Christian Crews, April Koury, and Laura Schlehuber of Andspace Consulting visited the Houston Foresight program on August 25th to run an implications sessions with students. Christian is a program alum and hired on April and Laura as interns. The students who participated were program “veterans” Omar Sahi, Kurt Callaway, Fatema Tuz Zorah; new students jason Crabtree, and Rachel young; Nathaniel Hernandez who is doing the Foresight graduate certificate; and retailing major Paola Pena who is taking a couple of foresight classes this fall.
Christian introduced himself and briefly described his “futurist journey.” He introduced the project they are doing for the Institute of Food Technology project and the methodology they are using. They are using the futures wheels to brainstorm/forecast around some trends. He noted the value of this session is getting fresh views to help the client get outside their “official future.”
He briefed several trends they identified through their research, though he noted that they are considered “weak signals” from the viewpoint of the client, who are likely less aware of them than futurists might be. He also talked about the Verge framework that takes a more human centric view of trends.
The group then split in half to generate the implications of the trends for the next hour-plus. The approach used the futures wheels to generation 3 orders of implications along a time scale
- The 1st order changes were roughly one to three years out
- The 2nd order changes were roughly four to seven years out
- The 3rd order changes were 7 years or further out
It was a terrific blend of real experience and getting some tips and pointers from Christian, one of the great practitioners in the foresight field today, ably assisted by April and Laura! Andy Hines
