As Futures Thinking gains wider recognition and awareness, it is natural for people from other disciplines to become curious about the practice. If you are an existing futures and foresight practitioner, you probably also know of peers that come from many diverse backgrounds.
This overlap of Futures with other disciplines creates an emergent melting pot of ideas, processes and mindsets. In my own work in Studio Dojo, Futures is regularly integrated with three other disciplines - design, leadership development and organisation development. This has provided me with a rich set of tools and processes to complement futures thinking in order to better address complex and rapidly changing problems. If you are also interested in interdisciplinary aspects of futures, here are some resources and readings that I’ve come across for you to explore further.
Futures & Design Thinking
In an age when innovation is key to organisational success and growth, you’ve likely come across the term “design thinking.” Design thinking is a non-linear, human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
Here are some resources to explore this area:
Anna Roumiantseva has written about the similarities and differences between Futures and Design, as seen in this diagram below.
Journal of Futures Studies dedicated two issues to Design and Futures (Vol 1 and Vol 2), recognising the commonality that designers and futures practitioners have.
Speculative Design deviates from traditional approaches to design, focusing on creating future products and service concepts as provocations about possible futures.
Ethnographic Futures explores qualitative research and ethnography and it can be used to study the images of the future that people have, creating frameworks like Ethnographic Experiential Futures. The topic of ethnographic futures is appearing with greater frequency in ethnography communities like EPIC. For example, the conference chairs of EPIC2021 selected Anticipation as the theme and invited Mozilla’s foresight strategist with an anthropology background to speak about ethnofutures.
Futures & Leadership Development
Leadership Development is the process of enhancing an individual's ability to perform effectively as a leader within an organisation. In the face of multiple global crises, sometimes called polycrisis, a future orientation is one of six key skills a leader must develop to effectively manage teams.
Within this discipline, holistic development of the self is also important.
Emotional literacy and the concept of the Emotional Quotient (EQ) is a key leadership skill, and the Futures field has seen increasing interest through Affective Foresight, and how awareness and skilful use of emotions in Futures (Part 1 and Part 2) can make us more effective practitioners.
The intelligence of the body, sometimes referred to as embodiment or somatics, is another important aspect that leadership coaches employ to improve an individual’s leadership abilities. Within Futures, the relationship between Causal Layered Analysis and the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems is being explored. While this is still a nascent topic, people are paying attention to this intersection.
Futures & Organisation Development
If Leadership Development focuses on the individual’s capacities, then Organisation Development (OD) broadens the scope to large groups of people working together. OD focuses on collaboratively working with organisations and communities to develop their system-wide capacity for effectiveness and health, grounded in organisational and social sciences.
A major part of OD is helping organisations to improve, change and evolve, and OD practitioners should consider incorporating futures methods and processes to the change management process. Likewise, there are also useful OD concepts like the strengths-based Appreciative Inquiry participatory method that Futures practitioners are already applying in their work, like APF Board Member Patricia Lustig and APF member Rosa Alegria. Other interesting methodologies that you may find useful are Large Group Interventions and Future Search.
Evolving the Futures Practice through Interdisciplinarity
Interdisciplinary Futures can be an exciting and dynamic space for you to learn in, where methods, knowledge, skills, and perspectives of different disciplines are modified and integrated into existing Futures Thinking practices. This helps us to improve the effectiveness of our thinking and processes, updating the field continuously.
I hope these resources encourage you to explore and branch out, so that you can also play your part in contributing to better and more effective Futures practices.
© Hong Khai Seng, 2024
KhaiSeng started Studio Dojo in Singapore to explore the intersection between Design, Futures, Organisation Development and Leadership Development. He is deeply invested in helping people, teams and organisations to become more adaptive and healthy through training, coaching and community engagement. Khai Seng thinks Futures is a great avenue to examine how the human and social condition is affected by our understanding and skill in the use of our pasts, present and futures.
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