Institute For The Future

Reinventing the future at Oxford

Recently I spent a couple days in Oxford, at the James Martin Center for Science and Civilization, and the Martin 21st Century School. My sense is that if they can pull it off, the Martin Center could completely transform the field of futures and forecasting.

On High Street, Oxford [via flickr]

A bit of backstory: both are products of a fairly vast bequest by James Martin, the computer pioneer and futurist, and author of The Meaning of the 21st Century. The book is a bit of a compendium of futures and cutting-edge science, and unintentionally a good introduction to current futures and forecasting in science, energy, environment, and a bunch of other fields. Martin has a pretty substantial reputation as a serious thinker about emerging technologies and their impacts, and this new book is very good. (And the choice of the term "meaning" is quite intriguing. We generally don't think of centuries as having meanings; Martin could have just as easily titled his book The Challenges of the 21st Century, or The Problems of the 21st Century, so the choice of a different, rather richer, word is a good indication that he's up to something more substantive than usual.)

The Meaning of the 21st Century can also be read as a blueprint, or guiding manifesto, for what he's doing at Oxford. The Martin Center was started in 2004, and was the first of ten research institutes at Oxford dealing with the future of everything from climate change to the brain. The Martin School just opened this year, and hopes eventually to become this century's equivalent of the Rhodes Scholarship: a program that creates a cadre of world leaders who, essentially, save the world.

The Said School of Business, home of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilization [via flickr]

One might think of Oxford as a strange place to start such a thing: the phrase "Oxford University" usually calls up images of the dreamy spires, or a tradition-bound, innovation-resistant set of colleges. But Oxford has long had a much stronger tradition in the natural sciences than most people give it credit for, and of course it looms large in the political history of Britain and the British empire.

Pembroke College, Oxford [via flickr]

And in its own way, it has had a deep sense of the future. Legend has it that when New College was founded in the mid-1300s, its benefactors ordered the college forester (which then was a serious position) to plant a forest of oak trees, with an eye to using them to replace the beams in the spectacular New College Hall. The trees were finally harvested in the 1920s.

St Ebbe's Street, home of the James Martin 21st Century School [via flickr]

So why could it have a big impact on futures? A few reasons.

Right now, the field is very methodologically and institutionally decentralized. There's absolutely no hierarchy of training programs, and no clear professional trajectory: pretty much anyone who can get paid do do stuff about the future, and nearly everybody else, can call themselves a futurist. There are very few core texts or methods you have to learn. And for something so important, there are surprisingly few professional (you might say "industry") standards for judging whether work is good or not. Which is not to say there are none: we have lots of arguments within the Institute about what a good forecast is, and how to make it, but our standards are probably quite different from those at Shell, or OECD, or elsewhere. They're highly local, which as anyone who studies knowledge-intensive industries knows, is an impediment to growth.

Common room, Said School of Business [via flickr]

There have been programs in the U.S. to train futurists, but I'm not sure you could argue they've had a strong impact on the field. They tend not to be at major institutions; they haven't produced texts that are central to the field; and their alumni are in a variety of places, but haven't evolved into the kind of mafia that you see with, say, McKinsely alumni or graduates of business schools. The 21st Century School starting to attract graduate students, but they're not (as I understand it) getting degrees in futures; they're associated with more traditional departments, which I suspect will smooth their professional development, even as they work on future-oriented subjects.

Courtyard, Said School of Business [via flickr]

So the 21st Century School could, in very short order, become the world center for doing futures research, and the place to go if you want to become a futurist. It's at one of the world's best universities. It's supported by a huge bequest. And if they can get their act together, they could change the world of futures-- and perhaps the world at large.