I. 700 Foresight Leaders – A One-Line Database
This chapter is our starter list of some particularly notable foresight leaders and organizations. Many are acceleration-aware, recognizing the deep value of exponential foresight. A smaller number are also evo-devo aware, recognizing that society, technology, and the universe are not only evolving, but also developing, and that universal values, principles, and futures exist, and can be increasingly discovered by evidence-seeking and collective intelligence.
Consider following some of these individuals on Twitter or LinkedIn (I don’t recommend Facebook, given its current lack of civic responsibility), and visiting the websites of, and subscribing to some of the newsletters and blog feeds of, any organizations you find interesting or relevant to your learning or work. We’ve found these leaders and organizations in lists on the web, and by using searches on social networks using foresight terms. Some are public figures. We’ve tried to describe them using the language they used themselves. We’ve condensed their self-descriptions to single lines for brevity’s sake. Our apologies to anyone that we may have inadvertently misrepresented in our condensation.
To make this list we relied heavily on Google and on LinkedIn’s search engine, the latter being an emerging global standard for business networking. Klout and PeerIndex are startup social influence rating systems. We have included Klout scores for each individual when available. Klout has many shortcomings as way to measure influence but we will use it until someone builds a better tool for the emerging reputation economy. Google Scholar tracks citations on papers published in foresight journals, and we included a few foresight academics whose papers have over 100 citations. If we’d searched the foresight journals we could have included many more foresight academics, but we wanted to use open access measures of social and professional influence to make this starter list. To grow your general notability or impact as a foresight leader, it helps to publish papers, write a book, speak, create videos, run a blog, tweet, or take a role in a foresight-related event or organization, like FERN. 🙂
Could you benefit from knowing or collaborating with any of these fine folks on your next foresight project? If so, reach out and contact them on LinkedIn. Professional foresight is a small and friendly community. Most of these leaders will be very happy to help where they can.
LinkedIn and particularly Klout are still in beta, and both are far too US-centric. Apologies to our European, Asian and other global colleagues, who are quite underrepresented below. Apologies also to our female foresight colleagues, who are also underrepresented. And our apologies to all the leaders quietly practicing organizational foresight who we missed with these preliminary search techniques. A good list of some European foresight leaders can be found in the appendix to EFMN’s 2009 final report.
Each entry begins with the leader name listed alphabetically by last name, linked to a LinkedIn, Wikipedia, or Bio page, followed by a condensed one line self-title, a link to a Book, Paper, Blog, or Site if there is space, and a Klout score (in parentheses) if available.
None of these folks or organizations have endorsed our guide. Our lists are quite incomplete and US-biased, but we must begin somewhere. With your help, we will continue to grow them each future edition of the guide.
Know anyone else who belongs on this list? Want to volunteer to expand this list? Let us know, thanks.
