Framework Foresight Review

Futures Research, Week 12

This week was an opportunity to take a step back and review the whole Framework Foresight process. After having spent the whole semester heads-down developing the pieces for a hypothetical futures engagement, seeing how they fit together gives me an opportunity to celebrate a little and articulate some things I’ve learned over the last few months. I’m including links to all the material I created throughout the course as concrete examples.

Step 1: Framing

This is where your understanding of the problem space and the client is laid out and the project’s boundaries are established. Precisely defining the issue you’re studying, as well as its geographic and temporal boundaries, and aligning this with a deep understanding of the client, is the foundation for a successful futures project; the domain map that’s created at this stage to organize your understanding of the problem space will guide the research. These foundations can be altered later if you learn something new, but a good start is invaluable. Looking back at my domain description and domain map with hindsight, two things stand out:

• My choice of client caused me a lot of difficulty in many of the assignments. Since my project was on the future of religion in the US in 2050, I selected the Pew Research Center as an ideal client, because they are one of the few groups I can imagine who seem interested in the status of religion generally. However, their lack of direct interest (they just measure identification and behavior) meant both that my work had no strategic direction (merely exploratory) and that it was hard to generate ideas of how they might use the information I provided¹. By the end I realized that the parent organization, Pew Charitable Trusts, was a better client, because of their direct mission focus on improving civic life (with gathering data as one component).

• In my domain map, there were lots of things that I thought would be relatively major themes but that didn’t show up much in my research, such as the use of religious buildings, the religious ephemera section of the economy (Christian bookstores etc), or specific drivers of religious switching.

Step 2: Scanning

The current state of the crisply defined domain can now be assessed, including the current controversies, stakeholders, and the recent history (how the prior era ended and the current era began). This can be done via some superficial research, asking experts, etc. Here is my domain assessment, which surfaces many of the cultural/social/political issues that pervade the rest of the semester’s work.

Scanning for relevant signals of change (stronger signals that describe the baseline future, as well as weak signals suggesting possible alternative futures) is the main source of data that drives the futures enterprise. In addition to the general scanning process that futurists should do daily², a focused scan should be done for several weeks to find content relevant to the various areas of the domain map. Overall a full futures project might have about 200 scan hits; for my solo effort in the class I found 36 solid ones; here are five written up in detail to show how examining the signals of change can spur the kind of thinking that will be needed at later stages.

It’s a good idea to supplement your scanning with some primary research, whether via interviews or surveys with people close to the domain. These can point you in new directions, give an assessment of the conventional wisdom on a topic, or possibly just confirm what you were already finding. I had the privilege of interviewing two of the nation’s leading experts on current trends in religion: Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University and author of the Graphs About Religion Substack, and Paul Raushenbush, President of the Interfaith Alliance. These interviews largely confirmed what I had been finding through my scanning, and underscored the decline of Christian identification in favor of “nothing in particular” as the big story that is driving everything else.

In addition to the scan and primary research, additional research should be done to compile inputs (potentially 100 or more) in the form of TIPPs, comprising Trends, Issues, Plans, and Projections that have direct relevance to the domain. My TIPPs work pulled together 16 inputs that point toward the likely changes that coming decades will bring: in addition to Christian disaffiliation, local large religious communities will lead to more conflict over the next generation.

Last, all this research can be sorted and compressed into a set of about 12 drivers, showing the major forces pushing, pulling, or holding back the future. These should be organized clearly with memorable names and strong descriptions - this is the client’s first opportunity to see a systematic accounting of how the future is being shaped. My 6 drivers show the various pressures from social, technological, demographic, economic, and political angles that are changing the way people think about and practice religion (and have pretty awesome names if I can brag for a moment).

Step 3: Futuring

The drivers are the building blocks that are manipulated to create the logics that govern plausible futures. Doing a cross-impact matrix that shows how the driver forces are likely to interact helps you get beyond first-order effects and shows which drivers are dominant and which are most dependent. My cross-impact matrix vindicates the interview result that the decline of Christianity without anything to take its place tends to dominate the other drivers.

These drivers can then be manipulated to create the logics for various scenarios. In the Baseline scenario, the drivers basically just follow along their current trajectory - this is usually pretty close to the “official future” that most people carry around in their heads³. Other scenarios adjust the drivers to follow other standard archetypal patterns. For class I was required to flesh out the drivers as they would exist in a Baseline and a Transformation scenario; I also put together the drivers under a Collapse scenario because I wanted something else to contrast with⁴. In a full project, these scenarios would be fully fleshed out into narratives, a set of experiences, or some other medium that would help people really take the possibilities seriously.

Step 4: Visioning

The scenarios explain the possible future world external to the client, and the rest of the futures work more closely corresponds to what the client should do to respond. The organization works to define its own vision and values clearly enough to confidently articulate its preferred future. Then the implications of the various scenarios can be teased out, identifying the possible second- and third-order consequences of the changes. A group working on this in a systematic way might generate a couple hundred of these; working alone, I came up with somewhere around 80 and was completely emotionally exhausted; something about the open-ended nature of “what might happen” rubbed me the wrong way.

Step 5: Designing

Based on the implications, strategies can be developed. This involves developing options based on the most interesting implications. These options need to fit into a coherent strategy that people can remember, so no more than a dozen final pieces (and again, make catchy names!). I sketched out two options, which reinforced my belief that I picked the wrong client, because my best options were both about dealing with broader social ills brought about by the changes in religion.

Step 6: Adapting

I’ll talk more next week about the work we did in class to communicate the results of the prior 5 steps, but Thinking About the Future has some suggestions for this last stage to make sure the client is prepared to take the work forward. Set expectations with the client early, and get feedback and adjust as needed - the goal should be to engage people by provoking them regularly but offending them sparingly. Once sufficient urgency is manifest, build an overall strategy that “bets” across the scenarios based on their plausibility and the lack of preparation for them⁵. Bake in milestones for success and a system to monitor for signs of unfolding futures that would favor one set of options over another, then build a cadence to refresh and revisit the work. If everything goes well, you might be invited to train the organization on how to integrate foresight into their everyday work, and have it woven into how the client functions as a learning organization.

What a class! When I look back at past-me before I started Futures Research, I can’t believe how confident I was that I more or less knew how to run a Futures engagement. I’m pretty proud of the work I put together this semester and am very excited to share next week about what culminating presentations might look like and how to make them as effective as possible.

1. I did make one interesting observation specific to the Pew Research Center, that our long-standing idea of what religion even means (more or less: an exclusive bundle of belief, behavior, and belonging) is breaking down, which may require Pew Research Center to adapt how it measures and thinks about the topic.

2. It’s been depressing that the course load for Futures Research was so heavy (in addition to the rest of my normal life) that I essentially took two months off from regular systematic scanning; I’m excited to be getting back into it this week.

3. Part of this is because the baseline doesn’t usually involve major changes in the rules of the game, and people tend to assume present trends will continue (possibly due to recency bias). Sometimes, though, the domain is on the precipice of a collapse or in the middle of a transformation, and carrying out current trends doesn’t align with the “official future” at all - climate change is a decent example of this.

4. Side note, I may have flown too close to the sun with my naming of the scenarios - I lifted them all from William Butler Yeats’s classic poem “The Second Coming”, based on its pessimistic view of the future and intense religious imagery. Despite having been described as perhaps “the most thoroughly pillaged piece of literature in English”, it may be too esoteric for our age of dwindling universal touchstones - to date, nobody I’ve discussed my scenarios with has heard of the poem.

5. At least one component of the strategy should be to invest in something that’s unlikely to happen, because it serves as a witness to the organization’s willingness to take the entire plausibility space seriously, and not just the “official future”.