… the impacts of how the future you want may play out.
The last post was of the Futures Wheel futuring strategem. A related technique is the Cross Impact Matrix.
It is what it sounds like; call it a spreadsheet if you will. It is a device to help futurists project the probable outcomes and impacts on people, systems, or groups that could be affected by the future you are aiming for.
Let’s take up the case of Goldilocks. She has had an argument with her parents and has run away. She wanders into the forest and comes upon the the Three Bears’ house. She is curious, hungry, and tired and wants badly to go into the house. The possible futures she is considering are to enter their house or not to enter their house.
Now look at the graphic:
I apologize for the quality of the graphic but I’ve no doubt you see how this works:
1. You put the probable futures under consideration along the vertical axis.
2. You put the people, groups, systems, sub-systems, premises likely to be affected by the probable futures you are considering along the horizontal axis.
3. You, hopefully in groups, begin to fill in the boxes to show how you project how the future will impact or effect the the people, groups, systems, sub-systems, premises you have identified.
4. Doing so helps the futures-based educator to begin to plan for the consequences of the future they prefer.
Here is another model: Last week Apple announced that it was going into education by making it easy to download e-texts to their IPads. As a futures-based educator how do you project the possibility / probability of moving towards giving every student an IPad?
Before you do this, and this is fodder for future posts. What would be the your preferable future? For example, do you project this probability as an opportunity to re-tool your educational system to promote an instructional program grounded in the P21 framework and / or do you consider the preferability of saving textbook expenditure monies? The sample cross impact matrix below is limited of course by space considerations. Go ahead, give it a try,
Creating Futures! 