I am very pleased to have nominated “Think Like a Futurist” by Cecily Sommers for an APF Most Significant Futures Work Award for 2014 in the Category of “Methods and Practice.” You may know Cecily as a futurist and member or APF or from her earlier incarnation as the driving force behind the very successful PUSH movement and conference. We’re fortunate she has turned her attention to capturing lessons learned from working in the field, as well as sharing how she does it.
Cecily bridges the worlds of foresight and innovation in this immensely handy book published by Jossey-Bass in 2012. This is a great book to hand to clients before an engagement, as it lays out foresight concepts and tools in a way that the non-futurist can readily grasp. It is a great example of translating foresight work to reach a general audience. The book is organized around a series of frameworks and models that are designed for memorability.
Her work emphasizes tying the application of foresight to concerns of great value to clients. Cecily emphasizes the use of foresight for solving problems — relating to the future but tied back to the present. The link between foresight and innovation is particularly promising and the case is well made for it here. She provides a handy, readable account that provides a useful framework for doing foresight work as well as a good example of how to write for a general audience. In addition, the work is chock full of insights that any professional futurist practitioner should find themselves jotting down as a “keepers.”
The APF MSFW program, which annually reviews and recognized outstanding foresight work, both to recognize authors as well as promote examples of outstanding foresight work. Andy Hines
