Andy’s primary role is with the University of Houston’s Graduate Program in Foresight, where he teaches and leads research projects with staff and students. He also does some speaking, workshopping, and consulting on the side through his firm Hinesight.

His career as a futurist was sparked by an undergraduate class on “The History of the Future” that led him to move to Houston and get the Futures Studies Master’s degree. He interned with Joseph Coates and Jennifer Jarratt at Coates & Jarratt, Inc., a Washington DC think tank and consulting firm that specialized in the study of the future. He stayed on for seven years, even reaching partners, before moving on to his first organizational futurist role with Kellogg’s, where he established and ran the Global Trends Program. He moved on to Dow Chemical, where he was Futurist & Senior Ideation Leader with a mission of using futures tools and knowledge to turn ideas into new business opportunities.

At that time, he began teaching part-time at UH as an Adjunct Professor in 2004 while maintaining various full-time roles. He then move backed into consulting and eventually because co-Managing Director of Social Technologies/Innovaro in Washington DC. In 2014, he succeeded Peter Bishop as the Program Coordinator of the Foresight Program.  

Andy is motivated by a professional hunger to introduce people to the future and to make foresight more practical and useful. He believes that foresight can help deliver the insight that is so needed in today’s world. His goal is to enlist as many change agents as possible with this message. Thus, he has honed a skill set designed to make foresight more actionable.  He compiled his thinking and experience on organizational foresight in his dissertation on “The Role of an Organizational Futurist in Integrating Foresight into Organizations” back in 2012. He has co-authored three books on foresight methodologies:

• The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies 2020 (APF: 2020) w/Richard Slaughter
• Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight, 2^nd Ed. (Hinesight: 2020; Social Technologies, 2007) w/ Peter Bishop
• Teaching about the Future: The Basics of Foresight Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) w/Peter Bishop (which won the Association of Professional Futurists Most Significant Futures Works Award in 2014).

He believes that this experience in foresight methodologies offers a unique contribution to the exploration of After Capitalism. The book builds on this methodological foundation and includes some new technical innovations as well.

He also has two books about the future itself, one on values and the others on science and technology

• ConsumerShift: How Changing Values Are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape (No Limits Publishing, 2011)
• 2025: Science and Technology Reshapes US and Global Society (Oak Hill, 1997) w/ Joe Coates and John Mahaffie.

Of the two, the ConsumerShift book on values plays a significant if not vital role in After Capitalism. So much of what is needed boils down a shift in values, and the ConsumerShift work provided a useful foundation in identifying the shifts likely to be necessary. 

Among his other relevant experience is that he has also more than 100 articles, delivered more than 500 presentations and workshops, and led several dozen full foresight projects for a wide range of clients in industry, government, non-profits, and associations.  He also co-founded and is former Chair of the Association of Professional Futurists.