APF Compass How-To Issue
Practical Tips for Futurists
I’m involved in the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) in a number of ways: I’m a member, I helped design the structure of their regional hubs, I help lead the Cascadia hub, and I currently have work under consideration for a student award. One of the benefits of APF membership is access to Compass magazine, which Houston alum Stephen Dupont does a great job editing. While I don’t always make time to read every issue during the semester, the June issue was one I knew I’d have to find time for: “The How-To Issue”. Since it’s still the latest issue as of press time, it’s available to everyone, APF member or not.
The issue is packed with valuable content. The more cynical part of me sees some articles that are just packaging up standard foresight techniques with branding from specific consultancies, but it runs the gamut from full futures methodologies to some specific exercises to Vinny Tafuro explaining exactly how to land a TEDx speaking gig (and why you’d want to)1.
Here are the articles I thought were most impactful. Each of these is a highly compressed summary, so check out the full articles:
Ewa Lombard presents a visioning technique of using a literal empty chair to stand in for future generations during futures exercises. At various points, someone is invited to stand in for the people of the future and speak to the rest of the group. This harnesses inherent positivity bias to help build a vision. A similar exercise was featured in the PBS show A Brief History of the Future last year as part of local planning in Japan.
Friend of the newsletter Jim Dator gives a very practical 16-step method for doing a futures project. This is largely just following the 6 steps of futures practice, but specifies that the first step is to articulate a theory of change that grounds the rest of the work (where you look and what you are looking for).
Friend of the newsletter Karl Schroeder explains the difference between writing science fiction and writing foresight fiction and gives a process for the latter, writing impactful and memorable scenarios. The key distinction is to not let your story get so good it overshadows the futures content - the external world should dominate the internal/character world. The goal is to create a story that serves as a mnemonic for the ideas contained within it.
Sohail Inayatullah gives a Q&A on the Futures Triangle. I think the tool is so flexible and primal that people mostly fill it with whatever they already have in their brain, but it was interesting to hear him talk about the pull of the future being about a specific image that motivates someone, and then the weight of the past being things that hold that specific future back. This is especially true when doing personal futures (one of Inayatullah’s special interests and an area I’d like to explore): what’s your personal vision for your own future, and what are the forces in your life today that are holding you back from achieving it?
Jane McGonigal gives an engaging short exercise about imagining a meal 10 years from now that helps not only introduce audiences to futures thinking, but also to help them critically evaluate their own ability to visualize possible futures. I would love to do this as a starting exercise in a futures exercise involving people with little or no experience, because it seems like a great way to immediately get a group to understand what foresight can offer. It’s individual with the opportunity for discussion, so it scales without needing much facilitation.
I see the TED brand significantly diminished from a decade ago, partly because there are so many that some ridiculous ones have slipped through, and partly because people developed immunity to the form of a presenter saying provocative things with tasteful visuals on a dark stage. However, when you’re trying to convince people that they should pay to to stand in front of them and say interesting things, there’s no more universal credential.