My Journey with Futures

Hello!

I'm developing this site to publish reports and reflections on the work I've done over the years. I would like to regularly blog about work and experiences - so there is a space to store these knowledge and memories I can learn from and others might want to learn from.

I've been teaching in higher education since 1993, started with a humble business college in Kuala Lumpur.  I was teaching and preparing students for the ICSA and CIMA professional examinations.  At that time, students could only sit for the UK exams. We had no guidance or any sort of support for the Institutes, so I resorted to learning from the examiners reports and comments about past years' exams.  After 4 years of doing that, I went on to pursue a master of science in management in a local public university, part time. Completed a research and wrote a dissertation on Organisational Change and Human Resource Management in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in Malaysia. I went on to work with a university and in two years, I went on to UK for a master of research and a PhD in Operations Research.  For my PhD I worked with 49 British non-departmental public bodies in exploring what worked and what didn't with performance measurement.  With that findings I've developed a guide for performance measurement (to be uploaded  in teaching resource soon).

Upon graduation I went home to Kuala Lumpur.  I was commissioned by the then Deputy Director General of the Ministry of Higher Education to evaluate the impacts of the national higher education strategic plan phase 1. I completed on 4 national policy research with four different teams for researchers from diffferent public universities.  It was then I ventured into Futures Studies.  I was looking for methods to help stakeholders think beyond today, tomorrow or 3 years.  The only tool they knew was the SWOT analysis for strategic planning.  I found that very limiting as university administrators always revert back to last year's plan to extend their efforts or put in a % increment in their KPIs. It was always just an extrapolation of the past.

One day I attended a keynote speech by Sohail Inayatullah, and realised there was so much more to Futures Studies.  I used scenarios for strategy development for the university I was working with then, and also worked on plans for the 2nd phase of the national higher education strategic plan.  That was my very first experience using foresight for planning.

All the while I was also engaged with 2GC UK Ltd for delivering training and consulting for Balanced Scorecard. We worked extensively with designing and implementation BSC for public organisations. That experience was added bonus supplementing the work I was doing for the ministry of higher education as I had to worked with different agencies within universities in designing, developing KPIS and BSCs.

I feel the younger generations can benefit so much from Futures Studies and that's where I'm now at this point – advancing Futures to the young, at school and universities. More teaching aids and resources would be uploaded soon to share with educators and enthusiasts.  I co-founded with Lavonne Leong, a Futures Community of Practice, hosted by the Journal of Futures Studies