Foresight Manual: Empowered Futures for the 2030 Agenda
(excerpts — Download the guide)
Published by the Global Center for Public Service Excellence, Singapore in Feb 2018
A. Introduction
Foresight is the umbrella term for those innovative strategic planning, policy formulation and solution design methods that don’t predict or forecast the future, but work with alternative futures…
The premise of foresight is that the future is still in the making and can be actively influenced or even created, rather than what has already been decided, there only to unearth and discover, and passively accepted as a given.
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10 things we need to know about the future/s
1. Future cannot be fully predicted — most things we think we know about the future tends to be extrapolation of current trends, which is based on past data — so we should not be looking at the rear-mirror when driving forward.
2. There are no evidence or facts from the future (we create the future as we experience it) — we should be thinking about futures in terms of different (often conflicting) personal and group perspectives, frames of references, and “images”.
3. The future should be “pluralized” — there is not one, but multiple alternative futures — so, in the broader scope of all possible futures, some are more probable or plausible, some are less so. Normative (preferable) futures are those that stakeholders aspire to create.
4. Very often, useful ideas and “images” of the future tend to seem ridiculous in the present exactly because they were “not expected” — therefore, foresight should challenge existing beliefs, values, mindsets, and behaviour to avoid being trapped in “business as usual”.
5. Technology is not the future — how we use existing (and develop new) technologies will determine their future implications.
6. The future belongs to the curious — those who see beyond existing systems and thinking patterns.
7. Future is the process, not a destination — you cannot “reach” the future or “arrive” there: there will always be another ten years into the future.
8. Historically, most trends died out relatively quickly, while most important events and that did reshape the future started as barely noticeable, “weak signals” of change.
9. For every future that will happen there are hundreds of expected futures that will not happen — so we always need plan B (and C and D, etc.).
10. The worst thing is to live somebody else’s past thinking it is your future.
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Participatory foresight at the civil society level enables greater citizen engagement and feedback, thus encouraging the co-creation of equitable and sustainable public service solutions, as well as an inclusive, whole-of-society approach to governance.
C. Doing Foresight Well
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Foresight should not become forecasting that extrapolates past data into the future and focused predominantly on feasibility, as seen from the current vantage point.
Instead, we should “pluralize” the future by entering into the whole broad space of possible futures and then recognize the legitimacy of different stakeholders’ to have their own future perspectives and aspirations.
Organizing for foresight
At the very start, we need to identify the purpose, format, and methodological approach of our foresight activities. The most common ones are presented below — for less ambitious foresight the choice of one for each should be made, but the options can be combined for more advanced foresight methodologies.
