Abstract
The Molitor Model of Change is a unique approach, yet has largely been overlooked as a futures studies method. This article traces the influences that led Graham Molitor to develop Emerging Issues Analysis.
Graham Molitor was not a household name, nor a known public intellectual, even though he was listed by The Macmillan Encyclopedia of the Future (Kurian, et al. 1996) as thirty-six out of the top hundred futurists in the world. Molitor had been shaped by the practice of futures research from the time he was thirty years old. From the mid-1960s, he labored under the light of prominent futurists, such as Alvin Toffler, Arthur C. Clarke, Daniel Bell, R. Buckminster Fuller, Jay Forrester, Herman Kahn, Isaac Asimov, John McHale, Pierre Wack, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Robert Jungk, and Donella Meadows.
Meeting Graham Molitor
Over time, I was drawn into the orbit of Graham Molitor through two mentors of mine, each who spoke of his encyclopedic knowledge and graciousness. As a practicing futurist, I first attended the annual World Future Society (WFS) conference in 1996. It was not until the year 2000 that I personally met Molitor. He was lecturing to a packed room on “The Journey to 3000 A.D.” I was fascinated by his sweeping forecast of five economic waves over the next one thousand years (Molitor, 2000), starting with leisure/entertainment era (dominant by 2015), life sciences (by 2100), meta-materials (2100–2300), new atomic age (2250–2500), and a new space age (2500–3000). After the session, I walked up to shake his hand across the podium and was warmly received. That momentary meeting was captured by a WFS photographer, only to further fix it in my mind that I had encountered greatness.
Later, I would develop the graduate foresight programs at Regent University (Gary 2010). I turned to Molitor’s work to teach Social Change to mid-career professionals. Using Molitor’s (2010) 22-Step Model of Change, my students conducted Emerging Issues projects for client organizations. This led me in 2007 to invite Molitor to Virginia Beach to give a daylong lecture at Foresight 2007 for doctoral students. Then in 2008, I coaxed him to return to the WFS for one final time, to do a two-day master workshop with me on “Framing and Forecasting Patterns of Change.” His lectures were so well received, that on the second day, I canceled two of my remaining talks to allow him to hold court.
Through these experiences, Molitor gave his personal library to Regent University in 2012, starting with a donation of two thousand books. His professional papers followed in 2013 and the remainder of three thousand books in 2015.
Unpacking the Molitor Files
After a year of keeping twenty-five boxes in my garage of Molitor’s client work, speeches, and professional papers, I recruited Janet Newman, a graduate student, to work with me to sort through this treasure trove. It was only then that I came to fully understand how Molitor did his work and why the Molitor Model of Change was a unique approach, largely overlooked as a futures studies method.
Molitor applied his approach to change across various sectors, including economic, environmental, health and social welfare, demographics, social breakdown/aberrant behavior, information technologies, consumerism, agriculture policy, human nutrition, sugars and sweeteners, politics and lobbying, and education and learning.
He marshaled his intellectual curiosity through careful research to spur on social inventions (Conger 1973). Table 1 lists forty-five client reports, out of a collection of four hundred, that illustrate the depth of Molitor’s work in forecasting, policy analysis, and issues management. His outpouring of work represented his passion to improve the human condition.
Forty-five Client Reports by Graham Molitor: A Selection.
Situating Molitor in Futures Studies
How should today’s futurists view Graham Molitor? It has been six decades since the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston appointed Daniel Bell to chair their “Commission on the Year 2000” to explore systemic efforts, inspire new institutions, and propose alternative futures (Bell and Graubard 1967). During this time, notions of the future shaped by modernity have changed, as Andersson (2012, 1414) wrote, from postwar notions of unceasing economic growth, technological invention, and political rationality, to these drivers themselves becoming “sources of contestation, disillusionment, and fear.”
Using Inayatullah’s (1990) three epistemological premises of futures studies, the predictive, cultural, and critical, Molitor can be situated in the predictive-empirical stance. He extrapolated trends, identified long-wave patterns, and followed s-curve trajectories. We would be mistaken, however, to view Molitor as reductionist. Due to the fact he dealt with social, not just economic or technological, trends, Molitor bridged Inayatullah’s empirical and cultural approaches. The Molitor (2003) Model of Change, by design, was a social forecasting methodology to identify countervailing viewpoints or, as sociologists have expressed it, “contested futures” (Brown et al. 2000).
Although Molitor should be seen within a predictive and cultural orbit, his work did not delve into the critical, or Inayatullah’s poststructural, stance. One does not encounter Molitor writing about “decolonizing futures.” This was demonstrated in 2002, when Hindmarsh (2002) assailed Molitor’s views on a future biotech economy as “techno-determinism” and “bio-utopian.” Molitor did not back away from his forecast of human innovation. He resisted doomsday bias, while asserting a systematic approach should recognize the “voices of the concerned [who] add to and temper runaway technocratic decision making” (Molitor 2002, 156). In this regard, Molitor saw himself serving the public by empowering corporate stakeholders to listen to public activists, in view of the common good.
So following Slaughter (2001), we may conclude that the dominant American empiricist tradition that shaped Molitor was conservative and unconcerned with progressive, multicultural, or integral futures. Yet Molitor was far from superficial in his policy analysis. He may have offered “thin” descriptions in certain genres, such as his Encyclopedia of the Future, but so did H. G. Wells in his Outline of History, which precluded alternative futures. Molitor’s work for clients often delved into the countervailing consumer forces that shape social indicators of human well-being.
Emerging Issues Analysis
What then is Molitor’s legacy to futures research? Plain and simple, Molitor should be remembered among foresight professionals as the pioneer of Emerging Issues Analysis. Before Molitor’s (1977) seminal article on “How to Anticipate Public-Policy Changes,” futures research encompassed environmental scanning, trend extrapolation, cross-impact analysis, technological assessment, and scenarios, but not emerging issues. This is clear from browsing Fowles’ (1978) Handbook of Futures Research. The term “emerging issues” was not used, nor did it appear in the index. Thanks to Molitor, the practice of identifying and analyzing emerging issues eventually took its place in the futurist’s toolkit to serve public, private, and nonprofit stakeholders.
Molitor’s work on emerging issues was not done in a vacuum. Parallel to his work as a futurist, the practice of “Issues Management” came to be defined in government and corporate spheres. Seminal to these broader developments in public policy was Howard Chase’s (1984) Issues Management: Origins of the Future, and, in the domain of industry, Igor Ansoff’s (1984) Implanting Strategic Management. More recently, Winter and Steger’s (1998) Managing Outside Pressure, and Heath and Palenchar’s (2009) Strategic Issues Management are representative of this widespread practice to help organizations tackle public-policy challenges.
What distinguished Molitor’s work from what developed as Issues Management was his systematic use of temporal horizons, through both retrospective and prospective analysis, stretching back seventy years in some cases and forward ten, twenty, or thirty years.
Based on Rogers’ (1962) diffusion model, Molitor used times series across twenty-two quantitative patterns to measure change according to the time at which a jurisdiction adopted a specific innovation. In many cases, he found that specific public-policy developments and corporate responses could be anticipated a decade out with accuracy, based on rates of diffusion.
Others in the futures field eventually joined Molitor to champion the practice of “issues management,” including Joseph Coates et al.’s (1986) Issues Management: How You Can Plan, Organize, and Manage for the Future and William Renfro’s (1993) Issues Management in Strategic Planning.
Today, many practicing futurists would not recognize “emerging issues” as a contemporary term or methodology that shaped how we frame, scan, or develop alternative futures (Hines et al. 2017). By the 1990s, other terms had come into the futures field as surrogates for “emerging issues” that signified the need for early warning and response, such as Weak Signals, Wild Cards, or Megatrends (Carbonell et al. 2015). Yet Molitor deserves credit for creating Emerging Issues Analysis as a structured foresight method.
Standing on the Shoulder of Giants
Molitor was a giant in futures research. In the final years of his life, he announced he would write two remaining books, The Next Thousand Years and The Chronology of Civilization. He never wrote them. After six decades of serving his country and the futures field, other pursuits captured him, such as enjoying with his grandchildren and taking daily six-mile hikes in the hills surrounding Camp David, Pennsylvania.
Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.” As a community of foresight professionals, united by World Futures Review and key associations, we now see further into the twenty-first century on top of the broad shoulders of Graham Molitor.
Each year now passes only to see the founding generation of our field past into the shadows of yesterday. Fortunately, Molitor left us with a gift of methodology. He demonstrated the value of quantitative analysis, applied to social indicators, bibliometrics, patents, and regulations. He worked tirelessly through issues analysis for the improvement of humanity.
It now falls to a new generation of futurists to take up Molitor’s three-stage approach to mapping policy horizons, across his framing, advancing, and resolving phases. When it does, may they be found like Molitor, early builders of a humane third millennium.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.