Futures and Foresight by Dr Adam Morris, Auckland Council, provides important insight and knowledge to inform innovation and experimentation through investigating alternative futures.
Why think about the future?
Ultimately, to prepare your business and community for future change, identify potential upcoming risks, and opportunities for doing things differently.
But thinking about future possibilities is difficult. Conversations about the future are cluttered with diverse opinions, projections and trends which can be confusing to make sense of and make it hard to realise that we have any say or control about what happens tomorrow and beyond.
Our future is not fixed, and any one of those opinions, projections or trends could be right or wrong.
Instead of moving into ‘a future’, we are moving towards many possible ‘futures’. Through exploring and experimenting with different ideas, there is plenty of room to innovate and shape what happens next
What is futures and foresight?
Doing futures and foresight is not about predicting a future or saying one is right and one is wrong. What it is about is bringing a diverse range of opinions, projections, and trends together in a structured way to think about alternate future possibilities.
This is done by considering what is changing and why for your business area and broader. What might those changes mean for you, your partners, and stakeholders. Then it is using all that insight to explore a range of possible solutions to challenges and creating ideas for new products and services or new ways of doing things.
There are three types of alternate futures you can think about, each with increasing levels of uncertainty. Probable where you are very confident it will happen; Plausible where you a cautiously confident, there are some known unknowns; and Possible where there are many known unknowns and you have little confidence what will happen. A final type of future to consider is a Preferable one, what type of future you would like to see happen.
All are valuable to think about as they test the boundaries of innovation but also because what might now seem possible but unlikely could, under the right circumstances, quickly become a probable, likely future.
Where might you find futures and foresight being used?
Anywhere where someone or an organisation or community is interested in planning for the future or looking for new and innovative ideas to solve challenges – examples include:
| Who might be interested? | Question they might be trying to answer |
|---|---|
| An organisation planning for a future where climate disruption is commonplace | How will their business model need to change to cope with extreme weather in the future? Or what kinds of new buildings or services might be needed to help people cope with those extremes? |
| A technology company trying to anticipate the long-term ethics and consequences of its new product? |
Will their technology be good for humanity in the long-run, or will it harm society in hard-to-predict ways? |
| A university or school planning new kinds of courses to teach students work skills and behaviours? | What will graduates need to know today to be ready for jobs of the future? |
| A library trying to anticipate how it might be used into the future | What kinds of services will the library need to provide, how will the design of the library need to change? |
| A local authority renewing a contract for its waste management facilities | How might the types of waste change into the future and what are the opportunities to ensure the facilities are flexible? How might those facilities help drive us toward our climate commitment goals? |
| An entrepreneur looking to inspire others with visions of a future that is hopeful | What are the biggest changes we can imagine, and what would it feel like to live in that future? |
How to do futures and foresight?
Most importantly it is about working together with a diverse range of people and expertise because that is what challenges and tests the boundaries of our thinking and creativity, assumptions, and biases, and that is what drives innovative solutions and new ideas. What one person thinks is probable, almost certain to happen future, might be to someone else an unlikely, possible future.
Working with a diverse range of people helps to build consensus with stakeholders and partners about what is changing and to help get buy-in to solutions and new ideas.
There are many tools available for doing futures and foresight. They provide structured approaches for a diverse range of information - including techniques for discovering what is changing and key issues in your area of interest. They also help identify the drivers of change and what could happen if those drivers were placed in alternative scenarios. In this way you can stress test your objectives or business model and explore different pathways using, for example, roadmaps and backcasting.
Five questions to get you started on your futures journey
Captions provide information that can help users find, navigate, and understand tables.
| Question | 1. What do you want to know, what is your question? |
|---|---|
| Comment | This is very important to think about as it will help you plan which futures and foresight approaches to use, where to look for information, and who to talk to. |
| Question | 2. What is changing? |
| Comment | What kind of changes are happening and what are they changing from and to? Also think about what is driving those changes. Look broadly and widely across international and national media articles, research reports, company reports, legislation, and opinion pieces. What we decide now will be what children and young people must live with – how can we include their ideas and opinions? Look at trends and signals of change. Trends are repeating and lasting things which are driving change, like increasing carbon emissions is driving climate change. A signal of change is something which is new or obscure but could mean something new which will form a new trend – these could be a business model, new technology, government legislation or social. |
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| Question | 3. What could that change look like if it became widespread? |
| Comment | From the changes you have found what probable, plausible and possible futures might play out and how would it feel to be in that world for you, your organisation, community, partners, and stakeholders |
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| Question | 4. Is this a future you want to make happen? Or do you want to avoid or prevent it? |
| Comment | Is there a future you would like to see happen |
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| Question | 5. How could these alternate futures be of benefit to you? |
| Comment | What needs to happen to make your preferred future or solution happen? What influence and change can you make to make that happen? |
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Written by Dr Adam Morris, Principal Strategic Advisor – Futures at Auckland Council, for Climate Connect Aotearoa