Foresight Principles

There are some fundamental principles that underpin all foresight work - here’s my interpretation of them.

This post identifies the basic principles of foresight work. As with terminology, others in the field may describe these principles differently but the fundamental message remains unchanged.

1. The future is not predetermined, inevitable or fixed. This principle is foundational for foresight work and suggests that as soon as we start to imagine possible futures, we start to influence what sort of futures might emerge. Basically, there are always alternative futures available to us in the present, and we can reasonably expect that the world will continue to transform into the future. That is, the future is not fixed, a position that contrasts to conventional strategy and policy approaches which, by their very nature, generally assume a single linear future, extrapolated from the present – a presentist and ‘present-forward’ approach rather than a futures and ‘futures-present’ stance.

2. The future is uncertain and is not predictable. Predictions are generated by bounded imaginations that …