Association of Professional Futurists

The Association of Professional Futurists (APF) is a global community of futurists advancing professional foresight. It was founded in 2002 to validate the competencies of emerging futurists, and to enhance their professional excellence.[1] As analysts, speakers, managers or consultants, APF's credentialed members cultivate strategic foresight for their organizations and clients. APF represents the professional side of the futures movement, while groups such as the World Futures Studies Federation, the World Future Society or The Millennium Project, represent its academic, popular, and activists expressions, respectively.

Association of
Professional Futurists
APF logo since 2015
AbbreviationAPF
Motto"advancing professional foresight"
Formation2002 (2002)
TypeAssociation
Legal statusNonprofit 501(c)(6)
HeadquartersWashington, DC, USA
Region
Worldwide
Membership
500 members, 40 countries
Chair
Prof. Shermon Cruz
12 directors, 4 continents
Main organ
Compass
Websitewww.apf.org

History

APF emerged as a network of practicing futurists who were utilizing futurology methods.[2] As the field approached the year 2000, it began to renew old calls[3] and issue new ones [4][5] to raise its internal standards in regards to ethics, competencies, and quality of work. While few felt that futurists--an occupational interest group at best--might become a full-fledged recognized profession via certification,[6] the nine members of APF's founding board, including Peter Bishop, Jennifer Jarratt, Andy Hines, and Herb Rubenstein felt that foresight professionals should lead the global discussion about professional futures practice, encourage the use of futures and foresight in strategic decision making, and offer services, resources and training for foresight professionals to advance their skills and knowledge.

Membership

The Association of Professional Futurists has 500 individual members from 40 countries, including authors and speakers, such as Clem Bezold, Sohail Inayatullah, Thomas Frey, Alexandra Levit, Richard Slaughter, and Amy Webb. Beyond individuals, it has renowned organizational members, such as Arup Foresight, the Foresight Alliance, the Institute for the Future-Palo Alto, Institute for Futures Research-Stellenbosch, Kantar Foresight, Kairos Futures, Kedge, Leading Futurists LLC, OCAD University, SAMI Consulting, Shaping Tomorrow, and Tamkang University.

Instead of certifying members through coursework,[7] professional futurists chose a pathway to credential its members, based on a peer-review assessment of their competencies. APF Professional Membership is conferred following a portfolio review to those who can, at the minimum, document performance in two of seven professional standards: consulting, organizational function, postgraduate degree, certificate program, speaking, teaching or writing. Full Members may use the appellation of APF after their name. Besides its Full Member program, APF also offers Provisional, Associate, and Student Memberships.

Institutions or individuals that are looking for APF help to expand their capacity to anticipate and influence the future, may search APF's Find a Futurist membership directory.

Programs & Publications

APF Annual gatherings have been a key activity since its founding. The first gathering was an "Applied Futures Summit" in Seattle in April 2002, at which founders agreed to establish the Association. The second gathering was in Austin, TX, focused on "The Future of Futures," employing a scenario planning approach to explore the next decade of the field.[8] Each subsequent gathering has focused on a particular topic, such as Design Thinking in Pasadena, CA, or the Future of Virtual Reality in Las Vegas, NV, Global Health in Seattle, WA, Blockchain Futures in Brisbane, Australia, or Resurgent City in Pittsburgh, PA.

APF hosts shorter "Pro Dev" workshops preceding larger conferences, in addition to annual gatherings, such as its September 2019 workshop in Mexico City on the "Praxis of Professional Futurists." As a digital learning platform, APF members also conduct various events online, ranging from Twitterchats, to webinars, to day-long learning festivals that address topics such as the future of museums, the future of machine intelligence, diverse futures, and design thinking. In 2020, APF began to host monthly member-only "Foresight Friday" webinars to showcase outstanding work by its professional members.

APF's flagship publication for members is its Compass newsletter, published quarterly since 2003. The Compass features recaps of APF events, articles on future trends, methodology salons, book reviews, plus member news and promotions. Non-members may view themed or conference editions.

Professionalism

Helping raise professionalism of futurists has been a perennial pursuit of the APF. In 2016, after three appointed studies over nine years, APF released a Foresight Competency Model, a product of 23 members from 4 continents that mapped the personal, academic, workplace, and technical competencies that futurists draw upon to support their work as consulting, organizational or academic futurists.[9]

The Foresight Competency Model addresses the basic question of what one ought to be capable of doing as a professional futurist. At the center of the model is a circle of six foresight competencies: Framing, Scanning, Futuring, Designing, Visioning, and Adapting.

Six Foresight Competencies
PracticeDescription
FramingDefining the focal issue and current conditions
ScanningExploring signals of change and cross-impacts
FuturingIdentifying a baseline and alternative futures
VisioningDeveloping and committing to a preferred future
DesigningDeveloping prototypes and artifacts to achieve goals
AdaptingGenerating strategies for alternative futures

The Foresight Competency Model[10] also defined sector competencies for different types of foresight professionals, such as consulting or organizational futurists, at the entry, associate, and senior career level. The origins of the Foresight Competency Model arose from previous taxonomies of futures research methods that offered guidelines for carrying out successful strategic foresight,[11][12] developed over four decades.[13][14]

Futurist Recognition

APF's members annually select and recognize significant futures works. The first awards were announced in 2008. The ten 'most significant futures works' in 2008 included Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View, Wendell Bell's Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era, Bertrand de Jouvenel's L'Art de la Conjecture (The Art of Conjecture), and Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines. Each year's APF award winners are listed at Futures studies#Books.

APF also has an annual student recognition program in which universities offering undergraduate, Masters and/or PhDs in foresight and futures studies can submit up to three student works that the instructor(s) considers being of exceptional quality in terms of originality, content, and contribution to the field. Annual APF student recognition award winners are posted online.

As is the intention of many associations, APF has sought to improve the image and performance of the field. APF's credentialed members have written for and are cited in various journals and magazines such as Wired, Fast Company, Futures, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Foresight, World Futures Review, The Futurist Journal, Futures & Foresight Science, and the Journal for Futures Studies.

APF is led by an international board of 12 futurists from five continents along with key volunteers. It is incorporated in the State of Delaware and is formed as a 501(c)(6) business league, with its headquarters in Washington, DC. It is considered exempt by the IRS as it is not organized for profit. APF's Twitter feed is @profuturists

See also

References
  1. Glasner, Joanna. The Future Needs Futurists, Wired, October 2005
  2. Hines, Andy (2004). "The History and Development of the Association of Professional Futurists," The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies: Professional Edition CD-ROM. Foresight International. ISBN 0-9757354-0-3
  3. Henshel, Richard. (1981). "Evolution of controversial fields: Lessons from the past for futures." Futures, 13(5), 401-412, https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(81)90125-7.
  4. Bell, Wendell. (1993). "Professional ethics for futurists: Preliminaries and proposals." Futures Research Quarterly, 9(1), 5-18.
  5. Slaughter, Richard. (1999). "Professional standards in futures work," Futures, 31(8), 835-851. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0016-3287(99)00039-7
  6. Coates, Joseph. (2001). "Certifying futurists." Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 66(2-3), 313-321.
  7. Gary, Jay; Heiko von der Gracht. (2015). "The future of foresight professionals: Results from a global Delphi study." Futures, 71, 132-145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2015.03.005
  8. Hines, Andy. (2003) "The Futures of Futures: A Scenario Salon," Foresight, 5(4), 28-35. https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680310494735
  9. Hines, Andy; Gary, Jay; Daheim, Cornelia; and Luke van der Lann (2017). Building foresight capacity: Toward a Foresight Competency Model. World Futures Review, 9(3), 123-141.
  10. Foresight Competency Model 1.1, August 2016, https://www.apf.org/resource/resmgr/documents/apf-foresight-competency-mod.pdf
  11. Bishop, Peter & Hines, Andy (2012). "Teaching about the future." New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-0230363496
  12. Hines, Andy & Peter Bishop. (2015). "Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for strategic foresight." Hinesight, 2nd edition. ISBN 978-0996773409
  13. Fowles, Jib (1978). Handbook of futures research. Westport, CT: Greenwood. ISBN 0837198852
  14. Markley, Oliver (1983). Preparing for the professional futures field: Observations from the UHCLC futures program. Futures, 15(1), 47-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/0016-3287(83)90072-1
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