Imagining our Futures - where is it?
A new section for my new book
Hi everyone
A short post to let you know that my Imagining our Futures book chapter posts are now in a separate section called, funnily enough, Imagining our Futures. You can access it from the top navigation bar at any time without having to search for past posts.
And thanks to the folks who have emailed me with feedback on the chapters so far - very much appreciated, very useful, and keep it coming at any time.
Till next time
Maree
Here’s a short extract from Chapter 3 on Finding Foresight for you. I will admit right now that I used to categorise foresight in my consulting work as a term in the way I’m asking you not to in what I have written below. A big worldview shift it was for me.
What is foresight?
I define foresight as a cognitive capacity that we use to think about and imagine new futures in the present, while applied foresight is the explicit design and application of futures processes in which we use our foresight effectively in the contexts being explored. I've been saying this in one form or another since 2008 when I wrote "Foresight informs the thinking that occurs before strategic decisions are made and expands the perceptions of the strategic options or choices available to the organisation." (An Overview of Foresight Methods, 2008, page 1).
As a conscious cognitive capacity, foresight enables us think in new ways and imagine new futures in the present. Applied foresight is the space in which we use our foresight capacities individually and collectively to imagine those futures. Foresight is not the process and we should stop using adjectives which infer that it is – strategic foresight for example.
I use Peter Hayward’s definition of foresight[1]:
a cognitive construct, something that an individual assembles in their consciousness, and then acts as if this construct carries significance for the real world … [it is] a capability which operates to increase the biological continuation of a human organism by reducing risk, employing prudence, and taking care. (Hayward, 2005a, p. 16)
Two things emerge from this definition for me: one that foresight is a capacity that we can use in practice, and two, that its focus on risk, prudence and taking care underpins one of my primary values – that we are all responsible for futures generations and they should inform every decision we make in the present. This point matters because we design futures processes for many contexts in which we then apply our foresight capacities. We are using our foresight to imagine what might be called context futures such as strategic futures, social futures, or environmental futures for example.
We are not designing a particular type of foresight for each context. Our foresight is innate and not a tangible ‘thing’ to be managed and adapted. It is a diachronic capacity that humans have always had, and our understanding of it has evolved over time. At this point in our human history, we are using foresight in one synchronic way in many contexts in the present. How it was used by us in the past was different and how might be used in our futures will be different.
Foresight is a capacity not a process or a field. I know, I'm repeating myself, but I think it’s an important point. We can have as many futures process adapted for a context was we want, but there’s only one type of foresight, no matter how many adjectives are used to categorise it. When the word ‘foresight’ is added to a particular context, such as organisational strategy and strategic foresight, it loses its cognitive power as we unavoidably have to focus on context outcomes, and our ability to find the new and novel in the present declines.
[1] I will accept that my definition of foresight is not used very often, and that the use of ‘foresight’ is now used in so many contexts with so many definitions that it may well have lost its power and impact as a cognitive capacity.