Designing Foresight Processes

Some ideas for getting starting using your foresight.

While foresight processes are designed to achieve some sort of desired outcome - scenarios, strategic options, increased awareness of possible futures - the focus here is an outcome that surfaces and uses our foresight capacities.

This means the process has to ensure that we can:

• recognise the formative assumptions we use when we are thinking about futures;

• understand there are different types of assumptions we can use when we are creating futures in the present - and that these assumptions produce different types of futures for different purposes depending on context and desired outcomes;

• begin to build our futures literacy, probably the most important skill we need to exercise in any futures process; and

• reframe our understanding of the present based on our expanded sense of assumptions.

This expanded thinking about futures then not only expands our perceptions of possible futures but also allows us to find new perspectives and new actions in the present. Fundamentally, what we want to ha…