Foresight Practice

Organizations and communities use lots of models and processes to plan effectively and do work that has a meaningful impact. Think about design thinking or strategic planning.

Foresight practice is increasingly used along these lines - but goes further. Trained futurists or foresight practitioners work with organizations and/or communities to guide them through a process of setting goals (much like in strategic planning) and creating useful models for what they’d like to accomplish (much like in design thinking) but it is distinctly different than each of these approaches in that it considers intense volatility, unpredictability, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) as an inherent aspect of planning. Foresight practice stretches people’s thinking to imagine a variety of futures - never just one. It assumes that plans made, will probably need to change (thus it is inherently agile). It assumes that multiple futures are possible (thus it is inherently imaginative). And finally, it assumes that the future will challenge us (thus it inherently requires individual and collective intellect and learning).

Foresight practice is a combination of scanning the environment to understand trends, and what might be beyond them...and doing creative work of imagining possible futures (preferred, probable, possible...and more), and charting courses most likely to co-create desired futures while avoiding the worst of the undesired futures. Foresight practice is also a collective PRACTICE - not an event. High quality foresight requires the commitment of a collective to explore, challenge each other, rigorously imagine and create together.

Generally, a community or organization decides they want to work together in a new way to explore their shared future. It might be a non-profit who wants to address a social issue a new way, a business that wants to thrive in a turbulent economic future, or a government organization that wants to be ready for new trends in civic life that present emerging challenges.

Once a group gets clear on what their focus will be, the stages of foresight generally include:

1. Exploration of what is happening in the world right now (scanning, gathering and looking for emergent high quality information) with regard to the organization’s focus as well as other “disruptors” that may change the way the organization operates or succeeds.

2. Analyzing what these explorations have netted and looking for patterns in what is discovered. Especially important to look for unexpected intersections between adjacent fields or areas of practice.

3. Interpreting what has been learned which involves looking for deeper meaning and shifts between old ways and emerging ways of operating in the world.

4. Prospective work which refers to putting all of this together in ways that begin to move us into action - but creatively and flexibly so. This might involve doing scenarios based on all the data discovered in earlier stages, designing experiences so that people could even more viscerally “try on” futures and evoke a human response to them, identify deeper cultural trends regarding desired and undesired futures and beyond

5. Joining all of this together in highly agile planning processes that prepare (as much as possible) for multiple futures simultaneously, and that intentionally build in continuous learning and adjustment to the path forward to keep any planning nimble, evolving based on emerging new information and taking advantage of creative opportunities (or responding to unexpected threats) that might arise. Once all of this has been done, much of futures work becomes evolving change management to work towards desired futures while simultaneously working against undesired ones.*

Increasingly, foresight practice is called to democratize and pluralize its methods to be both transparent and include more breadth of voices. The issue of “who gets to decide the future” is relevant - and a call to examine and account for power and equity dynamics in co-creation of desired futures is essential.

*Appreciation to Maree Conway and her terrific brief but robust guide to futures practice available on the web that inspired this summary.