The work done so far provides a basic level of professional standards and accountability and offers guidance in avoiding misuse of foresight practices. It does not deal with the social responsibilities and complex situations that futurists often face across the globe. We’ve called these the “thorny issues” of foresight practice. We hope to explore and add these to the CoE as our discussions and approaches develop and mature. We envision that in a few years of active review and addition, we will have a robust CoE that is familiar to those of us in other disciplines.

The CoE represents the APF CoE Committee's work toward establishing professional guidelines for the foresight community. Though the code has not yet been formally adopted by the APF board, we hope that APF members will consider the CoE as guidance for their foresight-related efforts. Professional members are encouraged to share the CoE with clients to establish trust and expectations and as a way to demonstrate commitment to ethical practices being developed by members of a professional association.

Our approach has been to start small and grow as we learn more. The APF established a CoE Committee to review the codes of other professional groups. Then, working with other futurists who are well versed in foresight methodology as well as ethics, the Committee produced a draft that was sent to a group of reviewers,recommended by APF board members and CoE committee members, who were chosen based on their range of experience and geographic/ cultural diversity. The review group provided over 30 pages of comments and thoughts. These were used to update CoE and to suggest work. The CoE that incorporated all of these updates was then sent to the current APF Board for their review and comment. The version of the CoE presented here– version 0.1- incorporates the board’s comments based on that review.

The CoE is a living document and it is expected to change as input is received from the APF community and as ethical issues are raised by membership. The CoE Committee will continue to seek input, conversations, and participation from members around the globe. Part of this effort includes forums for ethics-related conversations to be created within existing APF social spaces. Next steps also include formation of an Ethics Advisory Council (EAC) composed of a group of experienced futurists from the APF membership willing to be available to help APF members navigate thorny ethical concerns or situations.