OUR WORLD
UNDERSTANDING WHAT’S
HAPPENING
When I was studying anthropology, I learned that
human beings live and work together in remarkably similar ways, with a wide variety of local variations within those similarities. We learned systems
to track both the similarities and the differences.
Then, when I worked as a futurist, my job was to
track trends, identify potential “wild cards” that
would radically affect those trends, and discover new possibilities as they emerged. To do so I
scanned dozens of magazines and journals each
week, watched a wide variety of media, attended
conferences, listened in on casual conversations
wherever people around me were talking, and kept
a huge database of indicators of change. I could do
so because I had a framework for thinking about
all these different kinds of information, a way of dividing up our culture that made sense to me and
helped be to track not only individual events, but
relationships.
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The essence of the framework that I, and many
other futurists, use is based on the concept that
any culture may be divided into half a dozen categories of structures and activities:
• SOCIAL SYSTEMS – institutions, organizations,
and activities that provide support for the raising of children, which is the primary purpose for
all human society
• TECHNOLOGICAL SYSTEMS – the tools and
techniques that are used to generate all of the
things needed to maintain the social systems
• ECONOMIC SYSTEMS – the means by which
goods and services are produced and distributed
• ENVIRONMENTAL PRESSURES – the natural
processes and resources that affect the culture
• POLITICAL SYSTEMS – the structures and processes by which collective decisions are made
• VALUE SYSTEMS – the set of assumptions, beliefs, expectations, and ideals on which individual and collective decisions are made