Posted by Adam Gordon on Mar 11, 2010 in all, Future Savvy, policy, strategic foresight, trend tracking | 1 comment
Paul Saffo is always good value, and doesn’t shy from polemic. In this talk at the Foresight Institute 2010 conference, Saffo, emeritus and alumnus of the the foresight industry for over 20 years has a full swipe at ‘futurists’ who participate in ‘future-entertainment’ or profess to ‘see into the future;’ but calls for the broad infusion of foresight into public debate, including the restitution of the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) scrapped by Newt Gingrich in 1995.
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“Profiles of the Future” at the Foresight Institute 2010 conference
Says Saffo: “Futurists today are talking to the wrong people, don’t have good methods (for the most part,) and are still doing the kinds of silly things we did (or they did) when futurism got started…We should have an instant prohibition on anyone who writes an article titled: ‘Top 10 Trends to Watch’… We’ve got to get rid of this ‘future entertainment’ stuff and ‘top-10 trends’ stuff, and get serious.”
Part of the raison d’etre of Future Savvy, of course, is to demythologize exactly this kind of self-promoting infotainment foresight, and give real-world managers a way to see through it. Thinking long-term is too important to allow it to be tainted by snake-oil salesmen. Saffo admits he’s ranting on this topic (as I do too.) In a less ranting mode, he would probably admit there are also many high-quality thinkers doing exemplary foresight work. Certainly he’s all in favor of thinking long-term, and doing it better.
Saffo’s solution? “Move foresight to the masses; make policy conversations cool; engage powerful myopics (short-term thinkers on Wall Street and other financial institutions); engage politicians (incl. via the OTA). But he doesn’t say how, and of course therein lies the rub.
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Interesting take on “futurism” although I would caution against his particular solutions. We are all influenced by our experiences.
No matter who you are, we all carry around this load of mental baggage. While this “knowledge” helps to shape our views of the world, it can also cloud our vision and make it near impossible to spot things that are unforeseen and new. This is why it’s difficult to make “foresight” en masse, or to look to powerful and/or influential people because they are even more clouded by their preconceived notions of how the world works.
Check out a recent piece I wrote on this very subject: http://weineredrichbrown.com/2010/04/19/the-800-pound-gorilla/.
Thank you, too, for sending a copy of your book. Great read!