A quick guide for leaders to understand foresight and futures terminology

As a young discipline, Futures Studies is still under professional and academic development. However, organizations, governments, and institutions worldwide use foresight tools and frameworks to anticipate emerging issues and opportunities. 

Formal consensus on naming, processes, standards, and tools is still far from reality, and it might present some initial misunderstandings and issues to organizations, teams or professionals entering the field.

The main issue new practitioners might find is naming. There are no standard conventions in the field of foresight. Almost everyone is creating a new name for existing concepts but adding a few extra connotations or, in some cases, without adding anything new. A new field, different schools of practice, and multiple disciplines involved, seems like the perfect boiling plate to create confusion and disorder.

How do we call the discipline of studying the future?

First, let's talk about the name of the field. It is easy to see it as futures studies, futures thinking, foresight, strategic foresight, future-shaping or future foresight, to name just a few.

All of them are mostly the same, with a few subtle differences. Concepts such as foresight or strategic foresight are common in business organizations, while futures studies or futures thinking is the preferred term in academia. Meanwhile, in the arts, it is common to find names closer to critical, transitional, or speculative design to refer to the future.

Although naming might seem irrelevant, it helps encompass intentionality and attitude towards approaching the future. It is an open discussion in the field, and many are trying to chart it to achieve a better explanation of the intersection, similarities and differences for every approach. 

Initially, Elliot P. Montgomery mapped every different subtopic by constrainment, how it respected current paradigms versus freely creating alternatives. In this classification, it is easy to place strategy on the right side with a high degree of constrains, while the arts would be on the left side with a lower degree of constrains.

However, measuring around constrains or speculative freedom might not be enough. Corina Angheloiu took an evolutive approach to Montgomery's mapping to include the attitude towards change, initially by introducing sustainability, but it could be adopted for a broader approach. The horizontal axis measures the appetite for change, being disruptive or transformational on the right side while more incremental and conservative on the left side. While the vertical axis measures the intentionality towards change, being formal, normative and procedural on the upper side, while experimental and open-ended on the bottom side. 

Mapping the different namings and disciplines is an ongoing discussion. Both of the visuals presented are related to speculative design with no other clear visualization that maps other approaches to the future. Still, I will refer to it as just foresight and the futures during the following posts and articles to follow the most used naming conventions applied to business and leadership.

Expertise, skills and capabilities in foresight

Second, let's talk about expertise in foresight. Individuals train learn about processes, skills, frameworks, and methodologies, but they cannot be trained in the future as knowledge, as an end. People develop competencies and capabilities to become foresight practitioners through experience in using foresight toolkits in different endeavours. 

However, people become futures literate when understanding multiple futures and present options that might unfold alternatives, together with the associated driving forces and emerging issues supporting or defining those new scenarios. Futures literacy is knowledge-based and should be the final goal for every individual, team, or organization interested in the future. 

I will explore more on competency, capability, and maturity models regarding foresight in organizations in upcoming articles. So keep tuned for that!

Differences with strategy, innovation and trend research

Third, let's talk about what does foresight provides as a discipline. Obviously, foresight is different from strategy, innovation, and even trend research. Foresight is a systematic, participatory, future intelligence gathering and medium to long-term vision building process. It enables and facilitates present-day decision-making. It invites organizations to consider the future as something to create or shape rather than as something already decided. Foresight, and the future subsequently, is a tool, not a destination.

Strategy, unlike foresight, involves clear goals, actions and resources to achieve a particular end. Similarly, innovation focuses on producing a good or service that adds value while maintaining or optimizing the current business lines. Finally, trend research is constrained by what is going on now; trends manifest a shift that already happened in the past but can never assure future returns or sustainability.

The nature of change concerning the practice of foresight

Fourth, let's talk about change. Change is the consequence of a series of causes, the underlying reasons or motives for change to happen. For example, the sun sets every day to let the night emerge because the earth rotates around itself. In foresight, there are many names to refer to the causes and consequences related to change. Most of them could be depicted as in the following version of the futures cone by Steve Santer connecting many of the elements affecting change.

Driving forces, driving factors, or drivers of change refer to the causes that produce change, those that are already happening and make things happen; in the sunset example, the driving force will be the earth's rotation. Foresight practitioners aim to spot driving forces by looking for signals, weak or strong, that help identify the forces in play before change happens. Driving forces could be fast or slow, natural or produced, visible or invisible, and mega, macro, or micro, amongst many other attributes specific to each force.

On the other hand, emerging issues refer to the consequences of change that create perceptible shifts or drifts in business-as-usual or normality; in the sunset example, the night will be the emerging issue shifting the previous normality, the daylight.

When an emerging issue gains traction and repeats, it becomes more predictable, and it turns into a trend, a pattern repeated over time that turns into normality until new driving forces enter into play.

Foresight is, indeed, the field of anticipating and preparing for unexpected change by understanding the whys rather than the whats. Let's dare to say that a good foresight project should end with more questions than answers, providing more perspectives on what might unfold and how it might affect us.

When does the future start?

Lastly, let's talk about time. When does the future start? Precisely, the future is just the moment after now, but when referring to a specific sector's future, when does the future start?

The future usually starts in about 5 to 10 years, perceived as when enough change has become evident to shift normality farther away from today. However, most organizations and institutions worldwide still stick to a common short, medium, and long-term scheme, although those names' specificity might differ quantitatively.

However, this matter should and must be defined for every foresight endeavour to define the expectations of applicability and implementation. Aiming for far-fetched futures within short-term organizations might be a complete disaster for the adoption of foresight.