Efforts to improve decision-making and public debate by thinking
about longer term trends and the long-term implications of
short-term decisions have a long history. Likewise, efforts to
envisage desirable futures and directions of social development
go back several centuries - though earlier utopias were usually
located in far-off lands or on other worlds. Yet these efforts
were usually one-off exercises. In the early nineteenth century,
the classical political economists argued at great length about
the future of capitalist economies, but as the industrial
revolution was consolidated, social sciences tended to become
fragmented and more focused on the short-term.
In the decades on either side of the Second World War there were
a series of major developments in social and technological
forecasting, and subsequently in futures studies. By the 1930s
many of the principles of trend extrapolation and social
indicators were established, and by the 1960s methods of expert
analysis such as Delphi and cross-impact, and the first computer
simulation studies, were beginning to be well-known. "Futures
studies" was established - not without some resistance from
traditional disciplines - as a set of methods that sort to be
more holistic than most forecasting exercises. Futures work sees
to connect together various driving forces, trends, and
conditioning factors so as to envisage alternative futures
(rather than predict thefuture). Futures studies have
waxed and waned in terms of fashions in methods and popularity,
and been strongly influenced by the rise of issues such as
environmental problems and new technologies. They have often
found influential proponents in the military and large
corporations - both of whom have interests in strategic analysis
across a wide spectrum of problems - as well as in government
and academia.
The term ‘Foresight’ has been used increasingly in a specific
way since the late 1980s. The term refers to approaches to
informing decision-making, by improving inputs concerning the
longer-term future and by drawing on wider social networks than
has been the case in much “futures studies” or long-range
planning.
With the success of a number of Foresight exercises, it has
become common for the term “Foresight” to be used to cover all
sorts of activities – there has been much re-branding of
technology watch, environmental scanning, forecasting and
similar activities as Foresight. We can use the term
“Fully-Fledged Foresight” to describe those approaches that go
beyond these more narrow methods:
To bring together key agents of change and sources of
knowledge. This is liable to mean a wide variety of
stakeholders – often going well beyond the narrow sets of
experts employed in many traditional futures studies and
planning exercises.
These agents are brought together so as to develop
strategic visions and what is termed anticipatory
intelligence. Structured approaches are employed to
focus on long-term social, economic and technological
developments and the challenges they pose; feasible and
desirable options are explored. The methods of analysis are
interactive and participative.
One set of outputs of this process is results that
can help policy-making and priority setting, relating these
strategic visions to present-day decisions. The formal
results may include such outputs as scenarios, action plans,
priority lists. The guiding strategic visions are
fundamental to this, however; the Foresight process –
especially in its networking of people – should have helped
establish a shared sense of commitment to these. (In other
words, there will be not only understanding of the issues,
but “ownership” of the analysis as to what is feasible and
desirable.) This shared vision is not a utopia: feasibility
and desirability have to be combined. There has to be
explicit recognition and explication of the implications for
present day decisions and actions.
Another type of output is more informal, but can equally be
part of the explicit objectives of Foresight. It involves
the establishment of networks among the agents concerned.
These networks should allow for members to share awareness
of each other’s knowledge resources, strategic orientations,
and visions of the future. They should provide new knowledge
communities that can act to deal with long-term challenges.
Some Foresight programs use networks merely to help develop
and disseminate their formal results. Others take network
establishment to be an equally, or even more, important
achievement in its own right. The aim may be, for example,
to establish better linkages between people active in
various areas of social innovation, so as to enable them to
share and understand each other’s orientation towards longer
term perspectives.
Fully-Fledged Foresight places emphasis on policy networking as
well as on longer-term analyses to inform present-day decisions.
Not everything that is called Foresight does this, however,
whether in companies or as a national program. In practice,
Foresight exercises may be more limited – at a cost.
Notes:
Miles, Ian & Keenan, Michael. Handbook of Knowledge Society
Foresight, PREST, October 2002, p. 33-34
