Good planning requires thinking about the future, and Foresight is a discipline that helps planners do this in a structured and disciplined way. It provides a systematic and disciplined approach to understanding how the world is changing, the forces driving such change, and how to navigate those forces to achieve desired future goals.
Foresight provides an Opportunity to Examine Received Wisdom and Strikeout Anew
Ideally, Foresight is conducted in close collaboration with key stakeholders to create a broadly shared vision of a preferred future, along with a realistic plan for how to make that happen. In this sense Foresight is a process of collective learning that provides decision makers, enablers and beneficiaries with a shared purpose, common goals, clear ideas of how to achieve them, and clarity on the roles each must play to make that happen.
Everyone knows that progress requires new thinking, and that what worked until now, may no longer work in future. But it is very hard to break way form old habits, and established ways of thinking. It is easy to get people to agree that things are not good and must change. That usually means that everyone and everything must change. Everyone else that is, but not me. Everything else but now what I or we are doing. Moving, from this to real change, requires time and patience, or a catastrophe! In which case change happens too late and the opportunity is lost. A Foresight initiative can create a space and the time in which old ideas are replaced by new thinking and deep change can happen.
Typically, Foresight requires research, reading, sense-making, constructing scenarios and the creative imagining of new goals and different ways to achieve them. This requires a lot of desk work, and a lot of group work, and the temptation always exists to take shortcuts. To cut-and-paste from existing reports. To hastily adapt them to the situation at hand. Though understandable, this is a mistake and a lost opportunity. Foresight is a collective learning process. Such short cuts provide false economies of time and effort. They miss out on the opportunity to change hearts and minds and the way people see the world. They fail to introduce the new thinking that could change the entire trajectory of the team or organization that initiated the process. So, don’t take short-cuts ! It helps to get support from experienced external experts who can help you establish the right pace at which to proceed, introduce new thinking in a timely manner, and build and maintain momentum in the process, the will and capability to move off in a new direction.
Foresight as Change Management
Modern Foresight has moved far beyond its roots in the Delphi system and the practice of government planners to design and update research and technology development programs. Nowadays it is used for both long- and short-term planning, for business development, risk management and organizational transformation.
In 2007, while helping a national research organization deal with the threat of break-up due to an alleged lack of relevance of the national economy, CKA realized that the success of a significant departure from business as usual, in terms of technologies to be developed and the impact of their adoption, may sometimes require a transformation of the organization in terms of its structure, personnel policies, finance and investment.
Ever since then, CKA has seen Foresight as part of bigger process of change management, in which organizational transformation may be required a critical enabler of the goals to be achieved.
Typical Weaknesses in Foresight Processes
CKA has guided and accompanied leadership teams in the application of Foresight for more than 25 years. Based on this work, it has observed weaknesses in the practice of Foresight and created tools to address those weaknesses.
Don’t Confuse Foresight with Future Studies
There is a tendency to confuse Foresight with Future Studies. Future studies are important as an input to a Foresight initiative, but on their own, they are not sufficient to achieve a high impact in terms of changing hearts and minds and the adoption a new actionable agenda.
Successful Planning Means Execution
I am sometimes told by frustrated managers that “the last thing we need is another plan.” This tends to indicate that plans were made but not executed. So, why weren’t they executed?
The problem is not the plan, but a planning process, which has omitted to foresee what is needed for successful execution. In particular, for fund-raising, resourcing, commissioning and programming, all the boring tasks needed to make sure that the items on the 2DO list, get DONE!
It sounds obvious when said in that manner, but a surprising amount of time and effort is wasted producing plans that are never executed. This is especially true of local government in Europe. A group gets a grant to create a plan. It does excellent work mobilizing stakeholders, creating scenarios and visions and action plans. There is a kind of euphoria when it is published, often with articles in the paper, and accolades from politicians. But a year later, nothing has happened. Typically, this is because all of the effort went into working at a grass roots level, and no effort was spent on work with those whose complicity and cooperation is needed to make it all happen. No effort was made to work with the those who manage programming or budgeting. And so no provision is made for execution.
This is not only an issue in public sector planning processes it is often also an oversight in industry. It comes down to a failure of planning teams to engage in a timely and effective way with those whose cooperation is needed to make those plans happen.
The planning process must include a process of engagement with those who will oversee the execution of the plan. Thise who will eventually take responsibility for programming and financing and all of the many other steps needed to make it happen.
Over the years, CKA has developed techniques that are now a part of its Foresight ‘toolbox’ to make sure that plans are executed, and don’t just end up as reports gather dust on a shelf.
Blind Spots
Those who are skilled at Foresight bring a wide range of tools to bear upon each stage of the process. To understand how the world is changing and how change happens, an important concern is to be comprehensive in the approach and not ignore or omit forces that may one day come to play a decisive role in what is happening. An important tasks is therefore “drivers’ analysis,” a systematic approach to listing the forces that are driving change add understand how those forces may act in a certain region, in a certain sector or at a certain period. A good starting point is to employ a mnemonic such as STEEPV, to make a preliminary list of the forces driving change, under the headings of Social, Technological, Environmental, Economic, Political and Values, and then proceeding to their analysis. This may involve a consideration of trends, macro-trends, meso-trends, micro-trends, weak-signals, trend-breaks, game-changers and bind-spots. One can ignore possible overlaps, but it is very hard to be sure that all drivers have been considered. In particular the reference to blind-spots is a reference to the reality of unknown-unknowns (made famous by Donald Rumsfeld).
By definition we don’t the unknown unknown, so how can we list them. The point is to be open to new ideas. Ideas that people in one domain may not think of, but people in other domains may very well be aware of. This is more an art than a science and it helps to work with an experienced external experts to surface those ideas and make sure they get due consideration.
Over the years, CKA has come across a number of blind spots. Issues that are often ignored but which are significant for understand the nature of change in the world, the kind of preferred future one might want to obtain, and the means by which it may be achieved.
One of those, has already been addressed, the tendency to planning teams to create plans, without ensuring that those plans will be executed. But there are others.
Successful Pilots should be Followed by Scale-Ups
CKA has done a lot of Foresight related work for regional and local government, mainly in the Europe and neighboring countries. In doing so, it has often encountered the deservedly much-praised program for rural development called LEADER+. Typically this program provides local government with modest amounts of funding to support pilot projects for local economic development. The purpose of a pilot project is to provide a proof of concept or calibrate a plausible idea. Such pilots cover a wide range of initiatives. They address challenges related to job creation, nature conservation, biodiversity restoration, renewable energy production, and social housing to name but a few. The possibilities are endless and there is great scope for innovative thinking and new ideas adapted to the specificity of a region or community.
Those involved in the conception and execution of such pilot projects, are encouraged by the programs to tell of their successful projects. In principle, to encourage other regions to adopt or adapt examples of what works. When asked what is being done to scale up their successful pilot projects, the question is often met with a look of bewilderment ! The program says nothing about scaling up what works. It is only about designing and executing pilots. A small number of countries have understood this and have put in place a mechanism for scaling successful pilots. Denmark comes to mind. But most countries have not, and so scaling is an important blind spot. One that has been created by poor program design. Unless it is addressed, most of the money spent on those pilots will have been wasted.
Upstream and Downstream Supply Chain Development
Another bind spot exists in the development of certain industry sectors. The circular bio-economy sector, for example. In this case there is a blind spot in the need to develop and scale-up feed-stock supply chains. Almost the entire focus of development in this sector is on the development of new bio-refinery technologies. There still is, and always will be, a desire for new technologies and the improvement of existing technologies. But the point is that many of the existing technologies are already mature, and little is being done to develop large scale industrial activities based on what already work, to enable the transition away from a dependence on fossil fuels. Research and innovation tends to focus on the discovery of processes at lab scale. That is in batches of 1 liter, 10 liters, 100 liters. The development of 10,000 liter industry scale processes or continuous processes tends to be ignored. As is the problem of collection, aggregation, storage and transport of feedstock, quality criteria for feedstock management, the control and optimization of large-scale refinery processes, and the processing of by-products also tend to be neglected. This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are also blind spots with regard to downstream supply chain and market development, the need for innovative finance and low-cost MRV infrastructure for the traceable certification of compliance with sustainability criteria.
What about your Foresight Initiative
CKA constantly monitors the emergence of new ideas in science and technology, in business, the arts and economic development, from all around the world. It does this on a continuous basis, looking to the present, the past and the future. It employs a variety of tools to make sense of change in how the world works.
Most recently, it has been experimenting with the use of AI tools to support its basic workflows and the scope of its global monitoring and horizon scanning activities.
If you are considering the use of Foresight as an input to your strategy or policy process, get in touch with Patrick Crehan for a free consultation, and set yourself up for success.