Biography of Vahid V. Motlagh

Iranian translator and futurist, is a decision consultant and chief analyst at AtiNegaar Think Tank, Tehran, Iran.

Vahid Vahidi Motlagh was born on May 20 in 1979 in Qom, the largest center for Shi'a Islam scholarship in the world. The city lies 156 km by road southwest of Tehran, the capital of Iran.

Motlagh was educated in the public schools of Qom. Upon graduating form Moallem High School his interest in and curiosity about science and technology led him to consider universities instead of seminaries to pursue his formal education.  

In 1997 Iran was in the process of reconstruction after the Iran-Iraq war and Motlagh was just beginning to forget all the sad news and atrocities that virtually took the scene of every day life after Iranian Revolution in 1979. In the summer he took part in the nation-wide examination for entrance to state universities. Motlagh could get a relatively top score and was admitted to the prestigious technical university of Iran, Sharif University of Technology in Tehran to major in civil engineering.

It was a thrilling experience for him to learn a lot from professors
as well as from his fellows in the classrooms and the dormitory. In 1999 something unexpected happened and later radically changed his prospective career. His father, a daily paid worker in bakeries, got sick and suffered from severe depression. As the first son he had to take over many of his responsibilities.

Motlagh began searching for some kind of freelance job. The good command of English and written Persian led him to a job position as a translator and editor in a think tank. The think tank, IranAsef.org, was established and run by a veteran R&D manager, Aghil Malekifar, who envisaged contributing to a knowledge-based society in Iran by “offering a unique blend of interdisciplinary research in futures studies”.

The multiple tasks at IranAsef, among them the translation of some chapters of “New Thinking for a New Millennium” and monitoring RAND’s updates, opened his mind to a new field of knowledge that, in his view, could be more "effective" than civil engineering. In fact he gradually realized that people could design and maintain physical structures through applying the hard knowledge of civil engineering, but through applying the soft knowledge of policy analysis only a few number of wise men and women could design and sustain social structures and even engage themselves in "nation-building" projects. In terms of technology, which is broadly defined as an area of research and action that aims to transform natural or social reality, he tended to focus on “soft technologies” that could potentially transform social instead of physical realities.

Later on he asked the family to emigrate from Qom to Tehran. After family emigration his time was shared among policy-relevant documents, civil engineering courses, and family affairs. Nonetheless, as an autodidact, his education in futures studies, decision analysis, and strategic planning continued in IranAsef and reached a milestone by translation of "Value-Focused Thinking" by Ralph L. Keeney into Persian. Value-Focused Thinking had been used as the primary decision making method in a major Scenario Planning project for the US Air Force called “Air Force 2025”. His translation of this book introduced him as a young member of policy analysis circles in Iran. The good news was that, because of his contributions to the think tank, he received two national gold prizes, one for his outstanding intellectual achievement, and the other for the best scientific book translated by a university student. And the bad news was that he received an official warning letter issued by the civil engineering department that indicated a pending expulsion.

Right before cutting off his professional relationships with IranAsef  in 2003, he also translated "Global Technology Revolution" and "Shaping the Next One Hundred Years", both published by RAND, into Persian language.

Motlagh finally managed to graduate from Sharif University of Technology in 2003 and shortly after was conscripted into the I.R. Iran Police Forces. While working in the R&D office of the education department in command headquarters, he started blogging regularly about science and technology trends and events, decision making techniques, and socioeconomic images and actions. Motlagh, according to MohammadReza Mirzaamini, President of Sharif Think Tank, “is among the first who has seriously promoted futures studies in the Iranian communities as his writings and translations have benefited experts and laypersons equally well”.

After a couple of months of blogging, he accepted an offer by Hussein Mola from the Iranian Futurist Foundation (Ayandehnegar.org), based in Stockholm, to transform his weblog into a website, VahidThinkTank.com, just to better and more easily share his knowledge with other Iranians and Persian-speaking individuals around the globe. Through this media he began to carry the futures message to the public at large. Today this media is a popular website among Iranian and Persian-speaking individuals who look for updates and state-of-the-art in futures studies.

In addition to translating, editing, publishing, and offering short seminars, Motlagh has been involved in strategy consulting projects and long-term planning for both public and private clients such as the Center for High Tech Industries, General Inspection Organization, Electric Power Technology Development Center, and Institute for International Energy Studies in Iran.

In a recent contribution, he was involved in a project supported by the Center for High Tech Industries to “identify and design the optimal algorithm for Foresight exercises” with an emphasis on Road Mapping and Scenario Planning methods.

They focused on the identification of key dimensions of scenario planning projects as they have appeared in the pioneering works of van der Heijden, Wack, Slaughter, Slocum, Fulton, Mason, Fahey, Randall, Dammers, Huss, Horton, List, Steinmüller, van Notten, Godet, and Roubelat. There are a number of variables which ought to be considered before kicking off a new project, especially in order to provide strategic intelligence on the road map of technology development. Some of these variables belong to the general class of objectives, for example learning vs. planning, competitor focused vs. environment focused vs. organization focused. Others belong to the general class of approaches such as normative vs. explorative, qualitative vs. quantitative, intuition-based vs. data-based and so on. And finally, policy analysts have to deal with the context specific variables, for instance, organization cultures which can be classified into leader-driven, plan-driven, and evidence-driven organizations. Having a good knowledge of these variables, they did a cross impact analysis to determine the most affecting variables and the most affected variables. The findings helped them recommend a general algorithm for the high tech sectors of Iran and pick among the most common approaches for scenario planning (i.e. Intuition Logic, Trend Impact Logic, and Cross Impact Logic).

In 2007 Motlagh became the editor in chief of the Persian Encyclopedia of Futures. The encyclopedia, including more than 150 entries, is a proprietary product and ownership is partly for AtiNegaar Think Tank, a private consultancy specialized in Technology Foresight, Roadmapping, and Scenario Planning, to which Motlagh is currently affiliated. The major aim of the encyclopedia is to create and maintain a knowledge base of futures studies for Persian-speaking professionals. Motlagh focused on key words, biography of the notable thinkers, profile of the notable institutes, and also introduced in detail some suggested and common methods.

Motlagh was introduced to the World Futures Studies Federation by Richard Slaughter from Australia and Wendell Bell from the USA and became a member as of August 2007.

“In a world where the importance of integrity seems to be lacking with many in government and business, Moltagh seems to have developed "old-fashioned" integrity standards.” said Ralph Keeney, Research Professor of Decision Sciences, in 2006 in a supporting letter for him. Keeney added, “Motlagh is very creative and has numerous intellectual abilities”.

He is currently single and lives with his parents in Tehran.

Primary influences

Motlagh's first experience with the futures occurred as soon as he was 17 years old, when he bought a Persian translation of Future Sock by Alvin Toffler from a bookstore in Qom. Although this book was partly fascinating he felt unsatisfied because of the absence of a reasonably cogent theory behind the author’s claims. However, his later exposure to a number of professional works and his direct involvement in the translation of a few books helped him to extend and deepen his knowledge. The bellow list is a collection of some important books which have shaped his thinking and ideas about futures studies.

1- Keeney, Ralph L. 1992, “Value-Focused Thinking: A Path to Creative Decisionmaking”, Harvard University Press.

In this book, Keeney shows how recognizing and articulating fundamental values can lead to the identification of decision opportunities and the creation of better alternatives. The intent is to be proactive and to select more attractive decisions to ponder before attempting any solutions. Keeney describes specific procedures for articulating values by identifying and structuring objectives qualitatively, and he shows how to apply these procedures in various cases. Value-Focused Thinking was used in 1995 as the primary decision-making method in a major Scenario Planning project by the US Air Force, namely Air Force 2025.

2- Slaughter, Richard A. 1996, “New Thinking for a New Millennium” Routledge.

This book is a collection of insightful articles by leading futurists who began their career back in 1970s. The authors discuss the history, the premises, and the key works of  futures movement across the globe. They also offer a number of guidelines for critical study and research of the futures in order to promote the culture of foresight and social innovation.

3- Bell, Wendell 2003, “Foundations of Futures Studies: Vol. 1 “History, Purposes, and Knowledge”, Transaction Publishers.

In this book, Bell compiles a comprehensive introduction to the field. He masterfully covers its history, basic assumptions and promises. Bell also reviews and examines the epistemological issues of post-post-positivism in the philosophy of science and art as far as they are relevant to futures studies and practices.

4-Schwartz, Peter 1991 “The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World”, Doubleday Currency.

The author reviews his first-hand experience of working in Shell’s planning department back in 1970s. He claims that the best way to prepare for the future is Scenario Planning and suggests an intuition-based step by step method to accomplish this.

5-Schwartz, Peter 2003, “Inevitable Surprises”, Gotham

Schwartz in this book argues that the future is foreseeable, and that by examining the dynamics at work today we can predict the inevitable surprises of tomorrow. He gives some intriguing examples of such surprises that lie ahead in the horizon.

6-Dewar, James, 2002 “Assumption-Based Planning: A Tool for Reducing Avoidable Surprises”, Cambridge University Press

Assumption-based planning (ABP) is a tool for identifying as many as possible assumptions underlying the plans of an organization and bringing them explicitly into the planning process. Dewar presents a variety of techniques for rooting out those vulnerable, crucial assumptions. He also presents steps for monitoring the vulnerable assumptions of a plan by taking actions to control them where possible and preparing for potential failure where control is not possible.

7-Anton, Philip, S., Richard Silberglitt, James Schneider, 2001, “The Global Technology Revolution: Bio/Nano/Materials Trends and Their Synergies with Information Technology by 2015”, RAND

A global technology revolution is currently changing the world. This book discusses the broad, multidisciplinary, and synergistic trends in this revolution, including genomics, cloning, biomedical engineering, smart materials, agile manufacturing, nanofabricated computation devices, and integrated micro systems.

8-Cornish, Edward, 2005, “Futuring: The Exploration of the Future”, The World Future Society.

This book is a readable and understandable introduction to the field for the lay persons. Cornish captures some important issues such as the negative influence of fatalism in every day life of people and the role of futurists to correct this mind-set through applying their rational and analytical tools for exploration of tomorrow’s world.

9- Lempert, Robert J, Steven W. Popper, Steven C. Bankes, 2003, “Shaping the Next One Hundred Years: New Methods for Quantitative, Long-Term Policy Analysis”, RAND

The checkered history of predicting the future has dissuaded policymakers from considering the effects of their decisions more than a few months or years ahead. Lempert and his colleagues at RAND review weaknesses and strengths of traditional methods, from narratives to scenario analysis, and show that all of them fail to address the multiplicity of plausible long-term futures. They reframe the question "What will the long-term future bring?" as "How can we choose actions today that will be consistent with our long-term interests?”. The major theme of this book is to demonstrate how human-machine cooperative reasoning provides powerful analytic support to humans' innate capacity for "what-if-ing."

10- Kurzweil, Ray, 2006, “The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology”

Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of transhumanism who emphasizes the role of technology in our future. He examines the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations.