Many people are curious about the steps that futurists take to build a name for themselves in the futures industry. As a result, futures thinkers are often asked, “How do you become a futurist?” While there is no single career path that all futurists follow, here are several common threads that connect the learning and career history of leading futurists.
Backgrounds in diverse domains
What is striking about the backgrounds of prominent futurists is their individual and collective diversity. The education, industries, and geographical locations of today’s futurists are wide-ranging and sometimes surprising.
Exposure to variety in study, work and society
From film to writing to technology and more, futures thinkers across the globe engage with manifold domains. Some eventual futurists, including leading futurist Ross Dawson, intend to develop a well-rounded career history before adopting the futurist label. Dawson writes in a blog post, “When people ask me what is my background that prepared me for being a futurist, my response is ‘varied’. I worked across six distinct careers in several countries before engaging in my current path.”
Other futurists start their careers without necessarily intending to become futurists. Instead, they gain exposure to a variety of disciplines and gradually discover that being a futurist would be an interesting career suited to their strengths.
Mastering systems thinking
For those who aspire to become futurists, it is important to develop a deep understanding of systems thinking. In the experience of futurists from Genevieve Bell to Amy Webb to Rebecca Costa, travelling and living in diverse countries and cultures can help to form a systemic worldview. Costa attributes her ability to see the “big picture” to her cross-cultural upbringing and education in Japan, Laos and the United States.
Building capability and credibility
Futurists sometimes face skepticism from members of the public who misunderstand the real role of a futurist, thinking, for example, that futurists are like astrologists! Consequently, for people who decide to build a name for themselves as futurists, credibility is key. Futurists also need to be credible so that the people they work with are engaged and receptive.
Education and self-education
One way to gain credibility is to complete a tertiary futures studies program. The Acceleration Studies Foundation provides a helpful list of futures studies courses from around the world. For futurist Maree Conway, studying the Masters of Strategic Foresight course at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, was a life-changing experience. Conway reflects on her website that “The concept of responsibility for future generations and being a good ancestor struck a real chord with me, and by the end of the two years of the course, I had decided that I wanted to work in the futures field.”
While study can help to boost credibility and define one’s career direction, a large part of the capabilities of a futurist is often self-taught. The path of self-education can involve building experience in one or more careers, seeking out professional development, and maximizing opportunities for mentoring and networking.
Career paths
Although increasing numbers of futurists are studying and teaching futures programs, the game changer for most futurists is their career development. Major fields that futurists emerge from include science and technology, marketing and trends, social studies, anthropology, and the environment and sustainability. Within these disciplines, there are three main pathways that futurists tend to follow:
1) working at a consulting firm
2) corporate roles as in-house consultants or futurists, and
3) founding their own consultancies or strategic foresight businesses.
Across all of these pathways, expertise in strategy and planning is crucial.
Publishing
Several professionals have donned the “futurist” label after the publication of future-thinking articles or books that have become widely known and appreciated. For Ross Dawson, the “futurist” breakthrough came after the publication of his book, Living Networks, in 2002, where he outlined the upcoming explosion of social networks. Another example is futurist John Naisbitt, whose 1982 book Megatrends inspired millions of readers, including futurist David Houle.
Social networking
Most futurists today harness the power of social media to improve public recognition of their work as a futurist or as a futurist by another name, such as a foresight practitioner or futurologist. Prominent futurists usually have thousands of followers on Twitter, as well as using Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+ and other social networks for maximum effect, by sharing some of the fascinating and useful insights into the future they glean from their work.
Professional development
Professionals from a range of fields often develop their personal interest in the future by reading the latest literature on future trends, forecasting, organization and system change, science and technology, and other forward-thinking topics. They may also attend conferences and seminars about the future and join professional associations such as the World Future Society or the Association of Professional Futurists (APF). Candidates to join the APF must be recommended by a member and must meet two of the six selection criteria, which span employment as a consulting or organizational futurist, obtaining a postgraduate degree in futures studies, or demonstrating competence in teaching, writing or speaking on futures theory or methodology.
Mentoring and fostering connections
The process of learning about the future can be boosted by closely connecting with one or more professional futurists. Following them on social media is a starting point, but working for them or learning from them through direct mentoring can be a powerful asset. The benefits of mentoring for inspiration and know-how are vouched for by futurist danah boyd, who looks up to Genevieve Bell as a mentor in the technology space, and futurist Glen Hiemstra, who learnt from Ed Lindaman, an early member of the World Future Society.
The power of media
One way to solidify your education and expertise in particular fields is to develop a media presence. Most prominent futurists have their own websites that include links to their recent mentions in newspapers and their interviews on television or radio. If major media channels recognize your work and describe you as a futurist, this strongly supports your positioning and your ability to create value.
Creating value as a futurist
Becoming a futurist is not simply about forging a career, making money or acquiring fame. Futurist Ross Dawson believes that futurists have an important purpose: to create value for clients and the world around them. To achieve this goal, futurists must encourage leadership at all levels; that is, they must inspire other people to help create brighter futures.
Image sources: dirkb86, bidorbuy, and Surian Soosay
What the Revised Barcelona Principles Mean or the Future of PR Measurement
By Ross DawsonFive years ago the International Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication (AMEC) established the Barcelona Declaration of Measurement Principles, an overarching framework for the measurement of PR and communications.
AMEC has just announced a revised set of Barcelona Principles. The changes are shown in the image below, followed by an explanation of why the changes are made, and some reflections on the implications for the future of PR.
David Rockland, a partner at Ketchum and past Chairman of AMEC explained the changes:
In the big picture the changes to the Barcelona Principles are relatively subtle, reflecting that the original framework hit the key issues in PR measurement.
Point 5, that Advertising Value Equivalency (AVE) does not measure the value of PR and communications, is perhaps the starting point. While AVEs have never made that much sense, arguably in a past in which almost all communication was through mainstream media, it wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
One of the main reasons that AVEs are even less meaningful today is that advertising is having an ever-diminishing impact, while effective communication through social channels is having a greater impact. Effective PR and communication is about engagement, not message dissemination; these are completely different domains.
It is by now blindingly obvious that social media can and should be measured. The issue now is being able to integrate the measurement of social media with that of other channels. Almost every effective campaign spans multiple channels, and there must be ways to bring these together in assessing value.
The new principles point to “organizational performance”, which is a definite improvement on “business results”. I would argue that the impact could potentially be even beyond that, in shaping the organization itself.
Of course the principles only provide a high-level framework. There are still many challenges in establishing specific, meaningful measurement structures within these principles. Over the next few years the focus should be on building another layer of consensus, or at least constructive debate, about the mechanisms for measurement.
The framework is in place. The opportunity now is to bring this to life in consistent measures that clients recognize and value.
Collaboration and activation: the nub of the merger of physical and digital retail
By Ross DawsonLast week I visited Melbourne Spring Fashion Week as a guest of IBM and the City of Melbourne.
City of Melbourne’s over-arching vision for the annual Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is to position Melbourne as Australia’s premier fashion destination, and have a real economic impact by driving increased sales for retailers in the city.
In partnering with IBM for the second year the intention was to extend the impact of the event beyond the week and to drive ticket sales and in turn sales by tapping the social currency of influencers.
Melbourne Spring Fashion Week is unusual in fashion shows in that everything on the runways can be bought at stores in the city. This contrasts to the traditional role of fashion shows as breaking new fashion, which may not be available for many months after it is launched.
Melbourne Spring Fashion Week used IBM Social Media Analytics on Twitter and Instagram to uncover the top 50 relevant fashion influencers, used Watson Personality Insights to work out how best to approach them, and invited them to be MSFW “insiders”, asking them what content would be most useful to them.
Ticket sales have been considerably higher than last year, with 4 of the events sold out.
The initiative is particularly interesting in showing how social analytics and engagement can help drive shoppers into shopping centers and physical stores.
While individual stores can do a great deal to merge their digital, social and physical engagement, the real power comes in bringing people to a shopping center or area, or even an entire city center.
All shopping is becoming social. Retail strategies for merging physical and digital are best envisaged and implemented on a large scale, tapping collaboration and activating buyers.
Image credit: Eva Rinaldi
6 key insights into the flow of innovation: Creating value in an open world
By Vanessa CartwrightEmbedding innovation into business structures is widely seen as vital for the future success of organizations. Innovation is enabling an extraordinary pace of change in the whole structure of who we are, how business works, and how society functions. “Innovation has become a flow, and must be a flow,” observes leading futurist Ross Dawson.
By learning about the flow of innovation, organizations can turn the realization that we are living in a world of innovation into a positive impetus for change. Here are six key insights into the flow of innovation, drawn from a keynote speech that Dawson gave at the 2015 APIdays Sydney conference.
1. Networks are at the heart of everything
“In a world in which we are moving towards a truly fluid economy, driven partly by powerful twin technological and social trends towards openness, networks are at the heart of everything,” Dawson says. In his book Living Networks, the futurist notes that we have shifted to a society where “value is created by the network, not by the organization”. Rich connectivity makes networks more pervasive, and it is in this connectivity that innovation becomes a flow.
The present decade is full of exciting possibilities because the networks in which we are participating are “coming to life”, Dawson says, and mimicking the workings of our biological networks. What conditions are allowing networks to come to life? Our ability to “enable the connection, enable the flow, enable the innovation, enable that diversity of things coming together”, the futurist observes.
2. Connections are most valuable when they are diverse
The value of diversity is becoming increasingly evident in today’s world. Diversity is key because innovation is all about bringing together different directions and perspectives that have not been connected before. The 1993 Nobel Prize Winner for Chemistry, Kary Mullis, pointed out the value of innovation by recombination, stating, “I put together elements that were already there, but that’s what inventors always do. You can’t make up new elements, usually. The new element, if any, was the combination, the way they were used.” The moral of the story: a team with a broader range of experiences is more likely to challenge conventional wisdom and appreciate the innovation potential of new developments.
3. Innovation with the most important impact occurs at the levels of the organization and the business model
Dawson distinguishes five main domains in which business innovation can be applied: the product or service, marketing, processes, the organization, and the business model. While innovating at each level is required, higher-order innovation is more likely to be repeated and to reap the biggest returns. This is partly because traditional, inflexible organizational structures depend on habits that reinforce the existing business model, as Rita Gunther McGrath observes in Harvard Business Review. Therefore, many organizations need to revise their structures and business models if they want to keep pace with change and reinforce innovation.
4. External networks should mirror internal networks
5. Open data creates value
Business is being shaped by a fundamental, ongoing trend towards openness. This trend is derived from a virtuous cycle where social attitudes shape technology, which in turn shapes social attitudes. Dawson explains that today’s leaders must manage three layers of information inside organizations: proprietary data, information shared with trusted partners, and information thrown open to the world. “There are massive risks to not taking action, not exposing information,” he warns. Organizations who cannot decide what information should be available and what should not are being left behind.
6. Value creation occurs most beyond the organization, across ecosystems
One of the most important messages from Dawson’s APIdays keynote was that “Organizations cannot stand alone. They must be able to create value across systems.” The notion of the business “ecosystem” is signalling a change in strategy: a movement from value creation inside the organization to value creation across a broader space. To succeed in this transition, leaders must realize that they cannot capture all the value for themselves, or their organizations will erode. This is because today’s networks are created not only for the creators, but also for the broader community. The only organizations that will fully develop the flow of innovation will be those that allow sufficient value creation for other participants.
Image sources: Micah Elizabeth Scott and Rosmarie Voegtli
The Top 10 Global PR Agencies: Where Are They Now and Where Could They Be Headed
By Aaron HeinrichThe economic fortunes of public relations agencies are typically subjected to the economic swings of national and global economies. So one would think that the last several years that have marked an uptick from the downturn of the Great Recession would have most, if not all, of the large global agencies doing quite well economically. But a look at the revenue numbers of the top 10 global PR firms indicates otherwise.
In the chart below, you’ll see the billings for these firms over the four-year period from mid-2010 to mid-2014. Brunswick and Edelman are independent, but the rest are owned by the big global media holding companies. Weber Shandwick and Golin are owned by Interpublic; Ketchum and Fleishman Hillard belong to Omnicom; Burson, Hill & Knowlton and Ogilvy are with WPP; and MSL Group is owned by Publicis. The combined billings of these top 10 global agencies is $4.78 billion — a pretty significant number considering it’s generated by just ten firms. But dig deeper and the numbers become more telling.
Here are some specific data points worth noting:
What’s interesting about this information is what it reveals about the media holding companies relative to the PR agencies they own. While they all own multiple agencies engaged in everything from PR to advertising to digital, their ability to run growing global PR firms could be seen as questionable – particularly WPP. Consider that the three agencies on the list owned by them have been experiencing extended periods of mostly stagnant growth, while other agencies owned by the other holding companies (MSL Group excluded) have been able to grow or hold their own with the economic upturn. Edelman is the outlier, not only in its growth but in its ability to grow substantially more than any single or even group of agencies other than Weber Shandwick.
But WPP is the largest media holding company in the world and the others aren’t far behind. So what’s going on here?
To get a better sense of how these companies perform economically, let’s take a look at how their stock price did during a similar period. In this case August 23, 2010 to June 30, 2014
Most of these organizations were doubling their share valuation at a time when their PR agencies were experiencing modest to stagnant growth or declining. If their stock growth was tied to PR earnings alone, most of these would have been listed as DO NOT BUY or SELL.
The combination of revenue and share price points to a number of things:
What will be interesting is to look at the numbers four to five years from now and see if these trends have continued. More than likely one or more of these agencies will be subsumed into another to cut costs, reduce redundancy and make the parent entity more relevant. There are a number of other factors at work that could impact this scenario, but given that media holding companies are publicly traded, shareholder expectations may eventually drive the future of the agencies that can’t make their way up the revenue chart.
From Key Messages to Keywords: PR needs to get with the program
By Gareth LlewellynMany PR people still begin their strategy design with “what is our key message?” However, any good social media or SEO strategy begins with a consideration of what the common keywords are. Then you build a hierarchy of keywords and wrap the content strategy around that. The former approach fundamentally ignores what drives modern communications. Not only do most senior PR professionals ignore that reality, but many communications courses are taught by those who have not yet grasped this fact. As digital consultants fill the influence vacuum, are PR professionals in danger of obsolescence?
The Origins of Social Media
Before all the hysteria and glamour around Facebook and Twitter, it’s hard to remember that the roots of social media are in blogging, rather than Mark Zuckerberg’s imagination. If you think carefully about it, the very model of modern social media was defined by blogging. The post-comment-thread hierarchy is what has governed the way Facebook posts have been designed. Equally Twitter is basically a glorified, more user-friendly, RSS reader. Many would argue that despite the 2006 launch of Facebook, social media is already 15 to 20 years old.
Yet still the PR industry has struggled to respond to social media, despite the fact that the skill set of the typical PR professional is *perfectly* suited to the medium. Content production, audience analysis, influencer relations: the daily duties of a PR professional transpose perfectly into this new era. However, jealously guarding their network of journalist relationships and gate-keeper role, some PR people have attempted to either deny or subjugate social media.
The Rule of Word
When seeking to build greater influence, the most powerful tool is not even social media. It is SEO. Words have become the cogs that drive the Internet. Everything that happens on the internet begins with a search. How you rank in that search is fundamental to success. You can engineer that to some extent with advertising, and with web design and build. But the best way to do so is to be relevant to the machine. If Google thinks you are a consistent and regular purveyor of quality, well visited (and well shared) content on a given topic, you will rank well. This is today’s raw PR truth. Not which newspaper you are in. The advent of the paywall – and along with it the collapse of advertising budgets – has hammered the last nail into the newspaper’s coffin from the Internet’s point of view. Most successful media sites today owe more to blogs than to the newspaper model – you only have to look at BuzzFeed to understand this.
Despite the success of podcasting and Pinterest and YouTube, the written word is still the most significant publicity button to press. Consistent, unique and appreciated writing – however it is done – is what will drive most profile visits, web site traffic and – ultimately – outcomes (whatever they need to be). A video without tags and a good title is also a wasted effort. Google can’t watch videos!
Is Medium the Medium?
Blogger and WordPress were once powerful platforms. Everyone knows that Google is lazy and tends to tap the “usual suspects” for clues before it digs deeper. But as SEO as a discipline began to evolve, increasingly people began to embed blogging into their own website. Customized blogging templates are great for carefully managing your corporate look and the user experience. But in this departure there’s one aspect we’ve forgotten: Google’s sloth!
For video, the ultimate model established itself from the outset – the common platform. First YouTube and then Vimeo provided a simple upload interface and provides easy-to-use HTML code with which you could host videos on your website. But you still benefit from the “if you liked this, then you’ll like this” community reference engine. SlideShare did this well for slide decks too. But the written word has been missing a common platform for a long time, since WordPress began to decline as a destination.
Is Medium going to be the YouTube of the written word? Already many brands have ported their blogging efforts to Medium as an alternative platform to their own blogging site – take BMW or Burberry for instance. The interface is beautiful, it is incredibly easy to use and now that you can embed the post into your own site, you benefit from the SEO and social engines, as well as Medium’s own reference engine and community dynamic. Now you can use Medium as a hosting platform and benefit from the referential power – but embed the post directly into your site in the same way you do with YouTube.
Word Up!
Cleverly crafted key messages mean nothing anymore, Google only reads the distinct words, with only a passing appreciation of their context. The message itself is irrelevant because the Internet is arranged on topic clusters and communities that are found on single tag searches. Your social profile and web presence provides the extra context for those willing to look.
How you work the medium is what matters, not how carefully you draft your message sheet. Too many PR people are coaching for a dying medium. Consistency of message “in the media” is a microcosm of the wider game. How you play out on the Internet is what counts, and that depends on how many times your content hits the same keyword note. Google rankings, not coverage reports, are today’s PR battleground and scoreboard.
SWITCH festival shows the power and potential of cross-industry collaboration
By Ross DawsonI first met Mark Zawacki when I did the opening keynote at the ANZA Technology Conference in Silicon Valley in 2004, and Mark was also a speaker at the event. Mark has since founded the highly-regarded corporate accelerator 650Labs, which helps leading global corporates to drive innovation.
More recently I have met Catherine Stace, CEO of Cure Brain Cancer Foundation, who has brought inspiring and truly disruptive approaches to medical research philanthropy, by focusing on making research far more collaborative and effective rather than simply funding antiquated research models.
It is no surprise that collaboration between Mark and Catherine has created something exceptional: SWITCH Festival, to be held in Sydney 27-29 August.
Read more →
The virtual agent of the future: Real-time photo-realistic human faces that bridge the human/ machine divide
By Ross DawsonI recently gave a series of opening keynotes on The Future of Customer Experience as part of a roadshow for omnichannel customer experience platform provider Genesys, which is running a global series of events for their lead customers, which includes organizations such as News Limited, Vodafone, Western Union, and the Australian Taxation Office.
The central theme of my keynotes was the boundaries and relationship between humans and machines in customer experience.
Today, extraordinary insights from data and analytics enable us to address individual’s unique preferences to an unprecedented degree.
Yet the emotion, empathy and engagement of humans cannot be replaced – we all seek personal connection and a real sense of caring.
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Launch of Creating the Future of PR – shaping an exceptional future for the industry
By Ross DawsonAdvanced Human Technologies Group has just launched Creating the Future of PR, a publication that looks at how the Public Relations industry can create an exceptional future for itself and its clients in a fast-changing world.
In my article Join Us in Creating the Future of PR I frame the context for the launch of the publication:
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Join Us in Creating the Future of PR!
By Ross DawsonThe fundamental capabilities of PR professionals are more relevant than ever in our intensely networked world. Arguably, PR should be at the center of the marketing universe, since it is better able than any other discipline to deal with a world driven by relationships, fueled by connectivity, social, mobile, and power shifting to the individual.
The big question is: will the PR industry seize the immense opportunity before it?
For the last decade I and my companies have been extensively involved in the PR industry, helping PR agencies anticipate and respond to changes in the world of media, and supporting client projects with compelling insights on the future.
During this time of extraordinary change in media and marketing I have observed dramatic shifts in the PR industry, yet they have not always matched the pace of external change.
PR professionals as masters of the universe?
Back in 2006 I wrote an article Six Facets of the Future of PR, which concluded:
This is just as true today as it was then.
We believe that current social, technological, and business trends mean that the core capabilities of the PR industry are more relevant than ever, and can be applied to generate exceptional value. However the industry needs to evolve and adapt dramatically to seize that opportunity.
Why we are launching Creating the Future of PR
We are launching Creating the Future of PR to support the PR industry in this transition to a even more prosperous future.
We will bring perspectives from industry leaders on what professionals, firms, and the industry can do to build success.
We will also bring specific insights and research to bear on current issues such as software tools, influencer outreach, branded content, social engagement, and other emerging topics.
Global perspectives
In particular we are keen to take a global perspective, and examine differences in the state of PR and how it is evolving in different regions around the world. PR is a substantially different industry in growing markets such as South America and the Middle East that it is in established markets, and the diversity and dynamism of Asia is bringing entirely new opportunities.
Please let us know if you would like to contribute regional perspectives on the future of PR.
Please join us in helping create an exceptional future for PR!
We have just launched the publication, and will build it over time.
We will share insights and resources that will be useful to the PR industry, and would love to get insights from those who are in the frontlines creating the future of PR. Please get in touch If you would like to contribute your perspectives or have suggestions on what we should be covering.
To really make this valuable to the industry we need to support a conversation. We have set up a Creating the Future of PR Facebook Group; please join your peers there in discussing how we can make the most of the opportunities for the industry. We may establish other community platforms, let us know if there are ones that you would prefer.
We will convene events to bring together those who are creating the future of PR, starting with a Creating the Future of PR Forum in Sydney in October (details coming soon), and events in other major cities globally forthcoming. Please get in touch if you’re interested in participating or collaborating in any future of PR events.
So welcome to Creating the Future of PR, we will do what we can to support your leadership in building a spectacular future for the industry!
How do you become a futurist? 10 key elements of a career thinking about the future
By Vanessa CartwrightMany people are curious about the steps that futurists take to build a name for themselves in the futures industry. As a result, futures thinkers are often asked, “How do you become a futurist?” While there is no single career path that all futurists follow, here are several common threads that connect the learning and career history of leading futurists.
Backgrounds in diverse domains
What is striking about the backgrounds of prominent futurists is their individual and collective diversity. The education, industries, and geographical locations of today’s futurists are wide-ranging and sometimes surprising.
Exposure to variety in study, work and society
From film to writing to technology and more, futures thinkers across the globe engage with manifold domains. Some eventual futurists, including leading futurist Ross Dawson, intend to develop a well-rounded career history before adopting the futurist label. Dawson writes in a blog post, “When people ask me what is my background that prepared me for being a futurist, my response is ‘varied’. I worked across six distinct careers in several countries before engaging in my current path.”
Other futurists start their careers without necessarily intending to become futurists. Instead, they gain exposure to a variety of disciplines and gradually discover that being a futurist would be an interesting career suited to their strengths.
Mastering systems thinking
For those who aspire to become futurists, it is important to develop a deep understanding of systems thinking. In the experience of futurists from Genevieve Bell to Amy Webb to Rebecca Costa, travelling and living in diverse countries and cultures can help to form a systemic worldview. Costa attributes her ability to see the “big picture” to her cross-cultural upbringing and education in Japan, Laos and the United States.
Building capability and credibility
Futurists sometimes face skepticism from members of the public who misunderstand the real role of a futurist, thinking, for example, that futurists are like astrologists! Consequently, for people who decide to build a name for themselves as futurists, credibility is key. Futurists also need to be credible so that the people they work with are engaged and receptive.
Education and self-education
One way to gain credibility is to complete a tertiary futures studies program. The Acceleration Studies Foundation provides a helpful list of futures studies courses from around the world. For futurist Maree Conway, studying the Masters of Strategic Foresight course at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, was a life-changing experience. Conway reflects on her website that “The concept of responsibility for future generations and being a good ancestor struck a real chord with me, and by the end of the two years of the course, I had decided that I wanted to work in the futures field.”
While study can help to boost credibility and define one’s career direction, a large part of the capabilities of a futurist is often self-taught. The path of self-education can involve building experience in one or more careers, seeking out professional development, and maximizing opportunities for mentoring and networking.
Career paths
Although increasing numbers of futurists are studying and teaching futures programs, the game changer for most futurists is their career development. Major fields that futurists emerge from include science and technology, marketing and trends, social studies, anthropology, and the environment and sustainability. Within these disciplines, there are three main pathways that futurists tend to follow:
1) working at a consulting firm
2) corporate roles as in-house consultants or futurists, and
3) founding their own consultancies or strategic foresight businesses.
Across all of these pathways, expertise in strategy and planning is crucial.
Publishing
Several professionals have donned the “futurist” label after the publication of future-thinking articles or books that have become widely known and appreciated. For Ross Dawson, the “futurist” breakthrough came after the publication of his book, Living Networks, in 2002, where he outlined the upcoming explosion of social networks. Another example is futurist John Naisbitt, whose 1982 book Megatrends inspired millions of readers, including futurist David Houle.
Social networking
Most futurists today harness the power of social media to improve public recognition of their work as a futurist or as a futurist by another name, such as a foresight practitioner or futurologist. Prominent futurists usually have thousands of followers on Twitter, as well as using Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+ and other social networks for maximum effect, by sharing some of the fascinating and useful insights into the future they glean from their work.
Professional development
Professionals from a range of fields often develop their personal interest in the future by reading the latest literature on future trends, forecasting, organization and system change, science and technology, and other forward-thinking topics. They may also attend conferences and seminars about the future and join professional associations such as the World Future Society or the Association of Professional Futurists (APF). Candidates to join the APF must be recommended by a member and must meet two of the six selection criteria, which span employment as a consulting or organizational futurist, obtaining a postgraduate degree in futures studies, or demonstrating competence in teaching, writing or speaking on futures theory or methodology.
Mentoring and fostering connections
The process of learning about the future can be boosted by closely connecting with one or more professional futurists. Following them on social media is a starting point, but working for them or learning from them through direct mentoring can be a powerful asset. The benefits of mentoring for inspiration and know-how are vouched for by futurist danah boyd, who looks up to Genevieve Bell as a mentor in the technology space, and futurist Glen Hiemstra, who learnt from Ed Lindaman, an early member of the World Future Society.
The power of media
One way to solidify your education and expertise in particular fields is to develop a media presence. Most prominent futurists have their own websites that include links to their recent mentions in newspapers and their interviews on television or radio. If major media channels recognize your work and describe you as a futurist, this strongly supports your positioning and your ability to create value.
Creating value as a futurist
Becoming a futurist is not simply about forging a career, making money or acquiring fame. Futurist Ross Dawson believes that futurists have an important purpose: to create value for clients and the world around them. To achieve this goal, futurists must encourage leadership at all levels; that is, they must inspire other people to help create brighter futures.
Image sources: dirkb86, bidorbuy, and Surian Soosay