Better Scanning and Beyond: Old Ideas and New

My comments on national planning, American style, were prepared before attending the RAHS symposium. Strictly by coincidence, the lead essay in the excellent conference volume focused on this very point: “Different Lenses on the Future: U.S. and Singapore's Approaches to Strategic Planning” by Justin Zorn of Oxford University, in Decisions in a Complex World: Building Foresight Capabilities (Singapore National Security Coordination Secretariat, March 2010, 254 pages). Zorn, a former assistant to Leon Furth (national security advisor to Al Gore) writes at length about the “U.S. aversion to planning” and “what the U.S. can learn from Singapore.”.

Marien Michael , Essential Reading for the Future of Education (Syracuse NY: Educational Policy Research Center, 1970, 56 pages). Expanded to Alternative Futures for Learning: An Annotated Bibliography (EPRC, 1971, 223 pages).

Marien Michael , Societal Directions and Alternatives: A Critical Guide to the Literature (LaFayette NY: Information for Policy Design, 1976, 400 pages). Of special interest are the nine indexes, including Chronological Book Title Index, Index of 81 Titles for Our Present Society, Index of 63 Evolutionary Stage Theories, and Index of 206 Titles for Alternative Societies (none of which included “Sustainable Society,” now the most widely preferred and cited vision).

Gross Bertram M. , (ed.), A Great Society? (NY: Basic Books, 1968, 362 pages). Essays from the Arthur F. Bentley lecture series at Syracuse University, by Daniel Bell, Kenneth Boulding, Peter F. Drucker, Herbert Marcuse, Hans Morgenthau, Alvin Toffler, etc. I had the distinct honor of being the very junior co-author to Gross of the introductory overview chapter, responding to questions provided by President Lyndon B. Johnson—a still unique White House-academic dialogue.

Pirages Dennis , The Sustainable Society (NY: Praeger, 1977). This is probably the earliest reference to “sustainable society” in a book title (also see fn. #11). A book-length study is badly needed to explore the history of “sustainable society” thinking, and the different views of what it is and how to achieve it, e.g. Plan B 4.0 by Lester R. Brown (W. W. Norton, 2009), reviewed at length in World Future Review 1 no. 5 (October-November 2009): 53–56, followed by an interview with Brown (pp. 57–62). As for descriptions of our present society/age/era, Futures editor Ziauddin Sardar provides an apt perspective in “Welcome to Postnormal Times” (Futures 42 no. 5, June 2010, 435–444), in which our “period of transition” is characterized by three C's: Complexity, Chaos, and Contradictions—forces that lead to uncertainty and “a triple whammy of ignorance,” in turn requiring “radically new ways of thinking.” The GFB.org Web site, subsequently described here, may be one such new way to cope with our times.

Halal William E. Marien Michael , “Global Mega-crisis Survey: Four Scenarios on a Pessimism/Optimism Axis,” World Future Review 1 no. 5 (October-November 2009): 48–52. Halal's assessment that “the world is entering an advanced stage of evolution” is on pages 48–49. He assigns a 60% probability to our “Muddling Up” scenario, and a 5% probability to the idealized “Rise to Maturity” scenario. My numbers for these two upbeat scenarios were 20% and less than 1%, and somewhat less today due to the BP oil spill catastrophe.

Marien Michael , “Scanning: An Imperfect Activity in an Era of Fragmentation and Uncertainty,” Futures Research Quarterly 7 no. 3 (Fall 1991): 82–90. Notes a long-term trend to ever greater fragmentation, and points to 12 choices that we make as to what we will or will not look at in our effort to understand the world, e.g. books vs. periodicals, present vs. past, print vs. film, English vs. non-English.

Wurman Richard Saul , Information Architects. (NY: Graphis, 1996). Such architects “take complex information and convey it to a target audience as simply as possible.” Also see Robert Jacobson (ed.), Information Design (MIT Press, 1999, 357 pages), with a foreword by Wurman.

Lynd Robert S. , Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in American Culture (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1939).

Hamilton Clive , Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (London and Washington: Earthscan, May 2010, 286 pges). Of particular interest is the report of a meeting of some 100 climate scientists at Oxford University in September 2009, on the implications of a late twenty-first century world in which global temperature has risen beyond 4°C. Just a few years ago, this scenario was considered extreme; now it is seen by the experts as “most likely.”.

Marien Michael , “Infoglut and Competing Problems: Key Barriers Suggesting a New Strategy for Sustainability,” in Building Sustainable Societies: A Blueprint for a Post-Industrial World (Armonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1996) 299–311, ed. Dennis Pirages. Introduces an information-based modification of Paul Ehrlich's I = P × A × T formula (environmental Impact = Population × Affluence × Technology); the I = P × O × T formula suggests Infoglut = Population × Occupation × Technology.

Gross Bertram M. , “Operation BASIC: The Retrieval of Wasted Knowledge,” The Journal of Communication 12 no. 2 (June 1962): 67–83. A vision of “new institutions for the organization of knowledge,” involving Bibliographies, Abstracts, Surveys, Indexes, and Copies. Only “Copies” has been solved.

de Jouvenel Bertrand , The Art of Conjecture (NY: Basic Books, 1967, 307 pages). Especially see the concluding chapter on “The Surmising Forum,” pp. 275–296.

Wells H. G. , World Brain (Freeport NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1938). Various essays and lectures on knowledge organization.

Marien Michael , “The Future of Human Benefit Knowledge: Notes on a World Brain for the 21st Century” in Knowledge Futures (Special Issue), Futures: The Journal of Policy, Planning, and Futures Studies 39 no. 8 (October 2007): 955–962, ed. Walter Truett Anderson. Paper presented at the 2005 meeting of The World Academy of Art and Science in Zagreb.

Yew Lee Kuan , From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000. Foreword by Kissinger Henry A. (NY: HarperCollins, 2000, 729 pages). (See page 106.).

Postman Neil , Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (NY: Viking, 1985).

Lewin Tamar , “If Your Children Are Awake, Then They're Probably Online,” The New York Times (20 January 2010): page 1. Also see John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (Basic Books, revised edition, July 2010, 384 pages, www.borndigitalbook.com), a report from the Harvard Digital Natives Project.

Halal William E. , Technology's Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society. (NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 183 pages).

Nye Joseph S. Jr. , Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (NY: Public Affairs, 2004). Soft power is defined as the ability to get what is wanted through attraction rather than coercion.

Boyer Ernest L. , Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (Special Report) (Princeton NY: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1990). Explores four overlapping functions of scholarship: discovery, teaching, application, and integration. Very important.

Marien Michael , Many Methods and Mentors: Thinking About Change and Shaping Futures (Special Issue), Future Survey Mini-Guide #4, August 2008 (available from World Future Society; www.wfs.org). A 40-page guide to 98 items arranged in a “5 P's and a Q” format: Probable futures, Possible futures, Preferable futures, Present trends, Panoramic views, and constant Questioning.

A hopeful note is struck by Tow Bruce L. David A. Gilliam of the Synthesis Institute in San Francisco (www.synovationsolutions.com) who describe the various types of synthesis in many professions and hope that synthesis will become a generally recognized discipline in 15–25 years. See “Synthesis: An Interdisciplinary Discipline,” The Futurist 43 no. 3 (May-June 2009): 43–47. Given scarce financial resources in higher education, hostility to “non-rigorous” horizontal thinking, and the lack of qualified candidates, this worthy goal may be more arduous than imagined.

St. Vincent Millay Edna , Huntsman, What Quarry? (NY: Harper & Brothers, 1939), page 92. Cited in “Social Goals and Indicators for American Society,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (May 1967): 2, ed. Bertram M. Gross.