Futurecasting for Edtech Leaders and Teams

Is it worth it to spend an afternoon imagining possibilities?

GUEST COLUMN | by Valerie Mercer

Most educational technology leaders and their teams are focused on connectivity, network management, and defending against internal and external threats. In fact, running a modern educational technology department can feel like digital firefighting. No two days are alike, and extinguishing the latest crisis often leaves little time for strategic planning for three years ahead, five years away, or even ten years in the future.

Instead of spending a typical workday handling technology disruptions and issues, we as educational technology leaders should make time to lead our teams in an exercise of disrupting our accepted expectations and engage in future casting, the long-term forecast cousin of strategic planning.

‘…educational technology leaders should make time to lead our teams in an exercise of disrupting our accepted expectations and engage in future casting…’

Unlike a SWOT analysis or other traditional strategic planning tools, future casting is elastic, malleable, and alterable, and that’s an awesome premise for an educational technology team to consider when their workdays are often mired in the established and accepted worlds of reported errors, connectivity issues, technical support, and technology integration.

Strong Strategic Planning Needed in Edtech

We need strong strategic planning in educational technology. It is essential for providing quality services to our students, teachers, administrators, parents, and communities. With rapidly growing technical opportunities, we cannot be victims of shiny ball syndrome, and we must make purchases and implementations judiciously so we are using tax dollars or contribution funds wisely while providing the best possible tools and support the market provides at this time. Yet, we must also make time to go beyond strategic planning to full-blown future casting. Strategic planning is based on established budgets, known and accepted information, and resource allocations (Casselbury, 2024).

Strategic planning is done in light of existing laws, regulations, and compliance, and strategic planning is executed in light of the historical knowledge, skills, and traditions of an organization. We know we have succeeded in the strategic planning process when we can check off an item as completed and no longer needed as a budget line item.

We strategically plan as educational technology leaders based on the accepted definitions of accomplishment, success, and failure considering malware, ransomware, data theft, and identity loss.

Futurecasting: A Three Step Process

According to Carey (2021), an exercise should be simple in scaffolding and the complexity should come from the richness of solutions, possibilities, and prognosticating. With a three-step process, future casting exercises are simply defining the present in three sentences, defining the worst possible future in three sentences, defining the best possible future in three sentences, and then mapping a path backward for the worst and best scenarios.

At the heart of the future casting exercise is storytelling. We are imagining a story of the future and then we work our way backwards to detail what that story will evoke on a day-to-day basis in the technology team’s life ten years ahead. If storytelling gives us the avenue to ponder and reminisce, then it also affords us the power to build a story of possibilities to include quantum computing, quantum networking, semi-singularity, singularity, artificial intelligence, quantum internet, and more. “Future disruption can’t be anticipated by extrapolation of performance within the current paradigm or by monitoring innovation only within established targets. (Kohler et al., 2021).

We must look beyond the startups, the platform pilots, and the “Would you and your teachers consider trying this product for free for us for feedback?” opportunities. This can be challenging for technology people. We are often rooted in the realities of fixing the latest concrete “right in front of me” problem, and engaging in conceptualization can be challenging for those of us charged with keeping educational technology functional in day-to-day school life. We must expand our toolkits to include storytelling, crafting our own tales of possibility.

A Narrative of Potential

Gladwin et al., (2021) tell us storytelling is a way to create meaning of past experiences and it is also the same mechanism to synthesize the present with future possibilities by writing a narrative of potential. What will the network look like in five years? Ten? How will data travel? How will schools be technologically different for teachers, students, administrators, and support teams like technology services?

“The future is constantly being written and rewritten and we, as both individuals and society, have collective and collaborative agency (Kohler et al., 2021)” Technology teams grow in moral and positive relationship strength when they experience future casting, defined as applied storytelling with an exponential lens (Johnson 2024). Is it worth it to spend an afternoon imagining possibilities? Absolutely it is.

What if the future that’s cast does not come true? After all, as futurists teach us, “we cannot ultimately know which ‘acts of imagination’ will take hold in the future reality, nor how these imaginings will be enacted. (Gladwin et al., 2022).”

So why take the time out of a busy school day to forecast or future cast? As Jane McGonigal, futurist, game designer, and author of Imaginable states, “In dealing with the future… it is more important to be imaginative and insightful than to be one hundred percent ‘right.’” When we as technology leaders make time for future casting, we grow the mind’s capacity to face new challenges, sustain resilience, and make time for future-focused challenges today instead of wading through the latest helpdesk tickets or server log files.

Instead of an afternoon of digital firefighting, educational technology teams will benefit from future casting in transparency, accountability, and flexibility for problem-solving. Future casting gives people “the ability to imagine and model a range of possible and potential futures as well as giving them a framework to collaborate with others to identify how they might be able to disrupt, mitigate, and recover from undesirable future threats (Manetti et al., 2022).

As the futurists espouse, anticipating future risks, opportunities, and challenges, will help us start solving problems today. Future casting gives us opportunities to make changes today, so the next time there is an opportunity to future cast, I hope you and your team will take a break from digital firefighting to consider the possibilities and opportunities of educational technology of the future.

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Carey, H. (2021, July 23). Instructions for a future-backwards activity: Backcasting to shift the status quo. Medium. https://hillarywinnow.medium.com/instructions-for-a-future-backwards-activity-backcasting-to-shift-the-status-quo-191fef9ee05a

Casselbury, K. (2024, September 24). Backcasting: Using Future-back thinking to plan tomorrow’s triumphs. Welcome to SHRM. https://www.shrm.org/enterprise-solutions/insights/backcasting-future-back-thinking

Gladwin, D., Horst, R., James, K., & Sameshima, P. (2022). Imagining futures literacies: A collaborative practice. Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice, 22(7).

Green, L. S., & Grigsby, S. (2017). Beyond the horizon: perspectives that inform our professional future. Knowledge Quest, 46(1), 6-7.

Jesuthasan, R., & Kapilashrami, T. (2024, October 2). 5 changes leaders will need to make in order to survive the future of work. FastCompany. https://www.fastcompany.com/91199969/5-changes-leaders-will-need-to-make-in-order-to-survive-the-future-of-work

Johnson, B. D. (2024). The Future of Threatcasting. Computer, 57(1), 34-39.

Johnson, B. D., & Lindsay, D. (2020). Leadership and Threatcasting. Journal of Character and Leadership Development, 7(2).

Kelly, K. (2017). The inevitable: Understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. Penguin Books.

Kohler, K. (2021). Strategic foresight: Knowledge, tools, and methods for the future. CSS Risk and Resilience Reports.

Lee, R. (2016a). Threatcasting. Computer, 49(10), 94–95. https://doi.org/10.1109/mc.2016.305

Manetti, A., Lara-Navarra, P., & Sánchez-Navarro, J. (2022). Possibilities for futurecasting: designing a digital map of trends. Artnodes, 2022, no. 30.

McGonigal, J. (2022). Imaginable: How to see the future coming and be ready for anything. Random House.

Schmitt, U. (2020). A back-casting knowledge management vision for a digital platform ecosystem in support of thrivable communities of knowledge workers. Journal of Digital Innovation for Humanity, 1, 93-110.

Shrier, D. (2023, February 13). Futurecasting. Linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/futurecasting-david-shrier

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Valerie Mercer, Ed.D., retired as Chief Technology Officer emeritus for Monroe County Schools in Forsyth, Georgia after 12 years in that role. She served as a K-12 technology leader for 23 years in several public school systems. She also served as Director of Teacher Quality and a professional learning coordinator for public school systems in Georgia. Dr. Mercer began her career as a high school English teacher; she holds a doctorate degree in Educational Leadership from Valdosta State University, a specialist degree in Instructional Technology from Georgia State University, a master’s degree in Instructional Technology from Georgia College and State University, and an English Education degree from the University of Georgia. Today, she serves as Assistant Professor of Information Technology at Middle Georgia State University in Macon, Georgia, where she teaches courses in technology leadership, technology planning, digital ethics, digital legal issues, and technology research. Write to: valerie.mercer@mga.edu

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