On Tuesday 5th May, 8am Pacific / 11am Eastern / 4pm in the UK, I’m teaming up with ELGL (Engaging Local Government Leaders) to talk foresight, scenarios, and planning for uncertainty in local government.
Tag: foresight
Our feral future: working on the crises you did(n’t) see coming
Over the last few weeks, on and offline, I’ve been having a lot of conversations about “preparing for the future you didn’t see coming”.
The foresight approaches which I favour tend to avoid predicting the future. Instead, I work with clients to highlight the futures you didn’t anticipate, either because you had a strategic blindspot or because you chose to ignore them.
Was the pandemic one of the futures we couldn’t see coming, or one which we chose not to? And since its arrival, have our responses been based on what is really unfolding, or on mental models which we had previously constructed? Read more
Free webinar: Introduction to Scenario Planning
The short session provides a practical nuts-and-bolts overview of some scenario techniques and approaches, designed to support organisations that are new to the process as they seek to make sense of future uncertainties and take wise long-term decisions.
Real Time – Webinar with R. David Lankes
Today I spoke with leading US information professional R. David Lankes about foresight, strategy, and coping with uncertainty beyond immediate short-term crisis response.
David created one of the first 100 web sites ever, plus the first web presence for CNN, the Discovery Channel, and the U.S. Department of Education. We spoke about what he foresaw at the beginning of the Internet age, the surprises which emerged along the way, and how we might learn from the past when the future is uncertain and unlikely to repeat what went before.
You can watch the YouTube video below, or read more at the Librarians.Support website.
Which of your future selves are you going to help out?
Do you ready the pot for tomorrow’s coffee before you go to bed at night?
Do you go to a yoga class so that you’ll stay fit, strong, and flexible over time?
Do you put money aside to cover your next tax bill?
Foresight is a complex business. At the organisational level, a lot of thought and work goes into finding tools and techniques which help people prepare for times which haven’t arrived yet.
Yet, like all the most important topics, foresight is also terribly simple. It’s about finding answers to the questions “What’s coming next?” and “What should I do about it?”
Sometimes that’s as simple as prudently taking actions which will benefit your future self – like prepping that coffee pot before you go to bed.
When you do this, it’s like your present self is helping out your future self.
When you arrive in the future, you’ll be able to look back and feel glad that your past self made an effort on your behalf.
No-one knows for sure what the future holds, so we’re always taking bets, more or less informed, on what will await us. (Chances are high you’ll need coffee in the morning, and the kettle will still be there to let you make it).
When we address more complex future issues, individually or as an organisation, we have to take more complex bets about the future circumstances which await. Read more
Thinking Seriously About How Things Change
In a situation like the one we find ourselves currently in, there’s bound to be a lot of speculation.
Whether you’re now quarantined at home or still going in to your workplace, the chances are that you’re scrolling your digital device for the latest updates and information.
Among all the other information you’ll have to sift, there will be articles, columns, and features asking whether the pandemic will permanently transform our way of life. Slate suggests that “thanks to the coronavirus, the future may arrive earlier than expected“; the Guardian warns that “life may never be ‘normal’ again“; New York magazine is already certain that “we can’t go back to the way things used to be“.
On Twitter today, I watched a thread of futurists roll by, “brainstorming about medium-long term scenarios” of COVID-19, offering what boiled down to a series of “what-if” questions.
But this is where I think we have to be more disciplined about how we approach the future.
One of the joys of looking at what comes next is that no-one knows for sure. The best efforts of the human race across history have failed to give us either crystal balls or time machines. Evidence, by definition, cannot be gathered from events which haven’t happened yet, so any predictive model involves a degree of faith that the future will be like the past in certain respects.
As a result, there’s a danger that we mistake the future for either a projected dot on a graph, or an intuition shaped by our hopes and fears. In fact, it’s a place we’re going to have to live, as rich and complex and contradictory as the present, and it’s totally inaccessible to us, right up until it arrives.
The word “scenarios” gets bandied around a lot in these circumstances, by people who really mean either “contingencies” or “speculations”. But scenarios aren’t daydreams, dystopias, projected data points, or simple “what ifs”.
Scenarios are methodically constructed by a group of stakeholders to locate the futures which lie outside of current assumptions. They’re not predictions and don’t expect to successfully locate the one future which will actually come to pass. A good scenario can be wild and unlikely, as long as it helps you to notice something you had previously ignored about what lies ahead.
Scenarios have to be plausible – meaning that they challenge assumptions but are useful to inform decision-making. That means that, while they may incorporate some wild or unexpected circumstances, you’re not likely to spend much time scenario planning for the rise of Atlantis or the arrival of flying saucers from the great beyond.
Scenarios, as used on the Oxford Scenario Planning Approach at the Saïd Business School, actually have a pretty tight definition:
A small set
of manufactured possible future contexts
of something
for someone
for a purpose
with a pre-specified usable interface
and used.
This means:
- we construct possible futures for a specific context, user, and purpose;
- we only construct enough futures to usefully inform decision-making;
- we attend, in advance, to how the user will receive and incorporate the scenarios into their work;
- and the scenario engagement is only truly successful if the scenarios are used – that is to say, if they inform the decision which needs to be made.
This is why a lot of a scenario planner’s work happens in advance of the event at which possible future contexts will be created and discussed – because it is vitally important to define and understand the decision which the scenarios are meant to inform, and the context in which this decision will be made.
It is also why scenario planners must work hard in the latter stages of the process, once the future contexts have been created: the future stories and visions must inform the present-day decision which needs to be made.
As the great scenario planner Pierre Wack noted, in his work, articulating the scenarios – the future visions or stories themselves – was a small proportion of the time spent with executives. Once the scenarios had been presented to leaders, the rest of the time focussed on understanding and exploring the factors. The stories of the future themselves can be discarded once they have opened users’ eyes to the issues which lay outside of their previous framing.
So, as the pandemic sweeps the globe and you start to ponder what happens next – for you, your community, your organisation, your nation, the whole global order – don’t get too caught up in speculation and punditry; and certainly don’t mistake them for useful scenarios.
If you find yourself in quarantine, eager to think about what comes next, you could take pen and paper and begin to think about your strategic blindspots through a “back of the napkin” activity like Arrows of Time.
You could read some of the serious scenario planning literature or read an interview with an accomplished scenario practitioner.
Or you could get in touch for a chat.
Future health: Oslo and the ‘a-ha’ moment
Our University of Oslo scenarios for the future of schools, out this week, surfaced health, and perceptions of health, as a battleground between parents and institutions in the education sector of 2050.
This was an “a-ha” moment for university researchers seeking new issues to explore around the digitalisation of education.
In scenario planning, we don’t aim to predict the future, but rather to generate plausible visions which can usefully inform present-day decision-making.
The future stories we create together are intended to highlight issues and drivers which exist in the present; the future scenario can then be set aside in order to focus on the issue at hand.
For the Oslo education researchers, a world in which parents and institutions warred over children’s health in a heavily-surveilled society – bickering with ‘the algorithm’ even over when to wipe your child’s nose – highlighted the extent to which their research should explore questions of health and wellbeing.
Today, in the Norwegian news, we see a parent-led Facebook group urging the city to close schools while the municipal authorities maintain that there is no reason yet to do so.
The campaigners argue that if businesses are sending staff home, then young children – who are less able to follow guidelines on infection control, like coughing into your elbow – should certainly go back to their families too.
Questions of distance learning, and education via screens and digital devices, may be sharpened by the current pandemic – even for the youngest children.
How will coronavirus affect the way we teach and learn, in the short and long term? Could it impact even the youngest children, irrespective of whether they contract the disease?
Good foresight work can help communities, institutions, and individuals navigate such turbulent and uncertain situations. You can read more about the Oslo education scenarios project here.
Strategy and Impact Workshops at State Library of New South Wales
Following a successful engagement last year at the State Library of New South Wales, I’ll be returning to Sydney with colleague Brendan Fitzgerald for two workshops in early May.
In our “Library Leaders Workshop Day” on May 4, Brendan & I will help senior library staff to explore a range of strategic tools and techniques. These will help teams think about changing wants and needs in their communities, building the capability to respond with creative local strategies.
Then, on May 5, we will explore ways of defining, measuring, and sharing the difference that public libraries make to their communities, in “Next-generation Measures and Metrics for Public Libraries“.
Join us for one or both of these sessions in May – we’re looking forward to seeing you.
“Schools and/or screens”: scenarios for the digitalisation of education in Norway
In 2019, the University of Oslo contracted me for a short foresight project exploring the future of education in Norway, with a focus on digitalisation of learning.
We convened a small group of researchers, education professionals, and other stakeholders to create three scenarios: plausible visions of 2050 which challenge current assumptions about the futures which might await.
The scenarios explored questions of self-directed learning, hypersurveillance, financial and ecological collapse, as well as shifts in politics at all levels from the global to the local.
After the scenarios were produced, scholars from Norway and overseas provided responses, examining present-day issues which were highlighted by our visions of the future.
The aim of the scenarios was to enrich the futures thinking of two projects at the University, one exploring Screen Cultures, and the other investigating the Nordic Social Model.
You can download the full scenario document as a PDF file here, or read a short slide deck summarising the project, also as a PDF, here.
Scenarios for the Australian Energy Sector: Futures of Heat, Light, and Power
The scenarios I created for Energy Consumers Australia’s 2020 Foresighting Forum, Futures of Heat, Light, and Power – are now publicly available.
In four visions of Australia in 2050, we presented future contexts that challenge current assumptions about how the energy sector works and where it’s headed, with a focus on the experience of the Australian consumer.
In each scenario, we join Josie and her daughter Hannah at their breakfast table, to explore how they live their lives – and how Josie’s role as an energy worker changes – from one future to the next.
You can download the full scenario report (PDF) via the Energy Consumers Australia site, or watch a series of videos based on the scenarios as a YouTube playlist.
Imperial College London’s Dr. Jeff Hardy led a panel discussion unpacking the implications of the scenarios at the Forum, which you can also see on YouTube.
At a critical moment in Australia’s energy future, these scenarios help us to think differently about the world which might await us thirty years from now, and explore both the challenges and opportunities which may exist.
See more from the Energy Consumers Australia 2020 Foresighting Forum at their site.
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
