Strategic Foresight: a Mechanism for Stakeholder Mutuality
A think piece for the ESPAS 2016 conference by Marius Oosthuizen (@marius_oost), Faculty in Strategic Foresight, Gordon Institute of Business Science, University of Pretoria
The last decade was marked by a fundamental misalignment between the global economic system and the societies which it is expected to serve, between political systems that must enable prosperity and progress and the rising expectations of voters. This is at the heart of the social upheaval, rising populism and the declining trust in institutions seen in many western democracies.
Forming policy responses in this environment necessitates new modes of engagement, co-creation, and collaboration. Policy-making is about problem solving. Solutions however require strategic insight and future-orientated idealism, grounded in pragmatic implementation plans for the here-and-now. In complex globally interconnected systems such solutions are increasingly illusive and require broad coalitions of actors working in unison.
For global interdependence to be sustained into the future, higher levels of stakeholder mutuality will be crucial.
To create these coalitions amid competing interests and perspectives is the goal of participative strategic foresight methods employed for stakeholder mutuality. This implies methodological complexity and ambiguity. It implies diversity and contestation. It is in this nexus, between foresight, strategic option-generation, and ethical concession that policy-makers must craft
their interventions.
Under such conditions, mutuality, which is the recognised interdependence of stakeholders, serves as an enabling social lubricant for collaboration.
We thus propose that an approach to policy-making that employs strategic foresight methods such as scenario planning in an integrated manner with dialogue and diplomacy as social learning processes for the development of mutuality, is crucial and complimentary to the technocratic planning tools already in use. Such approaches enable broad participation by cross-sectoral stakeholders in the policy-making process, amounting to a mechanism for contending perspectives to be articulated and compared and for common ground to be sought.
For global interdependence to be sustained into the future, higher levels of stakeholder mutuality will be crucial.
