After the Future Force Talk podcast episode, I did an interview on The New Abnormal podcast hosted by Sean Pillot de Chenecey. It was recorded a couple of weeks before a presentation I was to give at a NATO conference in Rome last October. I will describe the lead-up to that presentation, and the paper it was based upon, in a subsequent post.
I do mention the paper a few times during the episode, but my deal with Sean was that the episode would not come out before the Rome presentation. That took place on 8 October at NATO Defense College, so the podcast went live on the interwebs on the 10th. We cover a fair bit of ground — quite a few of my old favourites, some of which I’ve posted here before: the relation between futurists and intelligence analysts, and the (probable!) lack of counter-intel from the future as compared to intelligence analysis. We also talk about the Futures Cone (of course), but I also discuss futurists a bit more generally, referencing Michael Marien’s (2010) taxonomy from 15-odd years ago (which itself references and is based on an initial taxonomy from 1985). Marien was perhaps the one person more than any other who perfected a super-synoptic view of the futures field as a whole. The field could do with a few more synoptic generalists like him (although he would probably dispute that characterisation).
The citation information for the podcast episode is:
Voros, Joseph, guest. 2025. Futures Thinking in Real-World Contexts. Hosted by Sean Pillot de Chenecey. The New Abnormal Podcast. October 10. 55m. It can be found on Amazon, Apple and Spotify.
References
Marien, Michael. 1985. “Toward a New Futures Research: Insights from Twelve Types of Futurists.” Futures Research Quarterly 1 (Spring): 13–35.
———. 2010. “Futures-Thinking and Identity: Why ‘Futures Studies’ Is Not a Field, Discipline, or Discourse: A Response to Ziauddin Sardar’s ‘the Namesake.’” Futures 42(3): 190–94. doi:10.1016/j.futures.2009.11.003.
The Voroscope 