Pondering futures processes

Some thoughts about futures processes, foresight and assumptions

Photo by Sarah Kilian on Unsplash

I have just been reading LinkedIn posts and I was getting more and more depressed. I read a strategic foresight report that included scenarios, the narratives of which were supposed to be located in 2040 … except that they were so like the present with a few tweaks that they were ridiculous. I thought if this is the limit of our imaginations in the present we are truly in trouble.

I then read a paper I was reviewing for a journal about introducing foresight in a university degree, with a standard format and no mention of expanding and deepening our thinking in the present. It was focused on the process not the mindset shift that all futures processes should be aiming for - which is the norm now I think. Perhaps strategic foresight processes have been formularised to the degree that we’ve forgotten how to expand our thinking by engaging our foresight - a bit like strategic planning, a term that just won’t go away.

Then I started to wonder why I was even writing here on Foresight in the Present, if what I’m reading is all that there is. What has to change in the systems we have created in futures work for thinking and imagination to become central to the design of all futures process? Talking about mind shifts isn’t enough. We need to enact ways to allow this shift to happen in our futures processes.

---

Because I write about futures, my mind shifts are related to finding new ways of thinking, new perspectives and new action in the present to change our systems that shape our processes. It’s about making our foresight conscious, able to be applied to the present to move beyond the systems we now regard as the norm. And it’s about challenging our assumptions.

There are four assumption sets as shown in this figure which is what I’m working on at the moment.

Most of the things I read on LinkedIn don’t challenge these assumptions or do so in a mostly superficial way - particularly in organisations where assumptions are often not open to dispute. And making those assumptions open to dispute is what I’m try to do with this new framework I am finally putting together in a way I now think makes sense. More about that soon.

Finally, I remembered while writing this a post I wrote in 2010 that I keep editing over the years - the characteristics of futures thinkers - which explores the types of mind shifts we need to make to achieve new perspectives - and how we need to challenge our existing assumptions about futures in our futures processes.

And back to the pondering - what is my role, my space in enacting ways to enable our foresight to be conscious and our futures processes to have new thinking at their core? And what is yours?