Futures Links / Futures History / Futures Quotes

Below are a few of the books used in the program and a few that are recommended reading. Click on an image to link to more information. Have more books you would like to add or a review of one of the books? Sign in and add your information. Please try to follow the formatting already shown.



Thinking about the Future: Guidlines for Strategic Foresight
edited by Andy Hines and Dr. Peter Bishop
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Hines and Bishop layout a generic though accurate process for delivering an effective Strategic Foresight project. The book has 30 contributors, including professional futurists from around the world, sharing best practices and case studies. Hines and Bishop edited these contributions into six chapters which follow the six steps of the process. These chapters then have subchapters which explain how to conduct these six steps. They then break these subchapters down even more to provide advice and best practices for each step and substep. Each peice of advice and best practice is provided with a description, the key steps, the benefits, a case study or example, and suggestions for further reading on the topic. Clearly the book is thorough, organized, and practical. It is not an encyclopedia nor is it meant to be. It is a great starting point for Futures Studies and will likely remain an immediate referrence regardless of the extent one goes in Futures Studies. My own copy is so well loved, my friends think it will make me go blind.





Strategic Foresight: The Power of Standing in the Future
by Nick Marsh, Mike McCallum, Dominique Purcell
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Dr. Nick Marsh was a key figure in starting the masters program at Swinburne University in Australia along with Richard Slaughter. Here he and two colleagues set forth the arguement for using Strategic Foresight with an explaination of how to go about delivering a product. The book is full of case studies and practical applications for Futures Studies. He argues that Futures Studies is the theory where Stategic Foresight is the application. Furthermore, he asserts backcasting is the crux of building the strategy based on the foresight process. Full of images and mental models, the book is surprisingly easy to read but extremely helpful for gaining greater insight to this practial application.





Future Savvy by Adam Gordon



This book is primarily targeted at decision makers in business and public policy. However, it is recommended for anyone thinking about how to deal with sifting through the predictions and forecasts which bombard them both internally and externally. That the world is constantly changing is obvious, and decision makers still search out people to explore what is on the horizon. This book is a how-to for deciding whether events are forming trends, whether these trends are relevant, and whether the predictions about these trends are accurate and worth investing towards. It is a helpful book to frame the predictive aspect of futures and to understand the strategic mindset futures' clients should be steering towards.






2025: Scenarios of US and Global Society Reshaped by Science and Technology
by Joseph Coates, John Mahaffie, and Andy Hines
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Foundations of Futures Studies Volume 1
by Wendell Bell

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The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook by Peter Senge

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Leading Change by John P. Kotter

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The Art of the Long View by Peter Schwartz

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Futuring: The Exploration of the Future
by Edward Cornish