My first contact with foresight was the day in late 1999 when the Vice-Chancellor at Swinburne University of Technology asked me to “do foresight” – a seemingly innocuous enough request at the time – but it turned out to be a tipping point in my career and my life. The first time I realised the impact of this request was a few years later when someone asked me why I was doing my job leading the integration of foresight approaches into Swinburne’s strategy development framework. I replied:
I do it because it has let me see the world in a new way. I can’t tell you exactly how, I can’t write it down, but I know I see the world differently now. I know I think differently now. And I do it because I like doing it.
I said that off the top of my head which, as close friends know, is a very unusual thing for me to do. It was a bit like a lightning bolt had just jolted me – like the universe was sending me a message. Something deep inside me was changing. I just had to find a way to articulate this shift, but at this point I didn’t entirely understand what was changing.
I had a similar experience when at the end of the first year of Master of Strategic Foresight course that I was studying at Swinburne University. We had to talk about a key takeaway from our first-year experience. I thought ‘what can I say that will make sense?’ and from somewhere in my brain, I said without thinking:
That we are responsible for future generations. That what we do today matters.
I was a bit shocked again at my lack of thinking before speaking and then I thought about why I’d said those particular words. It is a statement that had moved from my unconscious to consciousness. It remains at the core of my futures thinking today and, to a large extent, this book.
I left Swinburne in 2005, and foresight came with me. My career as a university manager was just about over as I ventured further in FS research and work. Since then, over almost 23 years of using foresight in practice, I’ve learned that there are two critical factors for FS. One is the neurological and cognitive capacities we have that allow us to imagine what does not yet exist, and how these capacities are understood and practiced in the present. The second is our ability to use these capacities to think beyond the present to imagine new futures, not because we can then set our course for them, but because they will help us reframe the present – new thinking and new images in the present lead to new actions and perhaps eventually to systems reform.
There are two words that are at the core of what you read in Imagining our Futures: foresight and imagination. What is the relationship between the two? Are they the same, or are they distinctly different in nature? Is there a common denominator? And how can/do we use these capacities in a synchronous way? I’ll leave you with these questions for the moment.