Dialogues About the Role of Foresight and Problems it Faces Today: Part 1

This article is the first of three dialogues between a few members of our foresight team, Mat Lincez, Karl Schroeder, Dr. Ashley Metz, and Dr. Paul Hartley. In this series of discussions, we talk about the place of foresight strategy in organizational work today, some problems that we see in the way foresight strategy is implemented, and what needs to happen for governments, companies, and NGOs to get more value out of the exercise. In it we also discuss a few topics, like the current situation concerning the global pandemic, failures of foresight strategy in the communications process, and problems that arise when doing foresight well. 

We hope you find something of value in the discussion and join us in trying to expand the way foresight is communicated as a whole so it can help prepare us all and prevent, or at least mitigate, future disasters. This discussion has been edited for length.

Introduction to Part 1:

The recent changes forced on our daily lives has created a sense of real, fundamental change. It is the first truly global event that has negatively impacted the species for a long time. Because of interruptions that we are experiencing, it is natural to believe that we are now living in a time of great change and upheaval. And this is true, but it is also not true. It is true that things are much different than they were in December of 2019, and that many of these shifts in the way we work and live will be with us for a long time. However, it is not true that this is anything new. Our lives are always filled with change and upheaval happening at different scales. These shifts are just not always uniform or occur at a pace that renders them unnoticeable—like the climate changes that will eventually transform everyone’s lives, potentially forever.

It is natural to consider the role and purpose of foresight in both business and in governance in moments like these. And there are two sides to this reflection. The first questions are why this was not foreseen and why were companies and governments not better prepared for an event, a quintessential “black swan,” of this kind. The next question asks how foresight strategy might offer answers to solving this crisis and return us to some form of “normal,” or at least prepare us for a “new normal.’

However natural these questions might be, they may be the wrong questions to ask first. Many foresight strategists did predict this event, or at least an event of this kind. There are many preparedness plans out there describing how we should respond to a global epidemic at local, national, and international levels. What we see now are the problems inherent in responding to these potential visions of the future so that we can mitigate the effects of events like Covid-19. Secondly—and this is where it becomes a bit difficult—to ask what the “new normal” is in light of the fact that “normal” does not mean much in the first place.

A good foresighter considers change as a continual process, not as a force that pushes us from one plateau of stability to another. A sense of “normal” is only visible from a single perspective at a particular point in time. It is a snapshot of a moment that does not consider the context or the fact that it fleeting and temporary. As such, the idea of “normal” is contrary to the ethos of real foresight because it presupposes stasis. Part of the reason foresight exists is to help organizations understand that they are living, and operating, in a world formed by relentless, constant change, and not by the superficial static experiences that we associate with “normal.” So, instead of looking to a “new normal,” we should look beyond the thin layer of what “normal” represents and work to prepare for a world in a more honest, realistic manner.

Perhaps more importantly, it is right to ask why nothing was done in the face of a large number of national, international, and local preparedness plans. There are examples, like those in Taiwan, Singapore, and Korea, where we can see the tangible effects of being prepared for a global pandemic. At the date of writing, Korea is down to low double digits in new cases, has kept the mortality rate and infection rate at the lowest end of the global scale, and has kept businesses and even restaurants and bars open for the duration. Their example of what preparedness looks like brings the failures across the globe into stark relief. Which brings us to the questions we should be asking. If foresight strategists identified this threat and helped to develop plans of action to mitigate the rise of a global pandemic, why were these issues not heeded? Given that this is a problem that happens at other levels, and entities like companies do not manage to convert their foresight scenarios into action, what is the role of foresight in preparedness? What is missing in the system that will help governments, NGOs, and corporations action on good, well-researched foresight strategy?

We consider these topics and more in these dialogues.

Part 1

Paul

Why is it that we are continually underprepared for stuff that we know is going to happen? Why are so many preventable problems, many that were even predicted, still allowed to happen without an action on the side of governments, or even just companies?

Mat

I think it's the same problem that's faced scientists in general for many, many years, clients and scientists in particular. They've been talking about these issues and presenting the data, who have been presenting the scenarios, and people kind of listen to it and look at it, but then don't do anything about it. And I think fundamentally, like as a discipline foresight's failed, the same way climate science has failed on the climate change agenda. You can turn the lens outward and say, well, we've been saying it and presenting it and we've got these methods and ways of thinking about the future or ways of modelling climate science and all these other things. But no one does anything about it. And it comes back to sort of a big issue about communication. It comes back to the politicization of it. It comes back to the inability to sort of connect with people on a fundamental level about the urgency or the risks that are presented by these futures or by these scenarios. And I think there's too much there's been too much indulgence in the artefact or the work itself and not enough attention paid to the proper communication and applicability of it. In many ways, the climate science has made that mistake too.

Paul

What it sounds like you're saying is that there's almost a storytelling failure. So it's not a general failure in foresight. If I got if I've got you right, you’re saying it's a storytelling failure.

Mat

Yes, it's a storytelling failure. But I think it's a bit more than that. I think you can tell a great story, but if you really peel back the layers, like in the work that we do, in corporate foresight and applied foresight for innovation, you can point to the sort of prevailing winds. You can point to the trends where there's likely opportunities or threats. All of that relates to good story telling.

But if you don't have the right sponsors inside a business who believe in it, if you don't have the politics sorted out in terms of, lubricating the organisation or society to become receptive to these ideas, to act upon them, if you don't have the proper attention paid to those details, the work becomes useless. How many scenarios have there been? How many science fiction novels? How many movies? They range from the spectrum of pop futurism all the way down to critical future studies at the most fundamental level. How many of these reports and how many of these things have been executed that, multi-lateral institutional levels at corporate levels, small scale levels that have just gone nowhere because people don't take it seriously? Is that a failure of the sort of process itself? Is it a failure of the approach taken by the foresight community or by practitioners? I'd say yes, to some extent.

Karl

Yeah, I can understand that perspective. It depends on how much responsibility and power using foresight should have. The thing is that when you look at foresight as being part of a general process of strategic planning, then there are failures of foresight. And then there are failures of strategic planning. And those are different things. So, when conceived of as a modest activity that occurs in the middle of sort of the design exploration phase of a strategic planning process, foresight has a specific role and how well it fulfils its role really has to be seen in light of the success of the overall strategic planning process. But it's just one of several different phases in that process. And each one can be the source of success or failure. So absolutely stellar, perfectly predictive and well communicated foresight can still reside in a failed strategic plan because of multiple other factors that have nothing to do with it. So, I would give foresight a little bit of a break here by just assuming that it's not an all singing, all dancing instrument of change. It resides in embedded in larger processes. And I'm sure we can certainly work to influence those bigger processes more. But we have to retain a certain amount of modesty for what foresight is capable of at all.

Paul

Where do you think the fault lies then? Is it a failure to communicate?

Mat

We’ve talked a little bit about this around the need for baseline assessments and pre-foresight work in a project: understanding the governance, understanding the use of foresight as a process or as an artefact when it's done. I think there's been a failure to kind of really pay attention to the details there on how the work becomes ultimately useful and we'll be effectively used or effectively communicated to the stakeholders it's supposed to sort of address.

I mean, none of this is intentional, of course, but I think a lot of it has to do with the community being excited to just get a job and do their job. We can imagine what a rich future is and we can create these workshops and have everybody roll up their sleeves and do stuff when they get back to their day job after that workshop. What's really being done and implemented out of that work? Oftentimes it's either completely disconnected from the function and operations of an organization big or small, or it's completely disconnected from the realities of the business or the realities of the economy.

You see the lack of impact. I'm curious to know like and it's worth studying more is like all of these practitioners I see on LinkedIn now saying like I wrote these worlds or scenarios or I did a workshop where we explored this and I've got these tools of thinking through all this stuff. Yeah. Great. But what work have you done, where you've where there's actually an outcome and an impact?  And I'm not trying to my own horn, but I would say in the applied context for innovation, as we've been applying foresight, it takes time and we have to be patient. But we have been seeing the impacts. We have been seeing the direct commitments and investments of our clients to shaping their future, proactively shaping their future, preparing for in, I would say, about 50 percent of the cases.

Ashley

There are issues around the adoption of foresight as a method as well as the implementation of the results of foresight projects that are conducted, and I think the two interrelate and explain part of the communication issues on the implementation side. On the topic of adoption in general, there are some theoretical reasons that situate the practice among strategy practices and strategy practices among the strategy field and professional work in general.  One could argue that rationalization trends in society since the 1960s and 70s from financialization to an increase in planning and a dominance of positivist and also rational-choice views, that foresight, a set of practices with a constructivist epistemology, are simply not viewed as fully legitimate among dominant views in strategy and in business.  So, on the one hand, it’s not a completely widespread practice across all strategy departments, and when it is used it is partially not viewed as a full contemporary of other practices. On the implementation side, of course there are other issues around people’s mental models, etc.

Now I think the environmental context is changing in many scary, but also exciting ways that will create structural shifts that may open up space.  So it could be that this is the exogenous shock that creates an institutional change to how strategy is done.

I think there are also a lot of other reasons, beyond foresight, for why we are underprepared. First, maybe we can question that a little - I was telling my students the other day, though, there are of course a lot of preparations behind the scenes that many people don’t know about – like the Svalbard seed storage vault in Norway, organizations do plan for long-term issues.  I’m sure every government had thought about pandemics, but some were more or less prepared in terms of equipment and capabilities for a range of different reasons, some getting at the overall structure of their healthcare systems.

And likewise, we were analyzing a CSR report for Unilver with a materiality matrix and a global health crisis or pandemic was even on the matrix, but they had put it as a low risk to the business. So firstly, companies and countries do think about pandemics or unlikely events and plan - some of them plan badly and some of them make strategic choices that the eventual cost is either to unpredictable or too unlikely to merit an investment today.  There are also likely many companies who planned for abstract supply chain disruptions without knowing what would drive them.

Then there are the small businesses, many of whom do not make long-term or even short-term strategic plans, which are unfortunately affected quite a bit.  Some larger businesses like airlines and cruise lines were completely disrupted. I don’t know the details about how such companies think about their third horizon strategies, but I would imagine that actually any company should always think about what events or changes in the environment could make all of their business assumptions obsolete.  This is nothing new – it’s just that usually the disruption is a technology or a competitor’s product.  I think Mat has been talking about this – that the drivers of disruption are changing to natural origins – climate, health – rather than technological.  It would be fascinating if there was one company, like Shell with the oil crisis scenarios, that just walked away from this giant change unscathed after having prepared for it. Does anybody know of an airline that has secretly been working on a vaccine with half its business? 

And above and beyond that, there is societal preparedness and a sort of cultural layer. I’m really excited to read the comparative papers that will come out and to actually see the data, but I think we can already see that a lot of the more collective-minded and collaborative economies are dealing well and the more liberal market economies with strong individualistic values have struggled in some areas. So aside from what their governments did, the way people listened or didn’t will have to do with the degree of trust in their government, but also possibly attitudes toward society, ideas of ‘freedom’ etc. 

Paul

These are all interesting points. One of the things that leads me to is wondering out loud about whether or not it's right to consider foresight as like just the work that we do as a process done by specialty practitioners when it would in this instance almost be better to see strategic planning writ large, including the other stakeholders like the decision makers and the entities that are actually doing things. And all of the strategic planners themselves and all of the other inputs, which could include even anthropologists or other people. So that it's perhaps that there's a little bit of a ghettoization going on.

Karl

Well, sure. I think this is really always been the case that there's an over specialization. And the field has fought recently against labels, such as futurist, which have encouraged that specialization and ghettoization of this element of strategic planning. By labelling ourselves as professional futurists who have some kind of magic sauce that we can bring to the table. We may have increased our own commercial viability as individual analysts, but we've impoverished or contributed to the impoverishing of organizational foresight. There's been a lot of pushback to that. And it's taking the form of understanding the idea of foresight, maturity and organizations and of the foresight practitioner’s role or part of that role as being to enhance and improve the maturity of organizations as such, when it comes to foresight. In other words, what you want to leave behind is not some kind of vision of the future and a strategic plan so much as an ability to envision the future and a broader horizon for the organisation as a whole. And it's that and the resiliency that comes from it that is in the present situation so obviously what we need.

Mat

Yeah, it is fair to say. And I think it's because of the lack of like business acumen of many of the practitioners themselves having sort of adopted or modified their careers or position in that sort of context to offer foresight as an input. Great. But they haven't done the work of like truly understanding how to connect with the decision-making levels of an organisation where, an action is going to take place and outcome will take place. And/or they are too complex. They get involved in these large multi-national efforts, that create these grander visions or very complex kind of scenarios that are inaccessible for the average stakeholder to implement. It goes back to peeling back the layers of an organisation to understand in the very beginning, in the upfront, how is this foresight output meant to be used? What are you going to do with it? What is going to be the delivery required? Who are the stakeholders internally that we need to convince or that we need to bring along with us so that action does take place after the fact? Without a sort of a path for investment, without a path for prioritization, and then investment and follow up, and action and measurement, where is that going? 

Paul

It makes me wonder if there's a role missing on the client side as well, if there's some form of actuary that is missing there as well. Companies need someone who is familiar with the foresight outputs and able to turn those into the pieces that the company needs in order to make large scale change. It strikes me that the fault doesn't entirely lie with the foresight practitioners that there is also a client-side problem.

Mat

There is a client-side problem. This is where I think there's a tension in being a consultant or a foresighter for hire. How interested are they in just getting the work and doing it? And potentially for them, if they start to sort of make it more complex, meaning asking the hard questions, like, who is sponsoring this work? How is this work really going to be used? Are actions going to be taken? Is there a budget sitting around to action upon this stuff or not? Sometimes I think people like to forget those questions or just jump into the work and hope for the best.

 I'm a fan of Igor Ansoff and the weak signal theory, that he coined. And one of the fundamental messages he had about weak signals and about, even just generally the organization being able to process and manage new information and emergence,   emerging context was managers lack the motivation and the means to do this. The average manager has no motivation to do anything about emerging signals and new information that comes from this sort of discipline. And they don't have the means to, meaning they don't have the not only the budgets or the operations internally to manage the knowledge or the information correctly. They don't have the governance structures in place in their organizations to do that. In most cases, in our in our world, we've been lucky on a few occasions where we've dealt directly with the C-suite and board levels of these organizations who are, in fact, where the buck stops, who are, in fact, the people that do make the decisions and create action. In other cases, we've dealt with lower levels of an organisation, directors and managers who have zero ability actually to take action this stuff and take it as a sort of superficial input into their business as usual planning. As a nice to have an addition to sort of inspire people with, but not something that actually is leverage to have an impact.

And that's where I think, again, the foresight proposition has sort of fallen flat. If I think about the spectrum again from pop futurism all the way down to sort of the more rigorous, fundamental critical futures work, none have had the ability to truly influence the political level of an organization and the mindset of an organization to sort of effect change.

I every time I go into an organization, my underlying motivation is to transform the whole organization. My underlying motivation is not only to transform the organization, but society itself. I'm swinging for the fences every time, to begin with, and then that gets tempered as you move forward. But the ultimate goal of any kind of activity, that's strategic or that, is assuming some kind of strategic nature is to transform. The mantra that I've been pushing around is transformation precedes growth. This has been proven time and time again also where you cannot in most industries continue to pursue growth in the linear fashion, in the same business, in the same model or the same approach that has succeeded in the past. You need to recognize some level of transformation in order to access new opportunities for growth. 

You cannot find growth in an industry that's hyper competitive and saturated other than to acquire it. You can acquire market share through buying companies that already have it and you can squeeze them out after. And you can incrementally introduce more SKUs into a category and hope that they can squeeze a fraction of a point of growth out of it. But fundamentally, a large business needs to figure out a way to transform itself, to access entirely new markets or create the markets. That transformation problem on a commercial sense is pretty obvious on a fundamental restructuring level. On a on a societal transformation level it's a lot more complex, obviously.

Paul

Well, that leads us to the next topic. The issue of society and culture in all of this. One thing that I want to point us all to is the fact that right now, while we are in the throws of a global pandemic, many foresight reports are talking about the “new normal” or a future that is marked by this change. In reading through many of them, I was struck that they all shared a major blind spot—they were ignoring the social and cultural constructs that help us through moments like this, and the fact that at times like this, it is not really a good idea to opine about a future that is unfolding differently from anything we’ve examined recently.

We will examine these issues in Part 2.