How can foresight help us imagine the future?

For organ­isa­tions, wheth­er in the private or pub­lic sec­tor, adapt­ing to the future can seem like an impossible task. The chal­lenge is to be agile and resi­li­ent in the face of a future that will be sub­ject to change, and which often seems more wor­ry­ing than desir­able. Indeed, con­tem­por­ary crises (cli­mate, biod­iversity, health, energy, access to resources) are expos­ing play­ers and organ­isa­tions to ever-great­er ten­sions between, on the one hand, rap­id and effect­ive decisions rooted in the present and, on the oth­er, the need to pro­ject into the future to avoid the solu­tions adop­ted turn­ing into new dead-ends. The future thus appears to be a prob­lem­at­ic tem­por­al cat­egory for organ­isa­tions: can we anti­cip­ate, guess at or pre­dict the future? How can we think about a future that is a pri­ori unknown and plur­al? Can the future be thought about and con­ceived with­in organ­isa­tions? It is pre­cisely to these ques­tions that foresight approaches and prac­tices attempt to provide some answers.

The concept of “foresight” was developed by the French philo­soph­er and seni­or civil ser­vant Gaston Ber­ger (1896–1960) in the 1950s. Before becom­ing a meth­od or a dis­cip­line, for Gaston Ber­ger, foresight was an atti­tude¹, a state of mind that led to the pre­par­a­tion of action in the present based on reflec­tion on pos­sible or desir­able futures. It is not a ques­tion of pre­dict­ing the future, but of cre­at­ing a dia­logue between the present and the future to build a desir­able out­look. The foresight approach is based on five principles:

• See­ing far ahead: think­ing about the dis­tant future (gen­er­ally 10–50 years ahead) so as not to lim­it ourselves to the imme­di­ate con­sequences of cur­rent decisions.

• Think­ing broadly: favour­ing mul­tidiscip­lin­ary approaches to take account of the plur­al­ity of view­points and avoid reductionism.

• Think deep: identi­fy the decis­ive factors so as not to suc­cumb to extra­pol­a­tion or analogy.

• Tak­ing risks: agree­ing to chal­lenge received wis­dom to gain great­er free­dom of thought. 

• Think­ing about people: pay­ing atten­tion to the role of people and the respons­ib­il­ity they bear.

Along with Gaston Ber­ger, Ber­trand de Jouven­el (1903–1987) was the oth­er lead­ing fig­ure in the French school of foresight. In 1960, he foun­ded the inter­na­tion­al asso­ci­ation Futuribles (a con­trac­tion of “futures” and “pos­sible”), which was ini­tially fun­ded by the Ford Found­a­tion. For Jouven­el, foresight is not about mak­ing uto­pi­an pro­jec­tions. Foresight should be an “art” that enables real­ist­ic fore­casts to be drawn up to sup­port decision-mak­ing and the man­age­ment of change.

Dur­ing the same peri­od, foresight approaches also developed in the USA under the impetus of Her­man Kahn, Theodore Gor­don, and Olaf Helmer at the RAND Cor­por­a­tion. The RAND Cor­por­a­tion developed sev­er­al form­al­ised meth­ods, the best known of which are the Delphi meth­od and the scen­ario meth­od². Developed in the 1960s to deal with the uncer­tainty weigh­ing on the devel­op­ment of weapons sys­tems in a tense polit­ic­al and geo­pol­it­ic­al con­text, the Delphi meth­od involves gath­er­ing and com­par­ing the opin­ions of experts on an iden­ti­fied prob­lem. The aim is to reach a form of con­sensus through a series of iter­at­ive ques­tion­naires, giv­ing respond­ents the oppor­tun­ity to revise and, if neces­sary, defend their judge­ment. The scen­ario meth­od is an “ima­gin­a­tion aid”³, the aim of which is to con­struct images of future situ­ations based on the iden­ti­fic­a­tion of a series of plaus­ible and coher­ent events.

Ini­tially, these tools were used in mil­it­ary or pub­lic policy con­texts, but they were soon applied to the eco­nom­ic and social sphere, par­tic­u­larly with­in major groups such as Shell or Gen­er­al Elec­trics and inter­na­tion­al insti­tu­tions (UN, UNESCO, UNITAR and the OECD, for example). The spread of French and Amer­ic­an futures stud­ies led to the cre­ation of sev­er­al struc­tures, includ­ing the World Future Soci­ety in 1966, the Club of Rome in 1968 (which com­mis­sioned the fam­ous Mead­ows report on the lim­its to growth)⁴, the Copen­ha­gen Insti­tute for Futures Stud­ies in 1969, the Swedish Sec­ret­ari­at for Futures Stud­ies in 1971 and the World Futures Stud­ies Fed­er­a­tion in 1973.

Foresight is con­cerned with dif­fer­ent types of future (Fig­ure 1)⁵: pos­sible, plaus­ible, prob­able, and desir­able. Pos­sible futures are dis­tinct from absurd or impossible futures that do not respect the ele­ment­ary laws of phys­ics. Pos­sible futures are, how­ever, mul­tiple, plur­al and may break with his­tor­ic­al tra­ject­or­ies. They depend on future know­ledge and char­ac­ter­ise what could hap­pen with a high degree of uncer­tainty. Plaus­ible futures are likely futures that are con­sist­ent with the present situ­ation. They remain uncer­tain but can occur giv­en the cur­rent state of know­ledge or con­sid­er­ing known unknowns. Prob­able futures are a cat­egory of futures that are an exten­sion of cur­rent trends. Finally, desir­able or prefer­able futures char­ac­ter­ise pos­sible or plaus­ible futures that are expli­citly derived from value judge­ments. Since value sys­tems dif­fer greatly from one per­son to anoth­er and from one organ­isa­tion to anoth­er, this cat­egory of future is highly depend­ent on the indi­vidu­als involved in con­struct­ing it.

Far from being a gen­er­al the­ory of the future, foresight has mainly developed through the gradu­al emer­gence of a mul­ti­tude of het­ero­gen­eous meth­ods and prac­tices. The Foresight Dia­mond (fig­ure 2) pos­i­tions foresight meth­ods accord­ing to four types of dimen­sions (cre­ativ­ity, inter­ac­tion, expert­ise and evid­ence)⁶. These meth­ods are not incom­pat­ible, but com­ple­ment­ary, and their uses depend on the object­ives and con­texts in which they are used. They can be quant­it­at­ive, qual­it­at­ive, or even semi-quant­it­at­ive. A single foresight exer­cise may involve between 5 and 6 dif­fer­ent meth­ods. The inter­me­di­ate products of one meth­od are often taken up at oth­er stages of the scen­ario devel­op­ment pro­cess, pro­du­cing import­ant syn­er­gies and encour­aging the integ­ra­tion of mul­tiple per­spect­ives⁷.

For example, bench­mark­ing, pat­ent ana­lys­is and bib­li­o­met­ric ana­lys­is of aca­dem­ic lit­er­at­ure are quant­it­at­ive approaches based on the use of data, inform­a­tion, and quant­it­at­ive indic­at­ors. They aim to build up a state of the art on a par­tic­u­lar issue or theme to be explored. Quant­it­at­ive or semi-quant­it­at­ive approaches can be described as pre­dict­ive or explor­at­ory. They are pre­dict­ive when they are asso­ci­ated with fore­cast­ing or plan­ning pro­jects. They are explor­at­ory when the aim is to identi­fy inter­ac­tions between dif­fer­ent types of phe­nom­ena to uncov­er pos­sible or plaus­ible futures.

Qual­it­at­ive approaches rely on ima­gin­a­tion and cre­ativ­ity and tend to be norm­at­ive in scope. The aim is to seek out and exam­ine pos­sible and desir­able futures rather than prob­able ones. The res­ults of this type of approach are then used to determ­ine what actions need to be taken to make this desir­able future a real­ity. For example, the back­cast­ing meth­od involves design­ing a desir­able future and then ima­gin­ing the vari­ous stages and decisions that would make it hap­pen⁸.

Foresight dif­fers from con­ven­tion­al fore­cast­ing and plan­ning prac­tices. It attaches par­tic­u­lar import­ance to the pro­cess itself, dur­ing which areas of uncer­tainty are iden­ti­fied. These areas of uncer­tainty are then explored using foresight tools and meth­ods, and it is dur­ing this explor­a­tion that par­ti­cipants build or acquire a shared vis­ion of the future that sup­ports them in their present decision-mak­ing. This shared vis­ion of the future will then be used with­in the organ­isa­tion to sup­port know­ledge cre­ation, decision-mak­ing, stra­tegic ori­ent­a­tion and change man­age­ment pro­cesse⁹.