Proyecto Noesis international blog on qualitative research, semiotics, cultural analysis and social issues

Todays motivation for learning the future is more related to economic, financial, political, commercial, marketing and, eventually, power issues, rather than past-historic needs that ruled private and public life of persons and governments (kings and princes) like weather, weddings, the crops and mood states. One of the most common mistakes now days is to consider that learning the future has to do with the act of guessing or having futuristic visions. We already talked about this in the fist delivery of this theme. A second mistake, and maybe even worst, is thinking that the act of predicting the future has something to do with the preconceibed idea that the history of people, things and society are in some way predetermined. Both of this notions are rooted in a lineal thought paradigm that is wide spread in our society. We understand the lineal thought paradigm as a predominant way of thinking that is based on the believe of a causal reality, that is, that thing occur related to a cause-and-efect.

Unfortunately, looking at reality from the casual paradigm point of view is always reductionist, partial and fragmentary of the reality observed. There are many examples of this because many things in our society, science and production are organized in a fragmented way oriented towards specialization of each area in every day human task. In qualitative market research it is very common to orient research objectives in relation to the reaction that the participants will have in relation to certain stimuli (communication, concepts, design, etcetera) without taking into consideration other many variables that are involved (emotions, relationship with the brand, relation and sensation regarding the moderator or other members in the group, previous experiences broth to the present, cultural notions, and many more).

With the causal paradigm the efects of an event are always lineal

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