The Association of Professional Futurists (APF) was founded in 2002 to validate the competencies of emerging futurists.[1] As analysts, speakers, managers or consultants, APF's credentialed members cultivate strategic foresight for their organizations and clients. APF represents the professional side of the futures movement, while groups such as the World Futures Studies Federation, the World Future Society or The Millennium Project, represent its academic, popular, and activists expressions, respectively.
APF emerged as a network of practicing futurists who were utilizing futurology methods.[2] As the field approached the year 2000, it began to renew old calls[3] and issue new ones [4][5] to raise its internal standards in regards to ethics, competencies, and quality of work. While few felt that futurists—an occupational interest group at best—might become a full-fledged recognized profession via certification,[6] the nine members of APF's founding board, including Peter Bishop, Jennifer Jarratt, Andy Hines, and Herb Rubenstein felt that foresight professionals should lead the global discussion about professional futures practice, encourage the use of futures and foresight in strategic decision making, and offer services, resources and training for foresight professionals to advance their skills and knowledge.[citation needed]
Instead of certifying members through coursework,[7] professional futurists chose a pathway to credential its members, based on a peer-review assessment of their competencies. APF Professional Membership is conferred following a portfolio review to those who can, at the minimum, document performance in two of seven professional standards: consulting, organizational function, postgraduate degree, certificate program, speaking, teaching or writing. Full Members may use the appellation of APF after their name. Besides its Full Member program, APF also offers Provisional, Associate, and Student Memberships.
Founding Members of the Organization
John Mahaffie
Jim Mathews
Michael Mcallum
Pero Micic
Stephen Millett
Mary Jane Naquin
Peter Padbury
Randy Scheel
Lee Shupp
Herb Rubenstein
Verne Wheelwright
Derek Woodgate
Peter Bishop
Michele Bowman
Jennifer Jarratt
Dominique Purcell Jaurola
Christian Crews
Mike De Bettencourt
Kate Delaney
Jay Forrest
Jay Gary
Joyce Gioia
Terry Grim
Andy Hines
David Shannon
Past APF Board Members
The first APF board was constituted in 2002 and consisted of nine members: Peter Bishop, Michele Bowman, Sandy Burchsted, Tom Conger, Mike de Bettencourt, Bob Hahn, Andy Hines, Jennifer Jarratt, and Herb Rubenstein. Randy Scheel served as the Executive Director, a role later assumed by Andy Hines.
Richard Yonck
Tanja Hichert
Jason Swanson
Cindy Frewen
Catherine Cosgrove
Wayne Pethrick
Marcus Barber
Jim Breaux
Herb Rubenstein
Wendy Schultz
Lee Shupp
Rob Hanson
Nick Price
Jennifer Jarratt
Joan Foltz
Garry Golden
Roumiana Gotseva
Andy Hines
Stephen Aguilar-Millan
Stacey Aldrich
Natalie Ambrose
Peter Bishop
Michele Bowman
Sandy Burchsted
Tom Conger
Bridgette Engeler
Maree Conway
Peter Hayward
Jim Mathews
Claudia Juech
Josh Lindenger
John Mahaffie
Riel Miller
Rowena Morrow
Andrew Curry
Randy Moss
Christian Crews
Mike de Bettencourt
Bob Hahn
Ann Feeney
Joe Tankersley
Derek Woodgate
Prateeksha Singh
Marius Oosthuizen
Yoonsik Choi
Bryan Alexander
Jay Gary
Joyce Gioia
Rebecca Ryan
Terry Grim
Shermon Cruz
Modafar Akhoirshieda
Mauricio Hernandez Ramirez
Laura Schlehuber
Chairpersons of the Organization
Tanja Schindler (Current)
Shermon Cruz
Jay Gary
Cindy Frewen
Ann Feeney
Andy Hines
John Mahaffie
Michele Bowman
Jennifer Jarratt
Programs & Publications
APF Annual gatherings have been a key activity since its founding. The first gathering was an "Applied Futures Summit" in Seattle in April 2002, at which founders agreed to establish the Association. The second gathering was in Austin, TX, focused on "The Future of Futures," employing a scenario planning approach to explore the next decade of the field.[8] Each subsequent gathering has focused on a particular topic, such as Design Thinking in Pasadena, CA, or the Future of Virtual Reality in Las Vegas, NV, Global Health in Seattle, WA, Blockchain Futures in Brisbane, Australia, or Resurgent City in Pittsburgh, PA.
APF hosts shorter "Pro Dev" workshops preceding larger conferences, in addition to annual gatherings, such as its September 2019 workshop in Mexico City on the "Praxis of Professional Futurists." As a digital learning platform, APF members also conduct various events online, ranging from Twitterchats, to webinars, to day-long learning festivals that address topics such as the future of museums, the future of machine intelligence, diverse futures, and design thinking. In 2020, APF began to host monthly member-only "Foresight Friday" webinars to showcase outstanding work by its professional members.
APF's flagship publication for members is its newsletter, published quarterly since 2003. The Compass features recaps of APF events, articles on future trends, methodology salons, book reviews, plus member news and promotions. Non-members may view themed or conference editions.
Professionalism
Helping raise professionalism of futurists has been a perennial pursuit of the APF. In 2016, after three appointed studies over nine years, APF released a Foresight Competency Model, a product of 23 members from 4 continents that mapped the personal, academic, workplace, and technical competencies that futurists draw upon to support their work as consulting, organizational or academic futurists.[9]
The Foresight Competency Model addresses the basic question of what one ought to be capable of doing as a professional futurist. At the center of the model is a circle of six foresight competencies: Framing, Scanning, Futuring, Designing, Visioning, and Adapting.
Six Foresight Competencies
Practice
Description
Framing
Defining the focal issue and current conditions
Scanning
Exploring signals of change and cross-impacts
Futuring
Identifying a baseline and alternative futures
Visioning
Developing and committing to a preferred future
Designing
Developing prototypes and artifacts to achieve goals
Adapting
Generating strategies for alternative futures
The Foresight Competency Model[10] also defined sector competencies for different types of foresight professionals, such as consulting or organizational futurists, at the entry, associate, and senior career level. The origins of the Foresight Competency Model arose from previous taxonomies of futures research methods that offered guidelines for carrying out successful strategic foresight,[11][12] developed over four decades.[13][14]
Futurist Recognition
APF's members annually select and recognize significant futures works. The first awards were announced in 2008. The ten 'most significant futures works' in 2008 included Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View, Wendell Bell's Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era, Bertrand de Jouvenel's L'Art de la Conjecture (The Art of Conjecture), and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines.[citation needed]
APF also has an annual student recognition program in which universities offering undergraduate, Masters and/or PhDs in foresight and futures studies can submit up to three student works that the instructor(s) considers being of exceptional quality in terms of originality, content, and contribution to the field.[citation needed]
APF is led by an international board of 12 futurists from five continents along with key volunteers. It is incorporated in the State of Delaware and is formed as a 501(c)(6) business league, with its headquarters in Washington, DC. It is considered exempt by the IRS as it is not organized for profit. APF's Twitter feed is @profuturists
The future is the time after the past and present. Its arrival is considered inevitable due to the existence of time and the laws of physics. Due to the apparent nature of reality and the unavoidability of the future, everything that currently exists and will exist can be categorized as either permanent, meaning that it will exist forever, or temporary, meaning that it will end. In the Occidental view, which uses a linear conception of time, the future is the portion of the projected timeline that is anticipated to occur. In special relativity, the future is considered absolute future, or the future light cone.
Futurists are people whose specialty or interest is futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities about the future and how they can emerge from the present, whether that of human society in particular or of life on Earth in general.
Futures studies, futures research, futurism, or futurology is the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social/technological advancement, and other environmental trends; often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and work in the future. Predictive techniques, such as forecasting, can be applied, but contemporary futures studies scholars emphasize the importance of systematically exploring alternatives. In general, it can be considered as a branch of the social sciences and an extension to the field of history. Futures studies seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to explore the possibility of future events and trends.
Strategic foresight is a planning-oriented discipline related to futures studies. In a business context, a more action-oriented approach has become well known as corporate foresight.
In futurology, especially in Europe, the term foresight has become widely used to describe activities such as:
Futures techniques used in the multi-disciplinary field of futurology by futurists in Americas and Australasia, and futurology by futurologists in EU, include a diverse range of forecasting methods, including anticipatory thinking, backcasting, simulation, and visioning. Some of the anticipatory methods include, the delphi method, causal layered analysis, environmental scanning, morphological analysis, and scenario planning.
Peter Schwartz is an American business executive, innovator, author, and co-founder of the Global Business Network (GBN), a corporate strategy firm, specializing in future-think and scenario planning. In 2011, Schwartz became an executive at Salesforce.com, where his roles include Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning and Chief Futures Officer.
The University of Houston College of Technology is the second largest among 13 schools and colleges at the University of Houston. It offers 11 undergraduate degrees and 12 graduate degrees throughout four different departments. In Fall of 2017, there were 6,520 students enrolled in the college. The University of Houston has a new building in Sugar Land, Texas, for the College of Technology; programs are being moved there and a couple of programs will solely be offered at that campus.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to futures studies:
Peter C. Bishop is a professional futurist (futurologist), a retired Associate Professor of Strategic Foresight, and the former Director of the graduate program in Futures Studies at the University of Houston.
Corporate foresight has been conceptualised by strategic foresight practitioners and academics working and/or studying corporations as a set of practices, a set of capabilities and an ability of a firm. It enables firms to detect discontinuous change early, interpret its consequences for the firm, and inform future courses of action to ensure the long-term survival and success of the company.
Sohail Inayatullah is a Pakistani-born Australian academic, futures studies researcher and a professor at the Graduate Institute of Futures Studies at Tamkang University in Taipei, Taiwan.
Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) is a future research theory, that integrates various epistemic modes, creates spaces for alternative futures, and consists of four layers: Litany, Social and Structural, Worldview, and Myth/Metaphor. The method was created by Sohail Inayatullah, a Pakistani-Australian futures studies researcher.
The Institute for the Future (IFTF) is a Palo Alto, California, US–based not-for-profit think tank. It was established, in 1968, as a spin-off from the RAND Corporation to help organizations plan for the long-term future, a subject known as futures studies.
Puruesh Chaudhary is a futures researcher, development and strategic narrative professional. She has a master's degree in International Negotiation and Policymaking from Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. She is also a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad. Chaudhary is the founder and president of the non-governmental organization Agahi, a media development and capacity building initiative in Pakistan.
Youngsook Park is a leading futurist from South Korea She serves as Chair of Millennium Project Korea Node. She also represents several global futures research organizations such as TechCastGlobal, and Davinci Institute. She has been Information Officer of the British Embassy Seoul (1982–2000) and Director of Public Diplomacy of the Australian Embassy Seoul (2000–2010) where she was trained as a futurist by attending World Future Society conferences, and other futurists meetings. Park is known for bringing global futurists to Korea for the last 30 years, and is a co-organizer of Korea Future Forum along with News1, a Korean news agency, inviting famous futurists to Seoul to speak on futures.
Andy Hines is an American futurist, head of graduate studies in Foresight at the University of Houston, and author of several books on strategic foresight. Hines is a professional futurist, co-creator of the framework foresight method, Assistant Professor and Program Coordinator of the Graduate Program in Foresight at the University of Houston, Principal of foresight consulting firm Hinesight, and former organizational futurist at Kellogg Company and Dow Chemical. He has written extensively on futures studies, strategic foresight, foresight research methods, the role of organizational futurists, and the consumer landscape.
Pero Mićić is a German professor for Foresight and Strategy at Steinbeis-Hochschule Berlin, as well as author, public speaker and management consultant. He is the founder and CEO of the FutureManagementGroup AG. Mićić lives in Eltville, Germany.
Noah Raford is an American futurist and specialist in public policy, strategy and emerging technologies. He is a founding executive of the Dubai Future Foundation and the Museum of the Future, and is currently the Futurist-in-Chief and Chief of Global Affairs at the Dubai Future Foundation. He was responsible for several global and regional firsts, including the world's first fully functional 3D printed building and the first blockchain strategy in the MENA region.
Erzsébet Nováky 2005. Academic Award. Erzsébet Nováky, Doctor of Economics, Professor, dedicated futurist since 1970, Head of the Department of Futures Research at the University of Economics 1992-2012. Corvinus University of Budapest, professor emeritus (2015).
↑ Hines, Andy (2004). "The History and Development of the Association of Professional Futurists," The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies: Professional Edition CD-ROM. Foresight International. ISBN0-9757354-0-3
↑ Hines, Andy; Gary, Jay; Daheim, Cornelia; and Luke van der Lann (2017). Building foresight capacity: Toward a Foresight Competency Model. World Futures Review, 9(3), 123-141.
↑ Markley, Oliver (1983). Preparing for the professional futures field: Observations from the UHCLC futures program. Futures, 15(1), 47-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(83)90072-1
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