by Oliver Markley, PhD
Introduction
Many seemingly insurmountable challenges face the achievement of preferred futures that are economically just, ecologically sustainable, and socially inspiring (Markley, 2015, Inayatullah, 2018); for example, the way that social media algorithms drive increased social polarization.
One of the founding tenets of the World Future Society (WFS) in 1966 was that a better future will emerge if many people explore their ideas about possible, probable and preferable, futures together—particularly about the specific types of future that they desire and/or see as most desirable for all. Whether this premise is something that holds up in practice, rather than being just an optimistic hope, is a question that I empirically tested in 1971.
This note tells the previously unpublished story of how I did this. Please note that in hindsight, I realize that I should have published this back then rather than only now, more than 70 years later, as part of a retirement initiative I now have underway to make all of my professional writings available online.
A few weeks after the first WFS General Assembly was held at Washington D.C. in 1971, I was invited to speak at a meeting of the San Francisco WFS Chapter. My invitation specifically asked me to report on the alternative futures research that my colleagues and I were doing in the new Education Policy Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute under the direction of Willis W. Harman.
My Presentation
I opened by stating the topic I had been asked to speak about, but interjected that before doing so, it might be interesting to report on the Society’s General Assembly, recently held in Washington DC. When I did a quick survey of how many had attended it, about 20% of the approximately 150 in attendance at the S.F. meeting indicated that they were also at the Washington meeting.
After briefly describing the conference in Washington, I told about how, in my perception, the general mood of its attendees had markedly shifted from that at the beginning—which was one of intense excitement, especially among students, their teachers, and others who were new to this whole thing—to a much less upbeat mood at the end, where many of these same people could be seen walking around with little or no animation, almost looking a bit dazed. Or so it had seemed to me at the time.
As I continued this preamble to my invited presentation, I told of flying back to the West Coast afterwards, and reflecting on this perception with an SRI colleague who had also attended the WFS Assembly. He agreed with me about the shifting “vibe” that had progressed from the beginning to the end of the Assembly. Enjoying a drink together, he and I decided to figure out, if we could, what might have caused this to happen.
We first thought about Alvin Toffler’s best-selling book, Future Shock, published just the year before; speculating whether or not the mood shift we perceived might be due to future shock. Intuitively, though, future shock didn’t seem to be what the problem was.
When we probed a bit deeper, thinking about the major visions of the future that various speakers had put forward, a light of illumination flashed for both my colleague and myself: several very charismatic speakers had put forward very clear images of the future, each of which seemed quite credible, but each of which conflicted with the others. And nowhere in the conference proceedings was there any attempt to recognize this fact and to reflect on what it meant.
Ordering a second drink, in classic “back of the cocktail napkin” style futures research, we decided to enumerate the major points of view that had been put forward and by whom. After some discussion, we agreed that there were three major clusters of views presented, and a clear “thought leader” of each, summarized as follows:
Ideological View Thought Leader
- Technological optimist/positive extrapolist Herman Kahn
- Technological pessimist/negative extrapolist Dennis Meadows
- Transformationalist Willis Harman
We also noted that many holders of each ideological view seemed to be quite closed to opposing viewpoints.
Thus, when I got an invitation to talk at the WFS’s San Francisco Chapter, I wondered if this meeting could be a forum in which to test the idea that open forum exploration of desired futures might not, in fact, lead to a positive outcome.
So, having made these remarks as an introduction, I briefly described the type of alternative futures research that my colleagues and I were doing at SRI, summarized by Figures 1 and 2.
Figure 1. Tree of plausible alternative future histories of the United States, 19970 – 2000. Source: Harman, Markley & Rhyne, 1973, Figure 12, p. 332.
Figure 2. Slice of Figure 2 at the year 2000. Source: Harman, Markley & Rhyne, 1973, Figure 13, p. 334
I concluded my summary of our SRI futures research, by saying that there were three major policy questions coming out of our research that we were now posing to our clients; and that I hoped we might use the remaining time tonight to discuss which of these alternative options is preferable.
The three policy alternative questions were these:
- Limits to growth: Should the long-term exponential growth trends of population, economic production, etc. observed in recent years be limited so as to avoid global ecological disruption?
- Regulation of technology: Should new and rapidly growing technologies be subjected to “technology impact analysis” with technology regulation to avoid major negative impacts?
- Economic inequality: Should public policies be enacted to reduce economic inequalities both domestic and global?
My Social Experiment
To begin the discussion, I asked people to cluster in groups of two, three or four, including people either in the rows in front or behind you, so as to include people you probably don’t know; and to canvass yourselves for several minutes regarding which policy options would lead to a better future.
After about five minutes, I asked for volunteers to summarize the view of their group. Which types of policy would be best for a desirable future? [1]
Well…, what happened next, greatly exceeded what I surmised might happen.
Rather than summarize what their group had considered about the three questions, one speaker after another spoke in true soap-box fashion of oratory, strongly advocating whatever specific future they thought most desirable, and why—with each speaker more or less ignoring what the previous speaker had said, just focusing on what they thought was important to go for.
After about five or six of these—some of which I had to cut short and ask to yield the floor so that others could speak—I called time out, and reminding them that it was a basic assumption of the World Future Society that open exploration of numerous points of view about the future leads to a better future actually emerging, I asked that when we begin again, that each speaker should at least connect to what the previous speaker had said before, before making a new point – as happens in good conversations.
When I opened the floor for audience participation again, however, exactly the same thing happened, with little or no connection between what each speaker said.
So, I called time out a second time, and once again reminded them of the WFS assumption about open sharing about the future leading to a better future emerging. But this time, I simply asked directly, “What do you think is happening here?”
After a long silence, a very elderly woman stood up and said with a quivering voice, “Well, I don’t know for sure, but it sounds to me like the different points of view that Dr. Markley said were in contention at the World Future Society Assembly are represented here, and that this is the problem.”
I replied, “That is a most interesting observation. Can we poll ourselves by a raising of hands to see if it is true?”
Without going into detail about what it took to facilitate such a polling successfully, it turned out that the same three clusters were majorly represented in the S.F. audience – except that there was a fourth category that insisted on being represented as a major point of view. They called themselves “Immortalists”— a view they characterized as believing that physical immortality was imminently achievable if we but we hold this intention collectively and devote the necessary R&D resources to this end. (Nowadays, this ideological position is associated with so-called “Transhumanists,” typified by the views of Ray Kurzweil.)
As I recall the results of this informal survey indicating the degree to which different people separate into ideologically different cohorts when considering possible and preferable futures, were was essentially as follows: [2]
Ideological View Size of Cohort
- Technological optimist/positive extrapolist 63%
- Technological pessimist/negative extrapolist 25%
- Transformationalist 10%
- Immortalist 2%
By this time, the scheduled time of adjournment was at hand, but I asked if people would be willing to stay for at least another five minutes; and to reflect on what all this meant. Most people did stay; and the comments that followed can be summarized by one speaker, who said:
“I don’t really understand what happened here, but this was by far the most interesting meeting we have had, and I hope we have more like this.”
Some years later, Peter Schwartz told me that he had been in the audience, and it was this experience that led him to want to become a futurist.
Criteria for Successfully Facilitating Agreement of Desired Futures
Since this little social experiment proved to my satisfaction that the exploration of desired futures in an open forum is not likely to lead to a positive outcome (thereby disproving the founding tenet of the WFS), I then asked myself what sort of explicit and deliberate process might help people to come to consensus thinking and synthesis about desired futures; i.e., how to successfully facilitate agreement about desired futures among people holding markedly different views of the specific future they themselves personally desire.
After some days of reflecting on this question, I realized that my work leading the team at the SRI EPRC to derive our set of alternative future histories, had already demonstrated how this could be done; I had simply never looked at our work in this way.
How our SRI team derived alternative future histories. By way of background, this work, described in “Alternative Futures for the United States, 1970-2000” (Harman, Markley and Rhyne, 1973, pp 317-344), involved the careful derivation of a longitudinal series of plausible states of society involving different combination of the various factors listed in Figure 3.
Figure 3. Six categories of factors making up the roster of societal characteristics used in describing plausible alternative future states of society (from Figure 9 in Harman, Markley & Rhyne, 1973, p. 326)
The sequencing of plausible groupings of these factors led to the “Tree” of plausible alternative future histories, pictured on Figure 1 with the Year 2000 “slice” on Figure 2.
The process of establishing plausible groupings involved lengthy discussion – and not infrequently, outright arguments – among our team of research analysts. This team included two engineers, a political scientist, a social psychologist, a historian, and an economist; two of these were liberals, one was a militarily-oriented conservative, one was an atheist, one was a mystic, and several had no particular political, religious or spiritual inclination. All, however, were committed to the ideal of producing ideologically-unbiased projections of plausible alternative future histories that would rise above the ethos of each analyst.
After reflecting on how our research team at SRI did this successfully, I derived the following four criteria as needing to be followed in gatherings involving number of competing and/or opposing viewpoints about “the desired future” – if the sharing of different visions of the future is to lead to a better future being realized:
- Agreement about the purpose of the gathering.
- Clarity about what would constitute a successful outcome or product of the gathering.
- A limited amount of time in which to create that outcome or product.
- Commitment by each participant to not let personal ideological beliefs or preferences stand in the way of letting the purpose of the gathering be successfully realized.
Concluding Summary
In this story I believe I empirically disproved a founding premise of the World Future Society that a better future will emerge if many people openly explore their ideas together about the future – particularly about the specific type of future that they see as most desirable.
Moreover, I have showed how this aim can be realized by carefully facilitating organized discussions of the future among people with ideologically different viewpoints, with four key criteria that lead people to sublimate their personal preferences in favor of group consensus.
I recommend the use of these four criteria for current practitioners.
I suspect that many professional futurists have stories about of their past work that they may wish they had shared publicly. In my own case, I realize that part of me, back the early 1970s, simply did not want to contradict the proud vision of Ed Cornish, WFS’s founder. I subconsciously let my desire to be kind to trump my sense of professional responsibility to publicize the story recounted here at that time.
Fortunately, many professional writings have been published since then, describing how collective futures exploration can be productive (Glenn & Gordon, 2009; Hines & Bishop, 2015).
References
Cornish, Edward (2005). Futuring: The Exploration of the Future. Washington, DC: World Future Society. https://archive.org/details/futuringexplorat0000corn_l8p2
Glenn, Jerome and T. Gordon (2009). Futures Research Methodology, Version 3.0. Washington, DC: The Millennium Project. https://www.millennium-project.org/publications-2/futures-research-methodology-version-3-0/
Harman, Willis (1970). Alternative Futures and Educational Policy. SRI/EPRC Research Memorandum 6747-6. Menlo Park, Calif: Educational Policy Research Center of Stanford Research Institute. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED038358.pdf
Harman, Willis, O. Markley and R. Rhyne (1973). The Forecasting of Plausible Alternative Future Histories: Methods, Results and Educational Policy Implications. In Long Range Policy Planning in Education, Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1973. http://www.olivermarkley.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/1973-OECD-Paper.pdf
Hines, Andy and P. Bishop (2007; 2nd Ed. 2015) Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight. Washington, DC: Social Technologies.
Inayatullah, Sohail (2018), Foresight in Challenging Environments, Journal of Futures Studies, 22(4): 15–24. DOI:10.6531/JFS.201806.22(4).0002 http://www.metafuture.org/library1/FuturesStudies/ForesightChallengingPractice.pdf
Kahn, Herman and A. Weiner (1967). The year 2000: A framework for speculation on the next thirty-three years. New York, NY: Macmillan. https://archive.org/details/year2000framewor00kahn
Kurzweil, Ray. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil
Markley, Oliver. (2015). Aspirational guidance for wiser futures: Toward open-sourced ascension from ego-centric to eco-centric human communities. Foresight, 17(1): 1-34. http://www.olivermarkley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Aspirational-Guidance-As-in-Foresight.pdf’; http://www.olivermarkley.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/04-01-2015-Expanded-Version-of-Aspirational-Guidance.pdf
Meadows, Donella, D. Meadows, J. Randers & W. Behrens III (1972). The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York, NY: Universe books. https://ia802201.us.archive.org/9/items/TheLimitsToGrowth/TheLimitsToGrowth.pdf
Schwartz, Peter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Schwartz_(futurist)
Toffler, Alvin (1970). Future Shock. New York, NY: Batam Books. https://archive.org/stream/AlvinTofflerFutureShockPdfTKRG/Alvin%20Toffler%20-%20Future%20Shock%20-%20pdf%20%5BTKRG%5D_djvu.txt.
- At this point, you, as a reader, might like to put this story aside for a moment, in order to envision the situation I described, and to imagine what happens next. How do you think the crowd of about 150 people actually handled this question? ↑
- Interestingly, almost 40 years later in 2008, I repeated this survey to an audience of the Central Texas Chapter of the WFS in Austin. As I recall, the percentages were approximately: 1. 25%, 2. 40%, 3. 30%, and 4. 5% – indicating a major perceptual shift from 1971. ↑
Author
Oliver Markley, PhD
Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology and former Chair, Graduate Program in Studies of the Future, University of Houston-Clear Lake
Email: oliver@olivermarkley.com
Websites: www.olivermarkley.com; www.imaginalvisioning.com
