Invitation to Futurology: A Taxonomy from Scanning to Scenarios
I recently gave an interview to Hilton Barbour, who blogs about organizational culture, on the topic of futurology. Specifically, I had the opportunity to share some of my ideas on scenarios, which is something I get asked a lot. As you can read in the interview, my explanation of scenarios starts by referring to signals. As usual, my interpretation is influenced by my anthropology studies, which is where I got the ideas for the Taxonomy of Foresight and the concept that a signal equates to "the smallest possible unit of foresight," which is an adaptation of one of my favorite linguistics concepts, a phoneme (the smallest possible unit of sound that carries meaning). If a signal is a phoneme, a scenario is an entire language system. Here is what I told Hilton about foresight now and into the future: Signals are a huge part of the futurist vocabulary. It is an indicator that something is changing, often discovered through a form of foresight research called scanning. A sign...
