Facing Our Futures: How Foresight, Futures Design and Strategy Creates Prosperity and Growth

This dry debut from Badminton, a business consultant and “Chief Futurist” at Futurist.com, offers advice on how to “open our eyes and minds to the possibilities for many futures and new ways of operating in the world... to address the biggest challenges we face.” He details his 10-step “Positive-Dystopia Framework,” which aims to help organizations think through possible challenges by deciding what principles matter to them and evaluating how to respond to burgeoning social or economic trends, but the convoluted explanation of this approach befuddles; for example, it’s unclear how step seven’s instruction to formulate “what if” statements differs from the first step of coming up with hypotheses to contemplate. Elsewhere, Badminton outlines strategies others have developed for considering potential outcomes, such as futurist Charles Taylor’s “Cone of Possibilities,” which visualizes prospects by arranging them from preposterous to probable. To prepare for the future, Badminton suggests businesses establish Chief Futurist positions and encourages readers to adopt “future consciousness” by practicing self-awareness, creativity, and “realistic idealism.” Unfortunately, his ambitions are stymied by dull, plodding prose that fails to meet its goal of inspiring readers, and the Positive-Dystopia Framework is too complicated to be useful. This comes up short. (Feb.)