Are Futures Having a Moment?

Foresight is having a moment. Here’s how not to blow it.

I could be over-indexing on my own network here, but there certainly seems to be an uptick in both the number of folks fashioning themselves as futures/foresight practitioners and the number of companies dipping an exploratory toe or two into the waters of strategic foresight. All of which would be totally understandable given… (*gestures vaguely at the world*)... everything.

While I generally regard the upward trend of interest as a good and encouraging response to a context of persistent uncertainty amid the slow-motion collapse of old systems and ways of doing/thinking, I also think now might be a perfect time to talk about what it looks like when foresight goes wrong.

I see three typical failure modes.

(1) Sometimes, the foresight journey is just a mission into the future searching for justifications of the present strategic direction. Futures-thinking facilitator/researcher Thomas D’hooge aptly describes this as “foresight as anticipatory legitimation,” where one version of the future is emphasized – and it just happens to be one that strongly favors preferred present choices as highly beneficial. This is foresight practiced with a heavy confirmation bias. The foresight is closed and compromised, so the insight will be as well.

(2) Even a more open process can still lead to a closed and limiting result when the foresight collapses into something treated like a forecast. A new strategic direction emerges around a future that comes to be treated as an inevitability. The old “official future” is cast down only to elevate a new official future in its place. This is futures-thinking in the service of big bet prediction. But as the old aphorism has it: Prediction is hard, especially about the future.

There’s a reason so many foresight reports include an explicit disclaimer that they’re NOT predictions. Foresight isn’t meant to be a one-shot, one-way journey from uncertainty to certainty. Rather, foresight is most effective when practiced as a dynamic linkage between the present and the possible, where the view from the future affords us a new perspective on present decisions and actions – and those actions enable us to develop increasing clarity about how to navigate and shape an unfolding future.

Now about the action part…

(3) Foresight that never connects to action is just an interesting exercise, and it’s one that will quickly lose buy-in. In a strategic setting, our capacity to envision and explore futures is only valuable to the extent that we can use it to inform and influence decision making in the present. I’ve always loved Bob Johansen’s simple formulation of a Foresight-Insight-Action loop. If we’re not closing the loop, we’re not delivering value.

The big question then (and one we often hear from clients when we’re leading foresight trainings at Radical) is how to get to “correct” actions without collapsing the foresight work into a forecast where we’re still just predicting a winner at the end of the day. Part of the answer involves keeping multiple futures meaningfully in play (rather than focusing on one that feels the most “likely”) to identify actions that look strategically valuable across a range of possible futures. These actions are the so-called No Regrets Moves. Make them with confidence.

The other part is to view the actions as a set of interrelated bets that don’t all need to hit to be worth making. The actions don’t all need to be long-term “correct,” but they should make sense together in a smart, evolving portfolio of experimentation that’s driving learning as the Foresight-Insight-Action loop rolls action-based learnings back into the foresight process. The actions are experimental pings in the direction of futures of interest, enabling us to discover a strategic path forward in a space where there is no roadmap.

To repurpose one of my favorite Pascal-isms from his new book: You’re not predicting the winning path here. You’re discovering the winning path.

And so it is with foresight and futures done well more generally: We’re not predicting the future here. We’re discovering the future. Practice accordingly.

@Jeffrey