The Future of Foresight in Europe
Beyond Evidence-Based Pessimism to Realistic Hope
A think piece for the ESPAS 2016 conference by Angela Wilkinson, former Head of Strategic Foresight, OECD, author of ‘Strategic Reframing’
A focus on the short term often overemphasises negative, trends of doom and gloom. Developing and using foresight enables realistic hope. It pushes beyond sugar-coated ideology about what the future should be and the evidence-based pessimism that is driving fear of the future.
Foresight is a disciplined approach to futures thinking that enables societies to thrive under disruptive changes and to collaborate to create new and better future possibilities for all. It is not about wishful thinking. The aim is not to predict, but to be better prepared. To develop a more explicit, testable, contestable and useful sense of the future that is already emerging in the here-and-now.
What will 2030 or 2050 look like, sound like, and feel like? The unexpected can happen faster than anyone anticipates in 2016. Imagine it is good news. We have access to boundless clean energy. Trust is distributed across networks. Gender parity has been achieved. Peace and prosperity are working hand in hand.
If you could immerse yourself in this future — experience it somehow — and then look back to the present day, what would you notice? How would your priorities and options for action differ from what you are doing today? Would today’s key trends still be significant? The power of foresight is in refreshing and reframing the present.
The power of foresight is in refreshing and reframing the present.
Looking forward from 2016, we are in danger of becoming overwhelmed by evidence-based pessimism. The distant future has become a source of fear. Probabilistic trend analysis, business-as-usual scenarios and conditional projections are necessary but insufficient. They fail to incentivise action until crisis.
There is no appetite for dystopian visions or overly optimistic utopias which lack insight, innovation and frustrate progress. Rather, we can use foresight to generate new insights about the present day — to inspire innovation, identify new solution spaces and populate these with new seeds of change.
