To Appreciate Book Tittle “Thinking about the Future”

By: Admin

Nowadays, there were many pharases explain future map. Either in management, bussines or personal perspectives. One of the book is a book titled “Thinking about the Future“, a book co-edited by Social Technologies’ Andy Hines and futurist Peter Bishop.

This book explained as summary by Kyle Spector as bellow:

The best way to do this is to map the issue in a simple systems map–identifying the key stakeholders and driving forces influencing the issue, then exploring the relationships among them.

Mapping an issue in its systemic context is done at the very beginning of a strategic activity. The systems map lays out a framework for the activity. Also, new issues and stakeholders will likely emerge as the activity proceeds.

Key steps: Creating a systems map is straightforward, involving several steps. First, define the issue crisply. Once your issue is crisply defined, identify the forces, trends, and actors relevant to it. Then sort the prioritized forces and stakeholders according to their relationships to the issue and to one another. Lastly, check the systems map against a STEEP framework: social, technological, economic, environmental, and political forces, plus any additional categories of forces deemed relevant, e.g., educational trends. Run the issue through these categories to see if any influential forces or stakeholders were missed during the ideation.

A challenge in systems mapping is to get the level of complexity right. Once the system is mapped, the activity is on solid footing.

Benefits: A systems map is a tool for understanding the context of an activity. Placing the issue in context deepens understanding of it, and identifies ways the issue might be influenced and changed in the future by key forces or stakeholders.
Another benefit of systems maps is that they identify external factors that organizations might otherwise miss.

A systems map also provides a visual framework for the activity. If the activity has its own physical space, create a poster- or wall-sized systems map. Coates was engaged by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to explore emerging environmental issues.

This fact shows us that future map has been being a popular words to people.

There many interpretation about Future Map. When You surf on Wikipedia as the largest online encyclopedia, You will find mean about Future Map as bellow.

“…The Future Map is a methodology for building scenarios based on the collection of anticipated events.

The concept is based on the idea that a group of people who integrate the partial visions of its members into a common, shared, discussed, large enough, collection of anticipated events it can eventually reveal its own Shared Future.

Because the Future Map methodology is dynamic and implemented on a wiki -platform the Future projected by the group is constantly under revision. By process, the community learns how to adapt to future changes and increases its ability to face “unexpected events”, it improves what the author calls its future-readiness…”

These explanations are not different to the concept explained here.