Invasion of the Tomorrow People in Full Swing Today

Joseph Coates has described himself as a futurist for 17 years and knows that the label now gets more respect than when he started out.

“I rarely get the damn fool irritating question ‘Where do you buy your crystal ball?’ anymore,” says Coates, whose Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm Coates & Jarratt helps major corporate clients like Dow Chemical, Coca-Cola and AT & T do long-range planning. “It’s a business-like thing now when they call us. The snickering is all history.”

Trend-spotters and social forecasters, most with new books in hand, are fanning out across America picking up healthy fees to address anxious audiences. Their book jackets and World Wide Web sites offer the soothing possibility of “compasses,” “blueprints” or “road maps” to a world churning with change. How much business will be done on the Internet in the next decade? Where will the next global conflict erupt? Will the electric car really catch on?

“No question about it, there is more demand for futures studies and futures work,” Coates says. Nobody can do business as usual these days. “The core of what we and other futurists do is help corporate clients widen their vision--especially the top executives. There is interesting research showing that the preferred member of any board of directors is another CEO--they prefer to talk to their clones. In doing that you are effectively shutting out all new information.”

His group has recently completed a study on the future of the apartment house for the National Multi-Housing Council.

Coates gave the council a presentation on the contemporary changes in family and work, such as telecommuting from home offices. After his group analyzed 275 ads for apartments and found that none reflected contemporary needs for changing space, they suggested a whole new approach to apartment design.

Wrestling with today’s complex world, corporations, like other institutions, are looking for anything that promises to help clarify the changes they are undergoing, and “futurists are just one avenue,” he says.

But it’s a busy avenue. Consultants like Coates, who have long specialized in corporate forecasting projects, have been joined by experts in everything from pop culture to computer technology. “Futurist” has become a hip title, a far cry from the 1960s when futurists were clumped in with the people who read palms.

“We’ve encountered misconceptions in the past,” says Edward Cornish, president of the 30-year-old World Future Society. “We often had to explain that we didn’t accept divination or any other supernatural leanings in our membership.” Not only were futurists viewed as lightweight in the society’s early days, “sort of like science-fiction space cadets,” Cornish says, but so were many of their priorities.

Utopias were a popular topic in the late ‘60s. “There was a great optimism and an incredible lack of interest in jobs,” Cornish says. “The burning worry was how we would spend all the leisure time we would have in the future.”

Today, he says, as jobs and entire companies are gulped up by mergers and downsizing, “People are asking ‘What is going to happen to me?’ ”

And there waiting with an assortment of answers is a crowd of futurists, some newly anointed.

“Nobody minds being called a futurist if they are getting paid big speaking fees, and that’s where the big fees are going today,” says John Azzaro, president of Great Speakers! in Ukiah, Calif. In the past two years, he says, the three most requested speaker topics have become “Change,” “Technology” and “The Future.” Futurists can command from $4,000 to $35,000 and up for a lecture, he says.

At Forecasting International in Arlington, Va., President Marv Cetron says the high-tech revolution has made forecasting extremely sophisticated.

“Because of the speed and capability of computers, we can do trend extrapolation, trend correlation, gaming models and simulations. With virtual reality you can take a look at things before the fact.

“There’s a tremendous respect for people who have quantitative data to back up what they’re talking about,” says Cetron, whose group has just completed a major study for the Department of Defense on the future of terrorism, analyzing four scenarios for the technology potential five and 10 years down the road.

“I’m getting five or six calls a day for speaking engagements,” says Ian Morrison of the Institute for the Future. His “Second Curve,” published last spring by Ballantine, discusses how new consumers, new technology and new geographical market frontiers are changing every aspect of our world.

Morrison--who is booked through October 1997 by clients including the Direct Marketing Assn.; the Purchase Connection, a health-care group; and the Strategic Leadership Forum--tries to reassure business people that what they are experiencing is not unusual.

“We’re almost like modern-day witch doctors,” he says of his futurist compatriots. “We come in and rattle a few sticks and say some mantras. There’s a lot of anxiety out there.”

It’s not just anxiety, says Vancouver-based futurist Frank Ogden. “In some cases, it’s bordering on terror.”

Ogden, 75, who calls himself Dr. Tomorrow, has been packaging global trends and technologies from aboard a high-tech houseboat for years. “In the last three years my speaking schedule has tripled and my fee has gone from reasonable to obscene,” he says.

Ogden, a technology fanatic who has been cruising the Internet for 15 years and just installed a satellite car phone, says that not only have the rules changed, but so has the game. He has been warning corporations and labor unions and most professions for a decade that they are out of date.

But, like most futurists, Ogden is an optimist, delivering the good news that more than 100,000 jobs have been provided in the last year on the Internet alone.

The trick is adaptability, he says: “Who are the futurists today? Anybody who has realized the world is never going to be like it was.”

Futurist is not usually considered a specific career, says the World Future Society’s Cornish. “Most futurists have specific expertise--they may be sociologists or engineers or economists whose specialty is futurism.” What they share is an attitude: They are looking at the changing present with an eye toward its impact down the line. Two universities--the University of Hawaii in Honolulu and the University of Houston at Clear Lake--have long offered master’s degree programs in future studies.

Ogden’s picture of a “bright, promising, exhilarating” future is not universally shared. William Knoke, who has hit the lecture circuit with his book “Bold New World” (Kodansha International, 1996), says he gets enthusiastic responses from business groups because they like his challenge of “figuring out the new rules before anybody else.”

But it’s the opposite feedback when he delivers the same message on radio talk shows. “I invariably get a phone call from someone in Chattanooga who doesn’t see all this change as opportunity. It is a threat, tearing away at the status quo in terms of their jobs and their house.”

Marketing guru Faith Popcorn, in her new book, “Clicking” (HarperCollins), notes that the questions she gets after her presentation are invariably personal:

“What are the jobs of the future?”

“What should my kids be studying?”

And Alvin Toffler, whose 1970 book “Future Shock” catapulted him to the top of the futurist ladder, a position he still holds, put it more bluntly when he told Time magazine recently that “People today are scared silly.”

Since 1969, Michael Marien has monitored books, reports and articles on the future. Working out of his Lafayette, N.Y., home, he compiles the results in his monthly newsletter “Future Survey,” published by the World Future Society.

Marien sees the American public as getting “bits and pieces” of the unfolding transformation.

“No one fully understands it, although a lot of people give you the feeling they do,” he says, “and that is unsettling too.”