Why Are We Doing Foresight?
What?! An ad-hoc mid-week post? Shocking – and yet so wonderful!
And why this unexpected gift? Because here in the office we’ve been discussing what people do - and do not - understand about formal foresight work and I may have needed to get some not-quite-rambling thoughts down on (digital) paper.
Your welcome 😉
What Is All This Foresight Stuff About?
What is foresight? It is insight into how and why the future may be different from the present.
Why is it valuable? Well, if I have to explain that again, then…
You don’t know what the future holds. No matter how confident you are today, you really don’t (remember, Caesar, thou art fallible). Right at this moment, you don’t actually know what’s coming next.
That’s in no small part because the future doesn’t exist. You can’t measure it and you can’t collect data on it. The “data” you keep reaching for is about the past. Again, you don’t actually know what the future holds.
What “the future” is, is a range of possibilities. A small handful of which you’ve already thought about. Some good, some bad, and some you couldn’t care less about. And there are a ton of possibilities you haven’t yet considered.
Those possibilities are constantly shifting. Actions, reactions, and lord knows how many complex dynamics in the universe are constantly interacting to alter the possibilities. Spoiler alert: foresight is perishable.
Your ignorance makes foresight challenging. You – just like me – don’t really know how the universe works, nor do you have visibility on what all the billions of other crazy humans are doing right now. Translation: your normal, everyday, intuitive understanding of what might bubble up is extremely limited.
Foresight work is about mapping the range of possibilities. Methodologies, models and yes – data – that are designed to help each of us think more coherently, comprehensively, and expansively about what is logically possible. We want better maps of what’s possible.
Better maps, better money. Ultimately, yes. More foresight means identifying more emerging risks, more budding opportunities, and more pathways into the future. Anticipating more of what is actually possible helps you make better informed plans, more resilient strategy, and effective contingencies.
So, why is foresight valuable? Because it provides you insight into more of what could actually happen and why it could happen. You use that insight to make better goals, better strategy, and better risk mitigation.
Like how? Well, like anticipating the likely risks from a never-before-seen “agentic economy.” By stress-testing your current strategy (assuming you have one) against scenarios featuring new geopolitical uncertainties + AI disruptions + Millennials and Gen Z taking over leadership. And by recognizing the pressures building to renegotiate the workplace social contract and making it a goal to get ahead of that curve before it’s a quaint lunch topic for HR professionals.
How is all this different than a typical management discussion about the future of their business? Formal foresight work – particularly coming out of futures studies – is intentionally big picture and long-term. We start with “how and why might society change” before getting to how a particular industry might change.
Put another way, we are trying to account for a lot more than a typical management discussion does.
Wrapping It Up
And just for you all, I can offer a much-simplified version of the above. A short list of principles (axioms) that is much easier to commit to memory:
The future doesn’t exist.
At any one moment, there are multiple possible futures.
Those futures are constantly in flux.
Foresight is perishable. So, our insights about “the futures” – such as they may be – are constantly aging.
We, therefore, consistently work on our foresight to maintain the best maps of the emerging landscape of the future practicable.
Simple, right? Good. Now I’m headed off to take a break, comfortable in the assumption that everything is now clear for everyone…