Futuring: The Exploration of the Future

The most important thing happening today is not reported in newspapers or on the TV news. It’s a global transformation of technology and society that is creating an age of hyperchange.

Since the future is hurtling toward us at breakneck speed, foresight is the great need of our times. We must think ahead if we are to cope with the hurricane-force changes now bashing at every aspect of our lives. This acceleration of change brings enormous opportunities as well as great dangers.

Most of us know better than to drive down a highway at eighty miles an hour without looking at the road ahead. But when it comes to steering our careers and businesses, we hardly ever consider what’s coming toward us. We often wind up in a nasty "crash" that we could have avoided if we had better anticipated possible developments.

This is where futuring can help.

Futuring is the art and science of exploring the future. It offers methods and techniques that can help you understand trends, identify opportunities and avoid dangers. Futuring can help you understand possible future developments, make better decisions, develop worthwhile goals, and find the means to achieve them. Futuring is a powerful way to help you and your organization to create a better future.

Virtually anyone can benefit from learning the skills and perspectives of futuring:
* Businesspeople can anticipate profitable new markets and innovative products.
* Investors can be ready to get in on the ground floor of emerging industries and new technologies.
* Educators and parents can help ensure that young people are properly prepared for the new world they’ll inherit.
* Students can plan out careers in highly rewarding professions.
* Concerned citizens and policy makers will find practical ways to help guide their communities and organizations to a successful future.

Futuring will open your eyes to the world of the future and how you can prepare for the opportunities and risks ahead. In addition, Futuring will guide you through the history of serious thinking about the future, including the development of the idea of progress in the seventeenth century to the disillusionment with progress that came in the twentieth century.

You will learn how far-sighted military planners, trend-watchers in business, and scholars in think tanks developed ways to think scientifically about the future so that leaders in government and business could prepare for the opportunities and risks ahead. Now you, too, can benefit from their discoveries.

Edward Cornish is president of the World Future Society and editor of its magazine THE FUTURIST.

With support from comprehensive designer Buckminster Fuller, Nobel prizewinning chemist Glenn T. Seaborg, former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman and many others, he organized a small group to develop plans for a World Future Society, which was officially born in October 1966 as an organization for people interested in the future. The Society now has some 25,000 members in 80 countries.

As a futurist, he has served as an adviser for four U.S. presidents, co-authored a report by the White House's National Goals Research Staff, and served as Chief Investigator in study of futuring for the National Science Foundation and the Library of Congress. He also wrote a textbook on futuring, The Study of the Future, that was widely used in colleges and universities. He resides in Bethesda, Maryland.