Wendy L. Schultz
Futurist, Infinite Futures
UK

Futurist and Spirit of the Summit

Preferred Futures

Reaching our full potential - as a civilization, society, organisation, or community - requires goals that challenge us to exceed that potential. Unfortunately, in this most instrumental of ages, daydreaming is unfashionable. An educational system inherited from the industrial era teaches us to keep our attention on the task at hand; the drive for upward mobility focuses our creativity on immediate problem-solving and practical matters of management. The age of deconstruction awards more points to critiques than to castles in the air.

Given these barriers, little wonder that people are uncomfortable with the verbs "vision," "imagine," "dream." If not for the cases cited in recent leadership and management literature which underscore the utility of vision for motivating exemplary performance, it would be difficult to convince professionals to engage in visioning. Yet it is something humans do naturally, that in fact we must be trained not to do. Reinstating visioning as a powerful creative tool is simply re-balancing our internal environment: giving equal pride of place to intuition and imagination next to logic and calculation. Envisioning a preferred future requires them all.

Dr. Wendy L. Schultz is Director of Infinite Futures: Foresight Research, Training, and Facilitation, with over two decades of foresight practice from Honolulu to Helsinki, and Brisbane to Budapest. She earned her Ph.D. in Alternative Futures at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, working for five years forecasting global natural gas markets at the East-West Center, and for over ten years as a researcher, foresight process designer, and project manager at the Hawai'i Research Center for Futures Studies. From 1996 to 2004 she served as visiting faculty with the Masters program in Studies of the Future at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, developing the introductory seminar, the qualitative methods seminar, and the facilitation practicum as part of overall curriculum redesign. Awarded a Fulbright grant in 2001, she spent six months as a lecturer and researcher with colleagues at the Finland Futures Research Centre.

Her current research and speaking topics include an overview of trends and emerging issues of change drawn from current work assembling a baseline environmental scan for the UK Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (Defra); the future of microsensors and RFID as tools, toys, and toxins (also drawn from current work at Defra); the future of learning and higher education (presentation at the World Future Society 2004 in DC); the future of space exploration (from essays drafted for Space 2100 (Popular Science) and The Catalog of Tomorrow (TechTV and Que)) and the future of undersea exploration (The Catalog of Tomorrow); and the future of libraries, archives, and media storage (keynotes for the Special Libraries Association and the American Library Association); among others. With regard to foresight concepts and methods, her speaking and training covers an overview of futures studies and foresight; a history of foresight and futures studies; a consumer's guide to common foresight tools and techniques; a holistic approach to environmental scanning; and scenario building for strategy and enhanced creativity; and leadership and vision.

Wendy currently resides in Oxford, England, where her partner lectures in Korean Studies at Oxford University. In between research projects, keynotes, lectures, and workshops, she is writing an introductory work on foresight concepts and methods, with an accompanying facilitator's guide for trainers and facilitators. Wendy is a Fellow of the World Futures Studies Federation, and a member of the Association of Professional Futurists.
http://www.infinitefutures.com