A Focus on Conversations about Futures

This site and my business website Foresight Futures are designed around my belief that before we embark on any foresight exercise - developing scenarios for example - we need to add a preliminary step where we first consider how we think about futures.

Most good foresight processes are designed to challenge our assumptions about futures that cause us to accept some futures as plausible and reject others. But often it's a process undertaken for an organisation or group rather than individuals. Yet it is our assumptions - biases, mindsets, whatever you want to call them - that will shape not only our thinking about futures but also our actions and decisions in the present. And if is often the futures we reject that seem to emerge over time - or bits of them anyway.

My PhD research led me to neuroscience and while it is very clear that we all have the neurological capacity to imagine possible futures (episodic foresight) and locate ourselves in future mental spaces, and remember them when …