Institute For The Future

A Methodological Interlude: Alternative Futures and Deductive Forecasting

The "Manoa School of Futures Studies," led by Jim Dator at the University of Hawaii, has been training students (including me) in the theories and methods of futures studies for almost 40 years. The prevailing philosophy of the program is that "the future cannot be predicted, because 'the future' doesn't exist." Instead futures research and forecasting should be directed toward developing and understanding 'alternative futures.' These alternative futures are a way to categorize our individual and collective "images of the future." Understanding our images and beliefs about the future is part of the process to help us make wiser decisions today, and to install a sense of empowerment and responsibility towards future generations.

This ethic resonates with the IFTF approach and Foresight-Insight-Action model. Much of our program work is now integrating the alternative futures method, including our recent Health Care 2020 research and in this year's Ten-Year Forecast. I've presented it at our HC2020 conference and at several IFTF events--most recently the Tech Horizons Open House on February 22.

The method embodies the "easy to learn, hard to master' dictum, and is most useful when continually cultivated and frequently iterated. A useful introduction to the method can be found an article by Jim Dator in 1998 special issue of American Behavioral Scientist, "THE FUTURE LIES BEHIND! Thirty years of teaching futures studies." Says Dator:

 

While I admit that any attempt to categorize the rich array of images of the future which actually exist does violence to the richness of that array, and while I know that other futurists have come up with different categorization schemes, I have concluded that all images in all cultures that I have encountered can be lumped into one of four major (generic) images of the future:

Continuation (usually "continued economic growth")

Collapse (from [usually] one of a variety of different reasons such as environmental overload and/or resource exhaustion, economic instability, moral degeneration, external or internal military attack, meteor impact, etc.)

Disciplined Society (in which society in the future is seen as organized around some set of overarching values or another--usually considered to be ancient, traditional, natural, ideologically-correct, or God-given.)

Transformational Society (usually either of a "high tech" or a "high spirit" variety, which sees the end of current forms, and the emergence of new (rather than the return to older traditional) forms of beliefs, behavior, organization and--perhaps--intelligent lifeforms.

In my teaching and consulting, I try not to favor one category or image over any of the others, nor to assume that one (or more) is "good" or "the most likely" or "the best (or worst) case scenario"--terms which I think are irrelevant here. While I certainly do have my own "vision" of what I call a "Transformational Society," my interest is primarily in helping students (and clients) understand that there are a wide variety of different (more or less firmly- and reasonably-held) images of the future in existence; for them to reflect on what their own image is--where it came from, how "robust" it is--and to test and exercise their image by comparing and contrasting it to the images of their classmates, fellow workers, other people in their community, and the broader world.

In addition, I have found that these four generic alternative futures can serve as the basis for a futures technique I call "deductive forecasting." That is to say, I can forecast the general characteristics, in each of the four alternative futures, of any present role or institution by deducing it from each of these four generic societal images.

So, for example, I can say something useful and coherent about the future of, say, "the family," if the future is one of "continued growth", while "the family" will have certain other characteristics if the future is one of "collapse"--or a "disciplined society," or a "transformational society." And so on for any role, institution, or value. One of the methods I encourage my students (especially in the Alternative Futures M A Option) to learn and then to use in their consulting, as I do in mine, is deductive forecasting.

 

 

Think about something in your life and put it into the deductive forecasting model. What does it look like as growth, collapse, discipline, or transformation?

Also, think about the images of the future you encounter in media, news, and in conversation with others. Do they fall into one of the four image archetypes? What are the most prevalent images you see? What do those images say about how we imagine possibility and what futures we can make?