A Note about Foresight

Focusing on the need to develop foresight capacities to use when we think about futures.

Continuous social change ensures that the present is unlikely to be replicated exactly in any version of the future we can imagine now – connected and influential certainly, but not identical. Thinking about futures therefore requires the capacity to look for both the known as well as the new and novel in the present, seeking understanding of the complexity of social change instead of reducing it to match existing simpler patterns of understanding. It requires a form of thinking that challenges and even disrupts deeply held assumptions, recognises latent futures, and builds new ways of sensemaking that can inform wiser, more considered and futures-inclusive decision making and policy development in the present.

Everyone develops beliefs about how futures might emerge that align with their worldviews, their way of making sense of, and generating meaning about their reality in the present, so the development of foresight capacities will always vary from individual to individual. If we ac…