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alternative futures
alternative futures
A SINGLE IMAGINED FUTURE CAN BE TRAPPING.
MIRIAM DELVES INTO THE MULTIPLE ALTERNATIVES.
watch the video and read the essay >>
A SINGLE IMAGINED FUTURE CAN BE TRAPPING.
MIRIAM DELVES INTO THE MULTIPLE ALTERNATIVES.
watch the video and read the essay >>
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The futures discipline really emerged in the 1950s. There were people like Buckminster Fuller who were thinking futuristically far before then, and who had had a huge impact, but as a profession it didn’t really make any headway until the 1950s. The Institute for the Future, which is where I work, was founded around this time, as was Jim Dator's Center for Future Studies at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. The phrase “alternative futures” is most commonly associated with this school. |
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The question was: how do we understand everyday risk? Also, how do we help people think about the future constructively, so as to move beyond that central uncertainty that they were—and will— deal with? How do we generate futures? This is really the central question of how we do our work. What we do is more than just point to examples and to straight trend lines. We need to find ways to make the concept of the future more robust and more tangible to people. We want to tell a compelling story about what could happen in the future, and what directional changes we could face given a particular topic. Most future studies are concerned with images of the future understanding how they work, what they mean to people, how they function as social objects, and how to codify and systematize them. Then we translate those meanings so that people can understand them. What this usually entails is getting a bunch of people in a room together to brainstorm, then doing research to understand how things have changed, and then reaching a consensus of how things have changed based on that research. We analyze the present to evaluate current trends, and then we look at where they could lead in the |
the future. And we ask questions. We try to cover those potentialities that we usually don’t think about, things that are sort of black swans that are almost impossible to conceive of, but that would have a huge impact if they were to actually come to pass. The process of collectively generating variation and possibility, and then narrowing it down into digestible content in the form of stories– that’s the basic activity of generating futures. There are four basic shapes of change that Jim Dator analyzed. From looking across cultures, across mediums, and at images of the future, he developed four categories of archetypal shapes of change: collapse, transformation, growth – which is business as usual – and discipline, which is where things are brought into a different kind of balance. With these ideas you can identify historically where you’ve seen that sort of shape change. For instance, rationing during World War II is a discipline machine; the Dust Bowl is a collapse; the advent of refrigeration was a major transformation in the American food system, and in food systems all over the world, as technology spread. You can take a topic and understand the shape of the change around that topic, and that generates extreme possibilities that create alternatives. |
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The rationale behind alternative futures is that it helps you get away from doing the high, medium, and low versions of the same future. So growth is not very successful or growth is kind of flat (such as is currently the case), or growth is extreme. Those are alternatives, but they’re not really all that different. They are still working under the same basic assumptions, and good futurists should challenge your assumptions in some way, shape, or form. Robert B. Textor developed the ethnographic futures method that I use a lot when I’m interviewing people. I ask them what is the best future that they can imagine, what is the worst future that they can imagine, and what is the most likely future that they can imagine. Now, I wouldn’t necessarily use that to present scenarios at the output, although the Institute for Alternative Futures has an aspirational futures model that basically does that. But for me it’s interesting to know what people value, because that comes out of their best future. What people are really afraid of comes out of their worst future. What makes them really uncomfortable, and how people think change happens, comes out of their most likely future. |
Each set of scenarios, whether you make space for it or not, will have those things embedded in it, will have a set of values that get rewarded over others, a set of fears that are taken more seriously in some context than others, and a particular model of how change happens in the world. Often we’re wrong and we have to be reflexive because for every story about the future that we tell, there’s another that we are not telling. The other reason why it’s important to think of alternatives is that we’re always wrong. Well not always. Actually, as a ten-year forecasting organization with a forty-four year track record, we actually have a not too bad track record, all things considered.There is this one amazing forecast from 1973, written about the future of ARPANET, that basically foretold eBay and Amazon at a time when the scientists who were using it were like, “no, this will only be used for email forever.” So occasionally we are right. But we have to be humble, because often we’re wrong. And we have to be reflexive, because for every story about the future that you tell there’s another that you are not telling. |
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And that’s why, sometimes, people adhere very strongly to particular methodologies. We like to say at the Institute—and we try to live up to this — that we are methodologically agnostic. We try to use the best methodology for a particular topic. When you choose your methodology you are choosing which future you are going to leave out in the cold, and that will not be included in your "scope." When you make a map of the future, you decide where its edges are – you decide where there will be dragons and you stop mapping. And for each decision like that, there is a disowned future that is basically a series of paths not taken, or in business terms the “opportunity cost.” It’s good to be aware of what those things are, because if you are not aware, they can come back to haunt you. It’s good to think about that sometimes, but it’s also a necessary outcome of any given futuring process – that you’re creating the futures that you want to talk about, you feel are productive to think about, and you feel have the potential to transform the present. There are, of course, those that just don’t make the cut, that are not persuasive in a given context, or are not realistic for a given audience.  Check back in a fortnight for part two of this essay... |
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