Strategic Foresight

Stuart Candy, Ph.D.*When you take an umbrella out as clouds gather overhead, when you stashsavings in a cookie tin, when you enrol for evening classes to improve youremployment prospects: these are all unremarkable acts of everyday foresight.But the kind of thinking ahead that we engage in day to day is different fromthe systematic and creative exploration of pathways through possible worlds tocome over years, decades, and beyond. This is foresight in another register, forthe future writ large. Writes futurist scholar Richard Slaughter:

Strategic foresight is the ability to create and maintain a high-quality, coherentand functional forward view and to use the insights arising in organizationallyuseful ways; for example, to detect adverse conditions, guide policy, shapestrategy, and to explore new markets, products and services. It represents afusion of futures methods with those of strategic management.

Whatever your line of business, both it and the wider world are changing fasterthan ever. For any entrepreneur or leader, looking further ahead in this manneris essential for navigating, in the phrase of the late economist-futurist RobertTheobald, ‘the rapids of change’

. The paradox of foresight is that, although itis a ubiquitous human capability, it is remarkably underdeveloped in most of us. ‘Everyone thinks about the future,’ observes futures consultant JakeDunagan, ‘they just don’t do it very well.’ Few people ever have a formalopportunity in their education to learn how to study the landscape of futurepossibilities in a strategically relevant way. Nor, unfortunately, is this a practicemodelled by other institutions such as politics or the media. So, what could itfeel like to live in a world where the UN Millennium Goals have beenaccomplished? How about one in which the impacts of climate change areseriously kicking in? Or one in which 'posthuman' is normal? We have no idea.These are crucial questions about the contexts in we might find ourselves livingand working the day after tomorrow, but generally we’re not in the habit of even asking them. Instead, we seem strangely willing to leave outcomes to acombination of chance, ideology, and blind hope. In this domain, even the besteducated and well intentioned among us come up short.

* Adjunct Professor in the Design Strategy MBA at California College of the Arts, Senior Foresight andInnovation Specialist at Arup, and writer of the Sceptical Futuryst blog. Email: scandy@cca.eduThis article appeared in Nathan Shedroff (ed.), 2011,

Design Strategy in Action

. San Francisco: CaliforniaCollege of the Arts.

Richard A. Slaughter, 2002, ‘Futures Studies as an Intellectual and Applied Discipline’. In

Advancing Futures

Futures Studies in Higher Education

. Westport, CT: Praeger, 91-108. Quote p. 104.

Robert Theobald, 1987,

The Rapids of Change: Social Entrepreneurship in Turbulent Times

. Indianapolis,IN: Knowledge Systems.

Meanwhile, many of the great challenges facing today’s organisations, as wellas society at large - climate change, peak oil, and economic crisis, to name afew – are clearly tied to the want of strategic foresight.

At both individual andcultural levels, we have inherited habits built on assumptions of continuity,which serve us poorly in a world of accelerating, disruptive change.

Cultivating preferred futures

The Design Strategy MBA class in Strategic Foresight is designed to exposestudents to some of the key concepts, theories and methods of the field. Itdraws on two parallel traditions, one of scholarly, academic thought (‘futuresstudies’ or ‘futures research’), and the other in organisational strategy andconsulting (‘scenario planning’ etc), both of which have been around for closeto half a century. A large body of literature and practice has grown up in bothcontexts.

There are many methods in the foresight repertoire, some rare,others more widely known. The list includes environmental and horizonscanning, trend and emerging issue analysis, Delphi, the futures wheel andcross-impact matrices, prediction markets, roadmapping, backcasting, SWOTanalysis, statistical modeling, systems mapping, simulation, visioningworkshops, and Causal Layered Analysis.

The DMBA Strategic Foresight class starts from a principled commitment to thenotion that alternative frameworks of sensemaking and storytelling are of paramount significance when it comes to the future. As the ‘black swan’argument mounted by Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes clear,

past observations –the basic stuff of scientific observation - are of limited application when itcomes to the social future. So this class is not about statistics or quantitativemodelling. As the philosopher Robert Brumbaugh once noted, ‘

there are no future facts…

That past time is a fair sample of all time is a mistakenmetaphysical assumption.’

To come at the point another way; the future is notpredictable, but it can in some ways be shaped. This is not a class in

predicting

change, it’s a crash course in

participating in

change, more mindfully andeffectively.

Jim Dator, 2011, ‘The Unholy Trinity, Plus One’,

Journal of Futures Studies

13(3): 33-48.

On the academic front see for example Wendell Bell, 2003,

Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era, Vol. 1: History, Purposes, Knowledge

. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. James A. Dator (ed.), 2002,

Advancing Futures: Futures Studies in Higher Education

. Westport, CT: Praeger.On the consulting side see Art Kleiner, 2008,

The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management

. San Francisco: Wiley/Jossey-Bass.

For an inventory of articles introducing the main futures/foresight methods see Jerome C. Glenn andTheodore J. Gordon, 2009,

Futures Research Methodology

(version 3.0) (CD-ROM), The Millennium Project.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, 2007,

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

. New York: RandomHouse.

Robert S. Brumbaugh, 1966, ‘Applied Metaphysics: Truth and Passing Time’.

The Review of Metaphysics

,19(4): 647-666. Quote p. 649 (original emphasis).

Our approach highlights the catalytic role that foresightful individuals andgroups can play within their organisations and communities. It emphasises theinvention and pursuit of preferred futures, the world-shaping aspects of futuresnarratives and images; striving for a necessary balance between theory andpractice, deep understanding and effective implementation. Visionary peopleand organisations are never simply manufactured according to a recipe, but thiscourse aims to draw out and activate the interests and potentials in thisdirection that each student brings to the table. In short, the class offers a sortof boot camp for world changers and culture evolvers, to complement andenrich skills acquired elsewhere in the MBA program.

Three dimensions of foresight literacy

The course is structured around three phases.The first phase is about coming to grips with the unchanging fact of continualchange, a macrohistorical axiom that we seem all too easily to forget.Cognitively, we tend to expect continuity, which leads to what futures educatorand political scientist Jim Dator calls the ‘crackpot realism of the present’, that‘fully understandable but quite misleading belief that the world of the presentwill dominate the future’, resulting in a failure to seriously entertain genuinealternatives.

The circumstances shaping life may appear stable enough on ashort timescale, but of course everything is in flux. The corollary of thisrealisation is twofold. First, things will continue to change (albeit at varyingrates) just as they always have. Everything that presently

, however importantor central to life as we know it – from the internal combustion engine, to theforty-hour work week, to AIDS, to the Internet, and on and on - begansomewhere. All such elements have a history, origins and an arc over time, andeverything that is will go away, too, sooner or later. Second, at any givenmoment at least some of the seeds of tomorrow’s changes are visible in thepresent.The practical upshot of the above is that we can cultivate the art of perceiving(and reperceiving

) our operating environment, in order better to understandboth the way things are now, and where they could be going. Two of the toolsfor putting this understanding into action are

environmental scanning

for

Jim Dator, 2006, Keynote address at ‘Securing the future: Networked policing in New Zealand’,Symposium proceedings, 22 November. http://www.policeact.govt.nz/securing-the-future/proceedings.html

Scenarios were described memorably as being about ‘the gentle art of reperceiving’ by the man creditedwith first adapting the method for a business setting. Pierre Wack, 1985a, ‘Scenarios: Uncharted WatersAhead’.

Harvard Business Review

, 63(5): 73-89; Pierre Wack, 1985b, ‘Shooting the Rapids’.

Harvard Business Review

, 63(6): 139-150. See also Art Kleiner, 2003, ‘The Man Who Saw the Future’.

Strategy +Business

, 30: 26-31, Spring.