Saturday, June 1, 2013

Methods for Futuring: Part 4 methods

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Futuring Methods
In this section we will look at the broad strokes of the methods behind futuring in eleven different methods. 
·              Scanning – Typically scanning is based on systematic survey of news articles, reviewing academic journals for new developments in technology and innovations. Not only is having an understanding of topographic of the developments of business and technology, but also politics. Trend Monitoring
·              Trend Analysis – Determine the rate of change of change in trends to identify its nature, cause, speed of development, and potential impact. Careful analysis maybe be needed though statistical models or with human imagination to give you a theoretical idea about the future.
·              Tend Monitoring – Watching reports regularly is key to creating informed decisions about the future.
·              Trend Projection – After trends have been analyzed in a numerical way, trends then can be plotted on in a graphing machine to show change in the past and theoretical changes in the future. 
·              Scenarios – The future development of trends, using different strategies such as Murphy’s law to describe an outline for the future.
·              Polling – Collecting people’s opinion through surveys, polls, or by face-to-face interactions. The Delphi polling method is one of the most popular polling methods among futurist.
·              Brainstorming – Generating new ideas about the future to help give you an idea map about the future. The same type of rough data that the early explorers would have used to map their journey to a new land.
·              Modeling – Gives us the ability to visualize data and project trends and project forecast into the future.
·              Gaming – The simulation of real-world situations by the means of humans playing different roles and observing the by-product of these scenario-building games.
·              Historical Analysis – The use of historical events to understand how to proceed into the future. 
·              Vision – Using the systematic creation of visions of a desirable future or companies, organization, or for individuals. Normally, this process starts with a historical analysis.
By interlacing these topics together and using the perspective of the supertrends and superforces and we reviewed in the pervious section, along with what we’ve learned from the great explorers, we can start to develop a futuristic model of the future, through the use of forecast and the creation of scenarios. 

Please note: All content from Part 1, 3, and 4 was summarized from the book Futuring:The Exploration of the future by Edward Cornish  

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