism towards an evolutionary paradigm, which
more explicitly considers the nonlinear, dynamic, organic, systemic and holistic
nature of the natural and social systems. This paradigm is already evolving
although the terminology and basic orientations eg. in the so called chaos
theory are varied.
When
people and organizations are not aware of their choices they may well end up
being part of someone else's future. In order to create desirable futures,
futures studies will help others to think more carefully and plan further ahead
than before. But it is not just a case of thinking further into the future. It
is also one of thinking more richly about what is possible and desirable.
So
what is Futures Studies? What are the theories and methods underlying the field?
What are its basic concepts and metaphors? How it is related to other academic
and practical field? Futures Studies does not try to “predict” the future in
the sense of saying precisely what will happen to an individual, organization or
country before it actually happens, but forecast a wide variety of
“alternative futures”. It helps the people to move towards their
“preferred future”.
Prof Henry David in 1970 proposes that: futures
research may be defined as the 'intellectual form in which a society renders
account to itself of its probable and possible futures'. A more detailed
formulation was suggested by Eleonora Masini and Knut Samset in 1975. In their
formulation: 'futures studies...is a field of intellectual and political
activity concerning all sectors of the psychological, social, economic,
Technological, political and cultural life, aiming at discovering and mastering
the extensions of the complex chains of casualties, by means of
conceptualizations, systematic reflections, experimentations, anticipations and
creative thinking. Futures studies therefore constitute a natural basis for
sub-national, national and international, and both interdisciplinary and
transdisciplinary activities tending to become a new forum for the basis of
decision making'. For everyday use, however, the following may be preferred.
Future studies is about goals, purposes, where we are going, how we get there
and the problems and opportunities we will encounter en route.
Futures Studies was created in the fifties,
after World War II, with the aim of orienting decision making processes in a
context of continuous change and crescent complexity. Due to this, these kinds
of studies can’t be separated from the processes of globalization and
technological innovation. The work developed at the beginning by the RAND., and
the Club of Rome report about Limits of Growth are two basic references for
understanding the origins of Futures Studies.
During next three decades Futures Studies were
developed as a working method, and spread around the world. This time World
Future Studies Federation and the World Future Society, were created. These two
main professional world-associations of futurists, and Futures Studies have
become a solid tool for decision making both in public and private organizations
(many great business corporations such as Shell, ATT or Bell Atlantic have used
Futures Studies for assessing their decisions; also, reengineering or strategic
planning can’t be understood without a futures vision).
Futures studies is
a multidisciplinary field of research. It seeks to describe and explain
wide-ranging social phenomena and their associated processes of change and
development in different areas of human activity. Futures studies methods thus
provide solutions for the challenging processes of strategic planning and
decision-making.
Furthermore, it examines, from its specifically
future-oriented perspective, trends in the present that are relevant to social
development. It integrates research results from different fields of science
into a whole to facilitate the process of decision-making. Futures researchers
explore possible futures by examining alternative futures. The probability or
desirability of realizing these alternative futures can be estimated by applying
different futures studies methodologies.
 Many of the terms and methodologies used within futures studies origin
from defence strategies. Another tradition is the more general policy-strategic,
where governments across the world have set-up think-tanks, forecast-studies
units, etc in order to monitor trends and to carry out prospective studies. A
third and growing category is the studies related to private business. An
increasing number of firms and organisations have discovered the need to plan
ahead and to carry out long-term studies and outlooks.
Technological forecasting is one of the
important part of futures studies. New behaviours constrained by new/emerging
technologies challenges values and rules generated by the behaviour permitted by
old technologies and thus the society changes. Futures studies through
technological forecasting asd other methods helps to understand how the
emerging/new technologies serve as an agent of social change for the future.
Forecasts are unavoidably inaccurate and
incomplete. Despite these limitations, futures research has been useful in
decision making for two reasons: first, because there is no better alternative
and some information about the future, however impaired, is probably better than
none (although this could be argued), and second, because methods have been
derived that aid in decision making despite the shortcomings of forecasting
(e.g. scenarios). The methods are, in general, systematic, but in no sense is
the field of futures research a science, that is its methods do not require
statement and validation of hypotheses, the standards of professionalism are
essentially ad hoc, and except for a few projects, the information which
comprises the field is rarely accumulated. When futures research methods are
applied to the study of competition in industry, the field is known as business
intelligence: projecting likely moves of competitors. Government intelligence,
information about the likely intent and actions of other nations, may also use
futures research techniques for analysis.
In short, the purpose of futures studies is to
make you “smarter” now to “surf the tsunamis of change” (Dator,1992). Futures studies is not one
academic discipline among the many. It is a profoundly cross-disciplinary
activity. In India there are number of universities offering courses in futures
studies. Department of Futures Studies, University of Kerala is the only
institution in Kerala which is offering masters, research and doctoral programme
in futures studies.
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