March 2024 - 01

Rethinking the future

4 years after the COVID-19 crisis, where are we now? To help you prepare your response, there's an excellent article here: Usbek & Rica , "Il faut renoncer aux futurs déjà obsolètes" (yes, this is in French, but various browsers offer an easy translation). What are your own obsolete images of the future?

This reading can usefully be completed with that of Adanna Shallowe (Imagining a better future through foresight – why the metaphors we use matter, blog, 2020) about:

the need to challenge the use old metaphors to allow for new narratives and better futures to emerge.

Anticipation has various definitions. The most promising may come from the neurosciences. The leading French neurophysiologist, Alain BERTHOZ, has been working for decades on the various physical mechanisms that enable anticipation, stating for ex. that

• "Perception is a simulated action" (in Le sens du Mouvement, 1997);
• "Emotion is a factor of anticipation" (in La Décision, 2003);
• "Anticipation is one of the simplex principles that enable living organisms to find effective solutions to their survival problems" (in La Simplexité, 2009);
• "A change of spatial perspective enables us to prepare the strategies best suited to the circumstances by changing our point of view; in other words by manipulating the frames of reference against which we examine the world." (in La Vicariance, 2013).

Ultimately, in Berthoz, A. & Debru, C. (2015). Anticipation et Prédiction: Du geste au voyage mental. Odile Jacob, two statements resonated with my thoughts.

Living things are characterised by their autonomy. And autonomy presupposes anticipation. In essence, anticipation can only occur if there is a goal. The most elementary organisms have a perception apparatus designed to guide action, but above all to predict its consequences.

If this is so (and I have no doubt this is true), why are we so inefficient when it comes to predict the consequences of our actions or the course of the world?

Anticipation is pre-embedded in the very functioning of sensory captors.

How can we build some equivalent of these sensory captors that would enable us to "sense" the world dynamics and anticipate in the real sense of the word: acting before something happens.

History of the Futures Studies

• Tuomo Kuosa, Evolution of futures studies, Futures 43 (2011) 327–336
• Histoire et mémoire de la prospective, Futuribles, online.

Scenarios

A.I. and scenario planning (EN)

Stefan Michel, Why the future of AI marks the end of scenario planning, Strategy, Dec 2023

Définitions (FR)

Sur une page sans doute oubliée du site GPE-Afrique :

• Un scénario est ? un ensemble formé par la description d'une situation future et du cheminement des événements qui permettent de passer de la situation d'origine à la situation future ? Bluet, J-C et J. Zémor (1970)
• Le scénario est comme ? une liste d'évènements hypothétiques, faite pour attirer l'attention sur des points importants et sur leurs causes ? Herman Kahn (Dans L'an 2000).
• Les scénarios n'ont de crédibilité et d'utilité que s'ils respectent cinq conditions: la pertinence, la cohérence, la vraisemblance, l'importance et la transparence.

Il semblerait que cette dernière définition provienne de l'article : Godet, M. & Durance, P. (2011). Chapitre?1. De la rigueur pour une indiscipline intellectuelle. Dans : M. Godet & P. Durance (Dir), La prospective stratégique: Pour les entreprises et les territoires (pp. 17-58). Paris: Dunod.