20 Books and Articles to Get You Started in Strategic Foresight

A futurist is someone who tracks signals using statistics, deep research, and creative thinking and methodically analyzes next-order outcomes. The job is about preparations, not predictions. Given what we know to be true today, we use data and deep research to understand how the future could look different in many different permutations. The field itself is called “foresight,” or sometimes “strategic foresight.”

Lately, a lot of people are interested in strategic foresight, and companies are creating new positions, or even entire teams, dedicated to exploring uncertainty.

There are different lineages and schools of foresight. Trained practitioners use a methodology of some kind. The field has split to some degree — there are now people who mainly focus on scenarios, and people who focus more on signals and trends (which are used to develop scenarios). We at the Future Today Institute are a bit unusual in that we do deep signals and trends research, and we also develop scenarios and work with organizations on backcasting, which is a way of backward-engineering strategic scenarios into strategic actions.

Regardless of whether you’re just starting out in the field of strategic foresight, or you’re a seasoned practitioner looking for new insights, these are the books we recommend to our clients and colleagues:

Introduction to Foresight

• Wendell Bell, Foundations of Futures Studies: Human Science for a New Era: History, Purposes, and Knowledge, Volumes I and II, Transaction, 1996. This is an academic approach, and it’s a dense book. But it offers a solid foundation for the history and application of foresight.
• Alberto Behar and Sandile Hlatshwayo, “How to Implement Strategic Foresight (and Why),” an IMF publication, December 2021. This is a short, good overview of different foresight approaches and the way that foresight is used within the International Monetary Fund. It also has a great overview of the value of strategic foresight.
• Ed Cornish, Futuring: The Exploration of the Future, World Future Society, 2003. This book is more accessible than Bell’s. While many of the tech-related examples are now outdated, his explanations of core practices still hold.
• Jennifer Gidley’s The Future (a short Oxford University Press guide) and Nick Montfort’s The Future (a short MIT Press guide) both offer very brief overviews of the field. Montfort’s has great perspective on the long history of foresight (dating back to the Oracle of Delphi), while Gidley’s has examples of grand challenges and educational approaches.

Deeper Cuts

• Pierre Wack, “Scenarios: Uncharted Waters Ahead,” Harvard Business Review, September 1985. This is a seminal work from the parent of modern corporate foresight describing the use, success and failure of scenarios in organizations.
• Alvin Toffler, The Futurists, Random House, 1972. This book is unfortunately now out of print, but if you come across a used copy, buy it. In the 1960s, the seeds for modern foresight were being planted, and this book includes essays from early practioners including Olaf Helmer, Margaret Mead, Arthur Waskow, Robert Jungk, Herman Kahmn, M.S. Iyengar, Yujiro Hayashi and Ossip Flechtheim, among others.
• Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of The Future, Holt Reinhart & Winston, 1962. This book is a good example of how to organize and communicate research about plausible next-order impacts.
• Bertrand de Jouvenel, The Art of Conjecture, Basic Books, 1967. This is a good introduction to the concept of scenarios, helping show how next-order thinking should influence the decisions we make in the present.

Trends

• Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, PublicAffairs, 2016. This book, by FTI founder Amy Webb, describes our methodology for signal detection and trend identification. While this book primarily focuses on how to find long-term trends and calculate their inflection points, it also includes an overview of how trends underpin scenarios. This book offers a good framing on how to find emerging signals of change using that would otherwise be missed––a way of seeing around corners.
• Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner, Superforecasting, Crown, 2015. This book details how a research team used emerging signals to identify forces of change. This approach offers a solid framing on how to predict answers to narrow questions using a probabilistic system.

Scenarios

• Peter Schwartz, The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, Doubleday, 1996. This book describes in detail how different organizations use scenarios. It’s an important work and is referenced all the time.
• Diane Scearce and Katherine Fulton, “What If: The Art of Scenario Thinking for Nonprofits,” Global Business Network, 2004. GBN was founded by Napier Collyns, Peter Schwartz, Jay Ogilvy, Stewart Brand and Lawrence Wilkinson now stretches far and wide. Their process, which was based on Pierre Wack’s earlier work, is codified well in this short PDF. Written for nonprofits, it’s still a great primer on scenarios thinking.

Foresight in Practice

• Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham, Black Futures, Penguin 2020. This is a wonderful compilation of essays, poetry, social media posts, art and more to inspire, inform, and generate public dialogue.
• Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, Bantam Books, 1984. This remains one of the most influential books written about the future. Toffler’s writing is masterful. This shows how foresight thinking can impact our perspective in the present. (The book is about how technology and science were rapidly changing the world at that point in history, and without new ways to cope with change individuals and society would face danger. A message that still resonates today.)
• Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel, The Genesis Machine, PublicAffairs, 2022. This book explores the history and futures of biotechnology, AI and synthetic biology, and Part III includes five chapters that are each a different plausible, data-driven scenario. The introduction chapter to Part III also offers a detailed explanation of what scenarios are and how they can be used to explore unknows.
• Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martins, 1981. This book describes the factors that created the present world in the late 1970s –– it’s a superb example of how to create a sense of urgency using forces, signals, trends and scenarios.
• Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, Harper & Row, 1933. This is a great example of a scenario, rooted in data. What happens when tech and science advances are used to control society, so that authoritarian states have more power over citizens? It’s a chilling read, nearly a century after it was first written.
• Joseph Coates, & Jennifer Jarratt , What Futurists Believe, World Future Society, 1987. This compliation of interviews provides a good backdrop to understand different parts of the foresight community.

Companion Books

Ultimately, foresight and strategy work together. So it’s important to also get familiar with some core books about strategy. We recommend:

• Michael Porter, Competitive Strategy, Simon & Schuster, 1998. This is Porter’s most important work (and there are many). It’s been translated into 19 languages and now in its 60th printing.
• Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma, Harvard Business School Press, 1997. This is the book that transformed how companies view competition and disruption.