Looking Back

And a small reflection on the futures field

Photo by Anoush Amraei on Unsplash

It’s been roughly four years since I closed my consulting business and today I was looking back at what I’ve been doing since then.

Apart from travel, I went to my last conference (APFN 2024), co-edited with Steven Licthy a Journal of Futures Studies Special Issue, wrote and posted some parts of my book, did all the work need to sell our home in 2024 and organise storage which took over my life for some months. This was followed by a year (December 2024 - December 2025) in a one bedroom apartment because our off-the-plan place wasn’t ready. This year wasn’t conducive to deep thinking. At least it had a good view of Melbourne city.

Now we are settled in our new place, the gap between my last posts and this one seems far too wide, and I’m catching up on what’s going on in the Futures field from the last year or so.

So what do I want/need to write about now? To be honest, I don’t know. But I do know one thing.

While the field does and should delve into new and expanded areas, there seems to be an approach I can only define by drawing on the saying about recycling: rethink, remake, recycle.

While I have stopped being a practitioner, I have been reading some papers and following folks on LinkedIn. Some I couldn’t read because they were too superficial. What I had come across was not frequent but enough times to think: "I was talking about that 25 years ago”. The way the ideas of the present may be tweaked, but are definitely the same topic — except that they are often remade without any deep thinking about that topic, which is only possible if one has not researched and delved into the history of futures and foresight.

Why does that matter? Simply to first understand what has been previously researched before that can inform your thinking about how futures work today has evolved over time. To understand that our work and the work of the present is only possible because we are standing on the shoulder of some incredible giants.

If a person comes to the futures field today and finds a certain area or methods or tools that they want to work with, that’s a good thing. These decisions shouldn’t take the field for granted as it appears now, however, as this risks missing the rich history of the field and won’t understand how the field has evolved over time. The result: they will have a narrow, shallow view upon which to base their practice - and are unaware of the foundations of the field.

So we are left with remaking and recycling as new something that is old. I say this because I have come across this situation in many of the papers I have reviewed over the years who propose a new version of some diagram or tool without crediting the person who first published it.

Take the Futures Cone for example. Joe Voros developed this tool in the earlier 1990s, when he worked for me (had to get that in) at Swinburne University here in Melbourne. His interpretation though was based on historical and present research. He did not ‘invent’ the Futures Cone, he adapted it for use in what we were doing at Swinburne.

We were trying to introduce futures and foresight there and were starting from the beginning - it was an unknown concept for staff and we were working on ways to explain what it is, why it matters and how to use it. Fundamentally, Joe developed the adapted Futures Cone to allow people to recognise that there are more futures in the present not only the single right future that we have been, and still do seek. Here is a quote from his post on the Voroscope:

The above descriptions are best considered not as rigidly-separate categories, but rather as nested sets or nested classes of futures, with the progression down through the list moving from the broadest towards more narrow classes, ultimately to a class of one—the ‘projected’. Thus, every future is a potential future, including those we cannot even imagine—these latter are outside the cone, in the ‘dark’ area, as it were.

The diagram on his site seems simple but it is but a tool, a way to indicate that we need to deepen and expand our thinking beyond those futures that are possible and projected and reject those that seem impossible. If we let our thinking constrained by the boundaries of the present, and bury our imaginations because ‘if there are facts and data’ it’s not real will overwhelm that thinking.

Do a search on Futures Cone now. There are too many adaptions - at least 20 - that take the Futures Cone at face value. There adaptions - and critiques - are therefore misguided. Some of these adaptions are interesting, most have missed the point because they found the Cone, thought it useful, but thought they could do it better (often without citation of the owner of image, which is not the done thing). The latter changes the original purpose of the Cone and, especially in some critiques, misses the fundamental aim that when we find something new in the field we need to do some research on who, when and why the owner developed this tool.

Read this article in the Jounal of Futures Studies by Romano Theunissen which provides an excellent historical, present and futures view of the Cone - the research behind this article is deep and one that pay homage to the past and present before he provides his take on how the Cone can be used in futures thinking now.

And remember, if a futures tool or method or theory in futures exists today someone else invented it. Take the time to find our why and how before you start to rethink, remake and recycle and don’t forget to credit the inventor in your work.