Creating responsible futures
Cat Tully writes:
Each year at our Summer foresight retreat, we have a policy theme, a methodology theme, and a ‘live challenge’ (set by one of our partners) that participants tackle using the foresight tools and approach that they learn.
For #SOIF2023 (24–28 July), our methodology focus is on responsible foresight. This is the idea that we need to be intentional about the values, behaviours standards and principles behind foresight work to ensure it maintains its core purpose: to enable the societal transformations needed to confront this decade’s global challenges.
This theme is both timely and important.
Foresight has existed as a field for many decades but has had limited impact or awareness in wider policy and decision-making communities, despite repeated attempts to mainstream the field.
Rising interest
Today, we are once again at a moment where there is rising interest in foresight, across a wide range of sectors, organisations, governments and in communities. Foresight is being adopted and mainstreamed across institutions and organisations as people look to better understand complexity and tackle systemic issues.
This is exciting, but there are always risks when people adopt tools or methods, without considering the ethics, morals and power relationships involved in what they are doing.
There are efforts to address this. Earlier this year Dubai Future Foundation released a set of principles to harness foresight to guide better decision making today. Ted Fuller’s Responsible Futures project has been exploring the theory, frameworks and practices needed in foresight and anticipation. Debates about what the sector needs to do to professionalise have been convened by Andy Hines and others in recent years.
Foresight’s superpower
Poor foresight practice reinforces pre-existing views of the world. The “future” is often co-opted by present incumbents.
Effective foresight focuses on mindsets and behaviours as much as tools — but it can be incremental or transformational. Incremental foresight helps policymakers and decision makers be more aware of the external environment and consider challenging alternative views and evidence about those futures.
If acted on, decisions become more resilient, future-alert, and can shape positive outcomes. This is better than doing nothing, but can lead to technocratic results. Values and systems of power remain largely untouched. Transformative foresight goes further. It creates deep change by weaving coalition of change across communities and helps incumbents, early adopters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and communities work through different views of the future to build a common ambition. It unlocks change by navigating beyond disagreements and entrenched positions.
We believe that the reason foresight is suddenly more popular is because we are in a moment where transformative change is needed. Foresight can be a superpower in this moment, but only if it is a rigorous and systematic practice that can help us to do what we know is necessary — to midwife the new, and to help to hospice the old.*
Managing tensions
Futures and foresight work is always about transitions, and transitions are always contested. They involve an interplay of new and old actors, innovation and stability, and there are always losers, and necessarily so. But while futures practitioners get excited by the new, they can forget that letting the past go, as respectfully as possible, is also a necessary part of change. In helping leaders make change successfully, futurists need to work with the grain of existing systems, while encouraging decision-makers to let go of some of their decision-making power.
Tensions are therefore inherent in futures work. We need to:
- Embrace uncertainty and complexity — understanding fluid drivers of change, while making insights from foresight relevant to decision-makers so they can act
- Speak truth to power in a way that is heard, challenging existing dynamics and helping people to have a voice, while building a case for change
- Recognise that transformation, however urgent, takes time and requires systems change and institutional and behavioural change.
New conversations
This is not simple work. But when done well, it opens up new conversations that challenge perspectives and open up new ideas. It makes a safer space for difficult conversations. And it nurtures relationships across communities and generations that can lead to new perspectives and possibilities.
The reason that these represent a superpower is that in the process of doing all of this, we are also doing three difficult things all at the same time. First, we are connecting into different forms of knowledge and using them to add richness to the way we understand the present moment. Second, we are working with leaders — both existing and emerging leaders — to create tomorrow’s institutions and governance processes. And third, we are helping existing institutions and organisations new ways of thinking and working with the future.
Tools, in other words, are not enough. Much of effective futures and foresight work is about working with meaning and culture, of deep immersion in the intangible.
Responsible futures at the Foresight Retreat
At our Summer foresight retreat we will focus on these tensions as we explore responsible foresight. How to bring to the fore the discomfort and challenges involved in doing foresight well? What values, behaviours, standards and principles are needed? And how can we navigate the risks that the rapid adoption of foresight results in co-option, in technocratic, performative and tokenistic endeavours, rather than transformational outcomes?
We’ll be joined by practitioners who have been experimenting with different aspects of responsible futures including Aarathi Krishan, who has been reimagining futures for social change at UNDP Asia Pacific, Melissa Ingaruca, one of our Next Generation Foresight Fellows and a researcher and designer in multi-species urbanism, and Riel Miller, a champion of futures literacy.
We will continue to explore this theme as the OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) explore what responsible foresight means for national policy-making standards for foresight.
If you’re interested in joining the conversation then join us this July at the retreat, or get in touch to be part of the conversation.
— — —
[*] The phrase is by the California Senator John Vasconcellos. Quoted in Graham Leicester, Transformative Innovation (Triarchy Press).
