Some Advice about Using Foresight

Some good advice about getting started with using foresight from my connections on LinkedIn.

I recently asked my connections on LinkedIn two questions:

1. If you have just discovered foresight and futures approaches and are now keen to use these approaches in your work, what do you need to know to get started?

2. If you already use foresight and futures approaches, what do you know now that you wished you'd known when you were starting out?

Here are their summarised responses with some very good advice:

Self

• Deepen understanding of yourself – your worldview, values, preferences, assumptions about futures. See foresight as a personal journey, a way of thinking and a mindset. Understand your own biases and assumptions.

• Testing your worldviews and assumptions is a destabilising, uncomfortable process and that is normal as you build “a deeper capacity for sense-making and imagining richer possibilities.”

• Using Personal Foresight is useful for individuals.

Competencies

• Develop critical reflection skills, the ability to step back of observe your own behaviour and to challenge your assumptio…