Foresight

Foresight in Practice

A foresight framework is increasingly used by businesses and organizations worldwide, and it is not uncommon to find people with job titles that include “foresight” and foresight-related descriptions. In recent years, for instance, the government of Singapore has established a scenario planning office, the brewing company Fosters Australia has an internal foresight group, and the University of Strathclyde in Scotland has in its business school the Centre for Scenario Planning and Future Studies.

Strategic planners and decision makers apply foresight in many ways and use diverse methodologies for delivering the benefits. The major broad methodologies are scenario planning and scenario thinking, with their accepted lineage from Shell in the seventies and eighties; integral futures as developed by Ken Wilber in the nineties and other devotees of holistic approaches; trend analysis; and frameworks like “three horizons.” Scenarios, or coherent stories or narrative visions that describe plausible future states of the world as environments in which organizations will possibly have to operate, are common to most strategic approaches to the future.

Strategic Contexts

All foresight activities deal with change and are directed at improving our understanding of the future as a context for the development of better quality strategic decisions and evaluations about change being made today. As Pierre Wack described in a landmark article in the Harvard Business Review in 1984, the journey to alternative futures is designed to transform the way one sees the present: to “re-perceive” reality by learning from the future and applying these insights to decision making today.

Foresightful strategists would also do well to recognize that there are three key approaches to strategic development currently within organizations. The first approach follows the logic of “it'll be OK,” whatever happens, in which organizations passively await the future with a sense of optimism. In current debates, the supporters of this approach argue, for example, that the future will not throw up anything that cannot be dealt with using current thinking or current technologies. Technology, it is argued, will save us from the exigencies of climate change, aging, health pandemics, water shortages, and so on. In scenario terms, these are the “brave old world” or “business as usual” scenarios.

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