Foresight Project Design
How do we choose which foresight techniques to use, and what combinations work best for a given client?
Rather than be inundated by hundreds of pundits’ opinions about what’s going to happen next, you could instead systematically study the future. This is the idea behind Strategic Foresight (henceforth just “Foresight”). It’s an important step in strategic planning, which is a much more involved and long-term organizational activity.
I’ve been promising some meatier discussion of Foresight and that’s what this post is. I’ll warn you upfront that if you’re doomscrolling today and this came up in your feed, it’s probably not for you. I’m here to show you how a proper foresight project works, and suggest ways that consultants using foresight can build rational and effective engagements with their clients.
Bored already? Then move on! For everybody who’s left, let’s dig in and see what foresight is, why we want to use it, and how to do that.
Foresight Methods
First, let’s shoot the elephant in the room: Foresight is not about predicting the future. Prediction might happen during a foresight activity, but it’s not the aim of a project. Strategic Foresight aims to build resilience in organizations. This is one reason I define the future as the dimension of surprise:
Foresight is the ability to avoid or adapt to surprises, and (in a competitive environment) inflict surprise on your competitors.
Typically, a foresight practitioner works with a client to determine their organization’s skill at dealing with surprise. We employ a diverse set of techniques to do this—and this is where it can get daunting. Choosing which of the many approaches to Foresight is appropriate for a given client is not easy.
The person who’s studied this side of things most systematically, in my opinion, is Rafael Popper, Founder, Chief Scientific Advisor (CSA), and Co-Director of Futures Capacity at Futures Diamond Ltd. (I’m not affiliated with them in any way.) He wrote a classic study that you can find online, called “How are foresight methods selected?” in which he identifies four main types of Foresight method:
Creative methods, such as scenarios, essays, and design fiction.
Interactive methods: brainstorming, workshops, stakeholder analysis, panels.
Evidence-based research, for example, literature reviews, scanning, modeling.
Expert recourse: expert panels, Delphi, quantitative scenarios, interviews, backcasting, etc.
All methods can be classified as qualitative, quantitative or somewhere in between. From this taxonomy, he’s able to derive a simple, now classic chart of Foresight methods called the “Foresight Diamond:”
This diagram is a great place to start if you’re new to Foresight; Popper’s own summary of these methods can be found here. You don’t have to take his word for things; the Internet is packed with highly accessible resources to help you explore the methods such as the UNDP Foresight Playbook, and of course the Journal of Futures Studies.
Popper’s analysis found that in 2008 the most commonly used Foresight methods were:
Literature reviews
Expert panels
Scenarios
Trend extrapolation
Futures workshops
Check the paper for a complete ranking of how often each method is used.
Although I’m sure things will have changed in the past decade, this ranking is still useful because it gives a short list of methods you’ll want to learn if you want to do this kind of work. However, there are some questions it doesn’t address:
What if the methods most commonly used are only popular because they’re easy to do?
Literature reviews are easy; a popular approach these days is the science fiction literature review, which systematizes the often scattershot predictions and scenarios we SF writers have created regarding some subject or period. Now, I’m not saying these can’t be useful—but as I’ve said elsewhere, while science fiction has made predictions about Artificial Intelligence for generations, we completely failed to anticipate the specific phenomenon that is the Large Language Model. LLMs aren’t exactly AI; we don’t really have a conceptual category for what they are, and SF utterly failed to predict them. So lit reviews are comparatively easy and may be comparatively useless if you’re not careful.
Popper’s paper is incomplete in another important way (to be fair, he packed several books’ worth of information into it). The thing about Foresight methods is we rarely employ just one. A Foresight engagement will typically occur about midway through a larger strategic planning effort, and consist of several stages, each taking input from the one before it and providing output for the one after it. Popper does not go into great detail about how you build these chains, and over the years I haven’t seen others do it either. This, it seems, is where the true dark art of Foresight project design lies.
How are Foresight methods combined to generate a useful project output?
Let’s take a stab at answering both of these questions.
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