20 Years of Using Foresight
In a FuturePod podcast recently, I was asked about how my career in the foresight field has emerged, stalled and shifted over time.
This article was originally a blog post, and is a personal reflection on what I’ve learned from 20 years of doing futures work. Much of what I write here you will find in other articles, so this might be viewed as a summary of sorts.
I have been working with people and foresight since 1999, when I had to look up what ‘foresight’ meant in a strategic sense. I’ve worked with a lot of people in a lot of countries. I’ve received good feedback and some not so good, and when the latter happened, it was deserved. I’ve run successful webinars on how to use foresight in practice and generated a set of resources that are available to paid subscribers. I’ve written a book about using foresight that’s been received well. I’ve redesigned my business approach to focus more on project work based on strong relationships with people. I finally finished my PhD on the future for the university, a long held passion. So I’m doing okay.
In a recent FuturePod podcast, I was asked about how my career in the foresight field has emerged, stalled and shifted over time. That set me thinking about what I’ve been doing and what I’ve learned over these past 20 years. Here are some things that I have come to believe, and that I will take with me as my work continues to evolve.
Our Foresight Capacities
We cannot predict the future and we should - must - stop trying.
There is no such thing as THE future, and we should stop talking about it. That locks us into comfort zone thinking and stops us engaging our imaginations. There are always multiple possible futures available to us in the present. Futures is the term from now on.
Comfort zone thinking is a trap, a really bad trap if we want to anticipate the future in the present and build a better world, or organisation, or city or nation, or …
Comfort zone thinking also makes us anxious about THE future, and that shuts down our thinking and our openness to other emergent futures in the present.
Our imaginations matter as much as hard data when it comes to thinking about the future and becoming futures ready. Yes, really.
Our action or inaction in the present is what shapes the future - foresight and action always go together. That was drummed into us by Joseph Voros at Swinburne University and I’m grateful.
Building Strategy
No single mind is ever wise enough to generate a future strategy for an organisation. Anticipating the future is always a collaborative and participative effort and needs as diverse a group of people in the room and the conversation as you can manage.
People in organisations care about the organisation’s possible future as much as the leaders. They can think strategically if given the time, information and opportunity. I have rarely seen a person not engage actively with a scenario thinking process - even if they at first thought it was a waste of time.
Good strategy starts with the people who have to implement it. A strategy that only the leaders own is bound to fail. Strategy without people at its core has no future.
Feeling a strategy is a more important indicator of the success of a strategic plan than the words in the plan. People have to integrate the future in the plan into their image of the future - words alone don’t do that.
Working with People
Some people have open minds about the future, some people don’t. Some people with closed minds can open them to the future, others can’t. The person you talk with about working in an organisation must be from the first group or it’s not worth your time.
Walk-in, walk-out engagements (keynote speaking, facilitating workshops) have little long term value for me and it’s not where I can have a meaningful impact. For others, they make perfect sense and help them build lucrative careers.
People need to experience a foresight process to understand its power. Conversations about futures must be conversations with a purpose and part of a broader process that anticipates the future.
Designing foresight processes collaboratively is essential but hard work, particularly in hierarchical organisations where process and position usually reign supreme. On the positive side, staying open minded in that design process usually results in improvements to my thinking and process design.
Writing about Foresight
There’s a lot of writing about foresight, and it’s not all good. Most of the ‘not good’ is superficial and doesn’t seek to challenge peoples comfort zone assumptions, a prerequisite to becoming futures ready.
There’s a lot of good work about foresight, what it is and why it is valuable for organisations contemplating their strategy. There are blogs and books (mine included) that provide frameworks and methods to use foresight approaches in practice or case studies (which I continue to think have limited value) but too many to detail in this post.
Good writing about foresight is essential but is it enough? Reflecting is the first step, building our foresight capacities and doing/using foresight approaches has to follow. Taking action without first surfacing and building our foresight capacities won’t change much.
I have challenged myself to move out of my comfort zones quite a few times in the past (it’s not easy), and with the power of client feedback, honest reflections about outcomes, and how I feel about my experiences, I have a pretty good idea about how to keep refreshing what I do to find that elusive place in the global foresight conversation I am still seeking. I will of course trust emergence (another thank you to Joseph Voros).