What is Strategic Foresight?
And why you should solve for WHY instead of X
After a year of unprecedented change it seems like there is an intense desire for both a return to normalcy and a greater ability to predict the future. Enter Strategic Foresight, a practice of critically examining where we’ve been to imagine where we’re going.
Futurists like Ray Kurzweil are often asked to comment on topics like artificial intelligence or transhumanism (the melding of man and machine), and often the questions are, “How soon will X happen?” or “Will we be able to do X by the year XXXX?” People crave timelines. But anyone who works in foresight and claims that they can magically answer these questions and predict the future is lying.
Solve for X
When we think about headlines or reports that have to do with the future, they tend to be framed as — The Future of X. It could be the future of food or the future of real estate. Anything and everything is fair game.
I like to think of this approach as solving for X.
Solving for X is an individual or group’s best guess at what the future might hold. It’s valuable to the extent that we use the outcome as one data point and not a definitive truth.
Solve for WHY
The real power of strategic foresight, in my mind, is giving us space to solve for why.
It’s an opportunity to take a collective pause, break from the inertia of the way things have been done in the past, and imagine new possibilities.
Strategic foresight should provoke more questions than it answers.
Take something like driverless cars for example, there are hundreds of pieces written about what that future looks like, how soon we’ll get there, and all of the steps we need to take.
But to me foresight is about slowing down and critically examining whether that’s a future we want to see happen. Whether we should work to accelerate that future or steer in a different direction.
We can avoid sleepwalking into a future we don’t want by asking “why?” over and over again.
Cone of Possibilities
This brings us to the concept of the cone of possibilities, a cornerstone of Strategic Foresight.
I find this to be a helpful reminder that from where we stand today there is no singular future, instead there is a whole range of probable, preferable, plausible, and possible futures and the further out you look the wider that cone of possibilities gets.
So again, anyone who tells you they can predict The Future is either lying, or betting on that probable future, which is really just an extension of the status quo.
Solving for why will help us move towards our preferable futures.
