Professor Profile: Andy Hines
A Futures Jack-of-All-Trades
Last week I was able to connect with Andy Hines1, my professor for Futures Research last semester, for an interview. I’m using the occasion to try out audio in Substack. See what you think, and I’d love to hear feedback on whether you like it or not.
The whole interview is great and worth your time, and I also wanted to extract a few of the highlights for everyone (edited for flow and clarity):
On Learning Change Management in Corporate Futures
One of the things that always bugged me was the clients would say, this is great, but we don't know what to do with it; and it was so common I was like, what's wrong with these people, or what? What's wrong with (not just corporations, because we did work with government agencies) organizations. So I'm like, alright, I'm not gonna hear this anymore, I'm gonna go inside and see what what the freak is going on in there.
So I imagined it as a rather short term thing. I didn't personally think I would like the organizational stuff. But I get in there at first at Kellogg's and Dow Chemical and, years later, I'm like I actually loved it. That shocked me. And so anyway, I go in. And you know, I'm gonna figure out what's going on in there. And and you know, I did learn a ton about like, how do you actually get this stuff implemented? It is hard. And you learn all the bureaucratic hurdles and blah blah blah. But what I found was, it was a really interesting challenge. And I ended up actually liking it because I was like, Oh, OK, so you can't just do this. You gotta try this.
On Building a Futures Community of Practice
Over to Dow; I did not have the same kind of partner like Natalie at Kellogg's. I did have a good political sponsor type who really helped me, but I was in a group of about 2 dozen people that were in charge of - it was called the Growth Center. And what was cool about this now is - again, this is another experiment that I made up - I said, well, let's do a community of practice, right? So just kind of built one up really slowly over time, and people really like the future stuff.
And I had built, by the time I left, there was like a couple of hundred people in this. We called it the Explorers Network, and it was always this little underground group, and we get together and do stuff, and beyond just sort of educational stuff it was a network of people to do projects. Like I'd say, Alright, hey, look, I'm doing a new project on blah blah blah, hey, Vince, do you wanna come on? You wanna come on, you know, 25% of your time on this? So I did not have a team per se, but I had an unofficial, really strong network that helped do a lot of that stuff. And that was great because people wanted to do it, as opposed to when you get assigned someone, you always take your chances with that. But if people are volunteering their own time, it's just cool.
On Synergy Between Bodies of Futures Work
It's all part of that ecosystem, right? You speak, you write, you workshop, it gets you a project, the project gets you this, and I think all of those things kind of feed one another. So if you're okay with spinning a bunch of plates it does create a virtuous circle.
On Finding a Niche in Futures
It's a challenge, you know, the politics and bureaucracy and all that stuff that we don't really wanna do, but if you wanna be successful, you find a way to approach that that feels comfortable to you. That's the winner, right?
Whether it's how do you get people to hire you as a speaker, whether you do consulting or whatever niche you choose, what's the value proposition that makes people go I want that - I want that? It's not just wild out there future stuff, but it's wild out there future stuff that actually makes people say, this helps me.
Slightly outranking John Sweeney, Andy Hines is the third-most-Googleable person with his name, so don’t get him confused with the music-video director or the Swarthmore professor.