Can foresight 'save the world'?

Looking Outside is a newsletter reflecting on conversations with influential and original thinkers from a wide range of fields, offering a fresh perspective on familiar topics. Written by Joanna Lepore, without AI aid.

This year, the Dubai Future Forum got a little self-reflective.

The Forum this year took a turn away from the sciences and towards the humanities. Last year’s Forum went deep on topics; traversing STEEP drivers, like the impact of technology on medicine, science on food, sustainability on travel, AI on productivity and demographic shifts on societies. In each case, a range of subject matter experts explored topics, allowing the forum to traverse within these, with equal weighting, advancements today and their future potential.

With such a heavy agenda, predominantly focused on science and tech, it left a lot of unanswered questions. Questions that push us to ask what all this advancement may do to our core human nature, how exponential innovation may stress the human condition, and what it is that we really want for our future. Big hairy, philosophical questions.

So, to their credit, the DUBAI FUTURE FOUNDATION (DFF) and the Forum organizing team took this on board in designing the agenda for 2024. You can see heavy influence from events like SXSW where crowd-curated content is showcased, and more space is given to the arts, creative expression, play and gaming. Sounds like a dream.

The challenge with this is that leaning heavily into the social sciences is typically softer, so after a while it feels a little mushy you crave some crunch. Perhaps next year there will be an attempt to balance both of these – technology/innovation with humanities/art. Or perhaps the Dubai team will surprise us completely and revamp how the Forum is set up.

The beautiful thing about the Forum, only in its third year, is that it follows no precedent, it's guided by no rules, only one ambitious vision with executional freedom.

And, without a doubt, it is the best event for those in foresight and futures.

So, in observing this familiar field of work from a different perspective, I offer five reflections.

1.?While the focus on technology was subtler this year, it was still there.

We can, in all fairness, debate how big/when/where tech will expand across industries and markets. But we are not asking the biggest what if: what if technology simply disappeared. We have absolutely no back up plan for this kind of scenario, because we are so absolutely certain our future is technologically sound and digitally dependent.

There remains tremendously differing views on AI in the foresight community. In the same day, one person told me it was revolutionizing everything, another that it was detrimental to the quality of our work. Of course we know the truth lies in the boring middle.

It clearly poses an important ask of foresight practitioners to practice what we preach: not to be too skeptical and dismissive, nor too enamored. But to keep digging into the ambiguity, frame AI with uncertainty, and push – no matter what happens next – for critical thinking.

Complacency and pace are a dangerous combination.

2.?Arguably the act of pushing for long term thinking is in itself worthy enough. But a movement is emerging for foresight as activism.

The idea is that foresight exists to create a better future, and therefore practitioners of foresight are its activists.

Jay Ogilvy in a fireside chat with Paul Saffo shared openly how foresight in its early days was sold to business to get more work. Fast forward a few decades and we see foresight in business and the private sector growing tremendously. Perhaps staying true to its pure intention, it exists to help business act on the future today … but not necessarily to “save the world”. (This is an entirely separate debate on the role of business in society, that’s not owned by foresight.)

Varied sub-fields and applications of foresight benefits everyone, in theory. Unless they’re combative, competitive and aggressive. Personal belief should not bias how we practice foresight.

Those who claim that ‘big business is destroying the world and using foresight for their preferred futures’ need to look in the mirror. An altruistic, idyllic, utopian world where big business either disappears, gives away all its profits, or magically overnight changes what it produces, is too simply one preferred future.

As it was said at the Forum, altruism without pragmatism is guaranteed disappointment.

3.?Is philosophy making a comeback? Maybe.

Without a doubt the highlight of the Forum for me was hearing experimental philosopher Jonathan Keats. Imagine if all the work you do today, and from this day forth, would not be visible to you – you would not see it come to fruition, you would not be rewarded or recognized for it, you would not understand or feel the consequences of it.

It would become completely a gesture without reciprocity. Would you make choices that serve others or that serve yourself?

The best philosophy is like a gentle slap in the face from a friend, bringing a smile to your face while making you lose your footing. And because of this the winning moment of the entire Forum goes to Patrick Noack who, in this this philosophical panel, reminded us we share 60% of our DNA with a banana.

4.?The foresight field must evolve to survive.

That means we still need the traditionalists and the purists. The amazing people who have doctorates in futures, who teach foresight, who set up the first foresight networks, who have been doing the research for decades are so important for the future futurists. But equally we need new people in the field. And by their nature they come armed with a different view of how to do foresight. They may be green and growing, without the training, without the experience, probably primed for making mistakes, but our field will not survive if we are not expanding our definition of it to include them.

We debated this on my panel, ‘What makes a futurist?’ and, hey, even Jan Oliver Schwarz agrees! I can’t think of any other field that says ‘no thank you’ to recruiting its future work force. No thank you, we don’t want more people in medicine, no we don’t want more people in science, no we don’t want more marketers, more pilots, more military, more comedians … can you imagine?

Instead of recognizing and celebrating the interest in working for the future and the long term, we fear losing our standing. In our quest to be taken seriously, we end up taking ourselves too seriously.

5. Foresight is good business.

There is a growing interest in seeing how business and the private sector apply foresight. Last year, the Foresight in the Boardroom panel I was on explored how this plays out in LEGO, JLR and McDonalds. The panel was repeated this year by popular demand as Winning with Foresight featuring two amazing women from 福特 and 欧莱雅 , Jennifer Brace and Marie-Caroline Darbon .

Both companies are members of our* non-profit, FIG | Foresight Inside Group , which aims to bring together, and help elevate the work of, organizations with dedicated foresight teams. The Forum marked our first in-person member gathering.

(*Co-founded with two incredible gentlemen, Benjamin Moncrieffe from JLR & Adam Walker from Disney.)

Interest in corporate foresight signals a recognition that we can’t do foresight alone; we need involvement from private sector. Organizations hold tremendous power in shaping the future, sometimes more than government and academia. But, importantly, foresight in business is different; applying the theory out of the text book just doesn’t work.

Many major businesses were present during this year’s Forum, including Pepsico, Arup, Amazon and IKEA. Companies that are curious and want to stretch the application of foresight, whether with dedicated resourcing or as a development area for the entire organization.

This is a great thing that benefits both the organizations and the diversity of experience that feeds into and fuels the evolution of our field. And of course makes the Forum the great event it is, no matter what kind of foresight you practice.