Foresight is not an approach
It's our capacity to think about and imagine futures in the present: nothing more, nothing less
I suspect what I’m writing about here is too late to explore. A case of shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted.
The term foresight is a well-used one but its use in the context of thinking about futures is, for me, quite specific: foresight is a cognitive construct, one that is grounded in an innate human capacity to imagine new futures. We apply foresight in any range of contexts to help people think about futures in the present.
When this capacity becomes conscious, we are developing futures consciousness and have commenced our journey towards futures literacy. We apply our foresight in futures processes to recognise and challenge the assumptions we use when we think about futures, the ones that now constrain our thinking to what we assume and believe to be true in the present about ‘the future’.
Today, strategic foresight and many other adjectives are now used to define the purpose and/or outcomes of using foresight. We use our foresight to achieve strategic outcomes for example. That makes a kind of sense. What I see more and more though, is the mistake of defining foresight as an approach, or a method.
This latter way of using foresight turns it into another process, rather than a cognitive capacity. Search for the phrase “foresight in futures studies” and you will see that it is often combined with the futures thinking - in the sense that foresight informs that thinking. That makes sense. But it’s also designated as a ‘tool’, ‘the application of futures studies methods and techniques’, ‘planning oriented’, ‘a practice’, ‘a process’ and even ‘futures studies’. And more recently, I read that strategic foresight was equivalent to futures studies - which it very definitely is not.
Now I have been guilty of using foresight in this latter way in the past, especially when I was starting out in 2000. Foresight was the term given to me by my boss to find a way to integrate ‘it’ into our planning framework. So, I started out thinking foresight was a ‘thing’ not a cognitive capability. But over time, and with experience, I came to realise that the success of futures processes is not only about finding trends, constructing scenarios or informing planning; it is also about how we can move beyond our cognitive constraints and ask new questions and find new actions in the present. The imagination we use (or don’t use) to construct images of futures is as important (if not more so) as the futures we define in scenario development.
When I set up my business in 2007, I convinced myself my aim was to help people think differently about our futures by applying our foresight in futures processes. That said, it’s taken me until the last few years to recognise what foresight is and what it is not - and how its usage is now so confused that it’s quickly losing its value and power to expand and deepen our thinking and our imaginations about futures. We lack awareness that we now use this cognitive capacity as a thing, a tool, a process which actually constrains our thinking and our imaginations - and we risk losing sight of the new, the different and the emergent in the present as a result.
Our futures are unknowable and there are no future facts. There is no certainty, no control, so simplicity - whatever emerges will emerge. The only thing over which we can exert any degree of control in the present is our thinking and the actions that emerge from that thinking. Just as scenario development as it is practiced today was originally designed to generate mind shifts and reperceiving the present in individuals, the reason for developing our foresight capacities is to enable us to think in new ways, find new perspectives and then take new actions in the present.
It is about using our imaginations to inform thinking about futures, challenging assumptions, and ultimately informing how we can reframe the present.
Why does this matter? Because a primary aim of futures work is to ensure an ontological expansion occurs in the minds of participants in the room as well as achieving a tangible outcome for clients.
How to frame a way to allow us to begin to challenge our lack of awareness about the cognitive constraints of the present (primarily, our tacit assumptions about futures) is now my work. The frame I’m trying to develop links worldviews, assumptions and foresight to make explicit how we can begin to expand our thinking and our imaginations about futures. As I’ve (sadly) written often before, it’s a work in progress, but it will be finished this year.