Relational Foresight: Our Methods & Values
Edited excerpt from our forthcoming Discovery Report, written collaboratively with Rachel Coldicutt and Anna Williams
Our working hypothesis for the Civil Society Foresight Observatory is that the Observatory might eventually look like a multidisciplinary team of experts with lived, learned, and practice experience working to create a foresight commons. Ideally, meeting the following needs:
- Help funders fund for the future (be able to shape not just respond, and to take greater risks)
- Help civil society organisations to anticipate and adapt more quickly
- Draw together weak signals from across the sector to show what is coming next
- Strengthen decision-making and evidence base for the sector
- Encourage more diverse and anticipatory funding decisions, so that funders feel more comfortable backing a more emergent world
- Help civil society organisations to more actively shape the stories of the future
- Co-ordinate and showcase the expertise and voice of civil society in long-term thinking and planning
Through the discovery phase, we have been researching what needs to be in place to make this happen. Our conclusion is that a Civil Society Foresight Commons requires a relational way of doing foresight. This relational foresight is based on a collective “response-ability”¹ — for our world and our futures.² In other words, we are attempting to create a process that demonstrates the co-existence and interconnection of multiple realities.
The starting point for this is to express a conversation between the “official” foresight produced by governments and big business, and the “unofficial” continuous sensing and navigating that takes place in civil society. As we found in the Glimmers Project, there is an abundance of empirical and qualitative knowledge in civil society that is never made material.
We will work closely with several groups of experts, who we are calling “Observers”, through this pilot phase to map and articulate these “unofficial” futures, and show them in relation to more established “official” futures. The aim of this is to show emerging realities and also demonstrate the gaps, overlaps, and potentially most fruitful levers for intervention by funders, policymakers, and civil society.
The values guiding our process
To understand how to make this relational practice a possibility, we have reviewed existing foresight practices that we will build on to create this new, relational methodology. Our initial hypothesis is that the creation and maintenance of a relational Foresight Commons depends upon:
- Ensuring foresight from all sources has equal status
- A commitment to avoiding both “top-down” and “bottom-up” foresight practice
- Consistently making visible the gaps and connections between “official” and “unofficial” futures
- Being useful and intelligible to both funders and to wider civil society
And ensuring we enact the following behaviours:
- Not top down, but relational
- Oriented towards justice, not just technical possibility
- Embracing distributed potential rather than focussed certainty
- Respecting lived, learnt, and practice experience as well as technocratic expertise
- Aim for transformational change, not just measurable impact
As Elinor Ostrom showed, the longevity of any Commons depends on clear terms of common agreement, and throughout the pilot we will iterate and build on this set of values.
Many thanks to Cassie Robinson. and Rhodri Davies who’ve given super helpful feedback on our early version of the discovery report.
[1] Haraway expands: “Response-ability is about both absence and presence, killing and nurturing, living and dying — and remembering who lives and who dies and how in the string figures of naturalcultural history” (2016, 28).
[2] Donna J Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices (Duke University Press, 2016), 125.
