Futures research: Did I meet its promises? Can it meet its promise?

The reader is first asked to go back with the author for a moment to 1963, the year in which Dr. Olaf Helmer and he were working on the first large-scale Delphi inquiry at Rand. If you had asked the author then, ‘What is the name of this field?’ he probably would have answered, ‘Futures research.’ But if you had also asked, ‘What do you think it will accomplish?’ he would have been less articulate. The author probably would have provided a list of half-formed ideas, most of these naive in retrospect but nevertheless indicative of the hope that thinking about the future would be seen as a responsible and necessary enterprise. Most of us tend to have selective memories of the past, but the author thinks that, if pressed, he might have said that this field should yield: (a) A new profession, not necessarily a scientic discipline, but at least a systematic social science with standards of excellence and means of accreting knowledge. (b) New tools for improved forecasting of future developments, not only in ‘hard’ domains such as technology and economics, but also in ‘soft’ areas such as social behavior. These tools would be used in decision making everywhere, particularly in business and government planning. (c) Greater understanding of the limits of knowledge about the future, and the creation of means for dealing with uncertainty. (d) A sense of awareness about the future; a recognition that our current actions or inactions help-directly or indirectly-shape the future world that will contain us all.