Foresights Department

The Paisley pattern has provenance in India. It’s flourishes capture an understanding of a global order of nature expressed in a local place. The product, and its making, are drenched with multiple narratives, capabilities, cultures. And possibilities.

Recently, Future Paisley hosted a series of 'Grand Conversationes' exploring new potential for the town. I chaired the conversation on urban futures with fantastic insights from Alidsair Wiseman of The Innovation Zone, Rolf Roscher of erz, Alasdair Morrison, Head of Economy and Development at Renfrewshire Council, and reflections from the audience drawn together by Stuart McMillan of Renfrewshire Council. The discussion and audience engagement provoked reflections on futures and foresight as strategic tools to shape places.

Nietchze said that the future influences the present just as much as the past

Responding to the subtle signals of change can help see different scenarios for better futures. It’s about imagining possibilities, as well as celebrating the past.

But, there are some key ingredients to reaching the future. The first is about mindset not stuff. Changing places needs changes in thinking. Often, old rules govern current places. New ideas are measured against current standards.

So, change the rules

Create a different strategic spaces for decision making. These spaces probe and sense signals about changing futures. They invite ideas to test ways to respond to changing times. They create an infrastructure to implement ideas, adopt new ways of doing, adapt to change.

Working with futures, as a practical means of shaping investment and infrastructure needs navigators.

It needs people who can help map the landscape and create route maps for others. It needs passion. And courage. It needs the right environment to be built, to explore, test and implement change. And these environments should build leaders, first adopters, and followers, champions and advocates, communicators and do-ers.

New futures invite new models

New futures also build on a belief that the potential of what we already have can be transformed. Cities, central business districts and old models of planning and development are already changing. The opportunity exists. Towns can transform.

The form of the different future hasn’t yet emerged

Changing mindsets need an infrastructure of action, and skills for change. The building blocks of this infrastructure include foresight skills, looking to the future, sensing signals, probing possibilities. They also include research and development skills, making sense of possible futures, building ideas to test possible responses, engaging coalitions for change. And it includes skills in adoption and implementation, translating what’s possible into what’s practical.

Conditions for human flourishing

Better futures, supporting human flourishing can’t be achieved by cataloguing past failures. They can’t be achieved by some groups gatekeeping the potential of all to flourish. They can’t be achieved by dreamy, directionless delegation of hope to others to do the right thing. The future can be visualised. We can create maps of potential. We can create new rules, new strategic spaces for new possibilities.

Foresights and insights provide a playbook for practical action to make possible futures real