The Good, the Bad, and the Singularity: Separating Foresight from Future Failure

The next article in our Questions for your Vendor Series. This one is about how to tell good foresight from the bad and the unethical versions.

This article is not really about what foresight is, or which of the many methodologies are best. You can find many descriptions of these elsewhere.[i] This article is about how to identify what good foresight is and what to look for in a foresight vendor. For our purposes, a simple definition will get us started and we can get on with the important bits. The most common goes as follows: foresight is a way of thinking about the future and preparing for what might happen. Foresight strategy, then, is the process of using these future visions to help organizations pro-actively shape and prepare for a future that has not yet come to be. More simply put, foresight and its applied form (strategic foresight) are ways to study change and do something about it for the better. The more important question is why is foresight necessary in business at all?

Foresight helps you plan and anticipate how your actions will affect the people around you. More than that, it helps any organization manage risk and avoid surprise by generating a view of how changes occurring in the operating environment today might impact the organization and its stakeholders tomorrow. Foresight is also useful in challenging your current thinking and bringing new issues to light. Foresight provides an opportunity for the organization to 1) critically assess its vision, purpose, propositions and strategy, 2) holistically identify and/or anticipate competency gaps, investment and solution requirements 3) design/prototype and rehearse a range of possible choices, actions and outcomes.

Ultimately, foresight is a way for anyone to consider how to protect your organization against the changes that you have no, or little, control over. In a dynamic environment it is essential to have foresight work in your strategic planning and in your product cycles. But there are many flavours of foresight and many, many methodologies to choose from. How do you know which is best? How do you use the right tools for the task?

You can’t waste time with just any old foresight because something that impacts company-wide strategy is extremely important, and potentially dangerous. You need good foresight to help you prepare for the next few years of your entire organization’s development. So, what is good foresight a how do you recognize it?

The current business environment does not make answering these questions an easy task. Right now, visions of the future are everywhere, and foresight is the biggest thing in business since…well…ethnography. Complicating matters, it seems almost everyone has an opinion about what the world will look like in a few years’ time. And there are many people claiming to be a futurist, or a foresight strategist, despite there being only a small number of credentialing programmes or people with substantive on-the-job experience. So, it is very difficult to understand which of these competing visions are better than the others. Who can you trust when you need a future vision that can serve as a north star for your organization’s strategic and creative endeavours? You need to find something to hang onto that is realistic, credible and actionable and also not ultimately dangerous for your organization (which bad foresight can be). You need a vendor that can guarantee all of these things.

In a world where future visions are common and often come with the pyrotechnics of prophecies of global annihilation at the hands of our new robot overlords, finding careful foresight is not sexy. Few people get excited about hard graft and the application of diligence and careful attention to detail. But you must, especially because people’s general preference for the former means many buyers of foresight have a big blind spot. They want foresight to be transformative and flashy.

It is true, future visions need to make a big statement and capture the attention of their coworkers. But carefully crafted reports detailing the potentiality in various carefully built future states and the limits of particular business choices are not as easy a sell as flashy prognostication. Good foresight should facilitate employee engagement and empower team building. It should critically assess a specific issue/threats that has been identified and then challenge or refresh vision and strategy to meet it. It should fill the front end of an innovation or investment pipeline with high potential, future ready ideas. Bad foresight can feel like this is happening, but in a way that simply turns to dust once the process is over. The fact that bad and good foresight feel the same makes foresight a potentially dangerous thing. Flashy foresight sells, but it is only the second option that is strategically valuable.  

Unfortunately, finding good foresight and a good vendor has nothing to do with identifying a vision of the future you find interesting or provocative. Credible foresight work depends entirely on the practitioner and their working habits. Problematically, it also has nothing to do with process—provided the practitioner already has mastery of a portfolio of approaches and theoretical tools. What matters is how you can identify rigorous, trustworthy foresight analysis from all of the competing, agenda-laden visions and practices. What this means is you have to look for careful, rigorous, transparent, data-rich visions of the future and someone willing to take you through the entire build.

The Problems Lurking in the Core of Foresight

Foresight is ambiguous because it is not a single practice or process. It is two entire fields of study and application—that often do not get along with each other. Academic foresight is quite different from the various flavours of foresight application in R&D, government, and corporate work. There are a number of alternatives in process and approach. It is even unclear what the differences between a futurist, futurologist, and foresight strategist are. Consequently, it is all a bit difficult to understand for someone who is not part of that world. These ambiguities are partially because foresight is still a new field. It has not yet solidified as a study of something because the future does not exist as such.

Foresight is probably more of a social science than anything else, but it is not practiced as such except by a few specialists (mostly anthropologists who do foresight). All of this makes foresight something very difficult to understand from an outsider’s perspective. It also makes it difficult to see the fact that foresight can be problematic, seductive, and powerful—making it both extremely useful and very dangerous for your business.

In practice, foresight is problematic because it is deeply positivistic in that it purports to speak the truth about something about the world (of the future) based on rational processes. That is, because its basic practices resemble the objective knowledge management process of historiography, and even some experimental science, foresighters are able to present “scientific” truths about the world. This a problem because contemporary business is overly dependent on process and has a tendency to be convince by the present of “science-like” data presentations.

But process cannot guarantee anything other than structure. Process without rigour, experience, and skill is nothing but a laundry list of tasks. Despite this, many in applied business research believe that the process is what makes the research rigorous, which opens up a host of problems. Even foresight practitioners forget this sometimes, the common description we used in the first paragraph, that foresight is “a way of thinking about the future” really just means it’s a process for generating something. This is really not entirely true, despite the fact that this is the most acceptable way to describe foresight quickly.

Foresight is seductive because it uses storytelling and argumentation to get its point across. Foresight is about creating potential visons of the future, not about predicting the future. However, these visions are meant to be persuasive. The more persuasive and rich they are the better. But that means that the rhetorical skill of the practitioner and their ability to convince people can often overwhelm the validity of their work or the limits of their conclusions. So, even when done well, foresight can be little more than sophistry. You have to be very sensitive to how the work leads to the conclusions that are being argued. If this connection is not direct, transparent, and thorough, there are going to be problems once you try to action against the scenarios or roadmaps.

Finally, foresight is very powerful because it is actually productive. It creates something that was not there before. It does not create the future, it creates a new company out of its client. It turns them into something that is deliberately changed to meet the pitfalls of the future they face. This productive act is agnostic of the quality of the work. Bad foresight has the same capacity to do this as good foresight.

So, how do you tell the difference between bad foresight and good foresight and avoid the problems we’re highlighting here?

You can’t.

Good foresight looks exactly like bad foresight a lot of the time. This is because the quality of the foresight lies in the nuances of how it was produced. Otherwise, all you have are stories and descriptions of future states. Good foresight is the result of careful, ethically-minded critical thinkers working diligently to build up a story of change through the application of skill, experience, and education.

The Good

So how do you get good foresight? You look for skilled, thoughtful practitioners. You also need to look for a few things when choosing who will be transforming your company’s trajectory into the great unknown.

+      Trust – Because foresight is a rhetorical practice as much as an analytical one, you have to believe the stories about future change and its meaning for it to be useful. This requires trust between the creators of these visions and the audience receiving them.

+      Excellent research practices – Foresight is an activity that lives or dies in the details. Ensuring that the nuance of these details are able to make it from one end of the process to the other requ[ii]ires a careful attention to every detail. It also means that every analytical practice needs to be considered carefully because.

+      Data hygiene and methodological transparency – Trust and good practice are the pillars of believability—the quality that future visions need to be powerful and useful tools for developing new products and guiding strategic decisions. But they rely on good data, good data management practices, and traceability.

• Data hygiene begins with good signal identification and articulation. It is found in the maintenance of clear points of comparability, ensuring that all inputs are equivalent and balanced, and in the disciple to not allow conclusions to outstrip what the data can support.

• Methodological transparency is part open process and part research discipline. While academic writing and reporting is often dry, it is designed to be transparent and allow anyone to scrutinize its building blocks or even recreate the circumstances described in the article or book. This means citations, clear methodological descriptions, and an inclusive approach to the presentation. It also means that a good team will breadcrumb everything by showing the work of how signals were gathered, how scenarios are built, and how everything in between was connected.

+      Willingness to collaborate and educate – Black box work is expedient, but foresight is about understanding, communication, and action. Open and honest collaboration is the best way to embed knowledge and inspire change. With that in mind, foresight processes are strongest when the intended audience has a part to play in their development. A willingness to include client teams and even community members in the build and then to educate people in the meaning of the work is a sign of a strong team of foresighters.  

+      Project pacing and time management – Good foresight takes time. That is just a fact. The correct term for a project depends on the complexity of the subject. You cannot build solid visions of the future in a few days or weeks. A well-designed foresight effort also requires a lot of space for hard work and collaboration. Good pacing allows for time to think, to revise, and to iterate together. A good foresight project has time to breathe and consider every option.

+      An understanding of the ethics of foresight – Compared to the five- and ten-year horizons of foresight, the results of design, strategy, and management consulting projects are short-lived. Foresight projects last for a long time and have the power to change the minds of people throughout an organization. They often serve as the basis for long-term strategy and can change the direction of the entire organization. As a result, there is an ethical imperative in foresight work: good, rigours work respects the responsibility you are taking on. A good foresight team respects the potential impact of their work and always works to ensure that they are not creating clever fictions but are working in their client’s best interests.

+      Holistic – Solidly, well crafted foresight incorporates many voices and many perspectives. It does this so it does not argue for a myopic view of the world that is only inhabitable by a company that thinks one way. It is also inclusive of contradiction and opinions that run counter to the status quo, or even counter to the argument being made in the scenarios.

The Bad

+      Trends are only a component – Trends are only about what is happening now. They trace what happened in the past and what is happening in the present. But they do not speak to the future, except that they may, or may not, be a factor in how things develop around your business. They only show how something is different now from what was in the past. What this means is that a trend’s ability to predict future change is very limited; it only speaks about the very near future (18 months max).

This is because the future potential of a trend lies only in its novelty in the now. The more an emerging trend departs from what happened in the past, the more significant it is for the present—which means most consultants choose trends that are obviously different. The subtle ones are edited out because they are not so spectacular.  

Thus, trends are only useful because they demonstrate how differences between the past and present hint at changes to come. They cannot be the sole input for a future scenario because they do not signal change to come, they are a symptom of change that has already happened.

+      Single Perspective Analysis – Foresight scenarios are visions of the future told from a particular perspective. But while they can only be written from one point of view, they must incorporate many perspectives. That means that the analytical tools and approaches used by the foresight practitioners must be able to accommodate many perspectives at once—many of which may be contradictory or conflicting. If they do not, then their scenarios will be unable to express the potential in a more reflexive, relativistic argumentation. Analytical tools like RDE (Residual, Dominant, Emergent) modelling, surveys, and scanning within a limited pool of sources (websites, news outlets) are often the cause of this degradation because they can only represent change from a single perspective—averaged opinion.  

+      Top-down analysis – Foresight is an incremental science built from the details of real life. Scenarios are built from the ground up by making careful associations and comparisons through an inductive process of moving from specific to general, from real life to explanatory “laws.” But this is slow work, and there is always a temptation to make things quicker by prefiguring some conclusions and using deductive procedures that move from general assumptions that contextualize the details. Good foresighters resist this temptation because this approach allows untested hypothesizing into the process and solidifies it into the analytical framework. You cannot start with categories for your signals and fill them in later and expect for the work to be rigorous. You must build your categories and themes out of hard analysis of an available signal set. This means you have to always do it the hard way. There are no shortcuts.

+      Single causation – The idea that there are “drivers of change” is popular, ubiquitous, and troubling. While there can be single causes for a particular phenomenon, they are rare. Single causation is an expression of a simple, clockwork-like-world where complex phenomena can be described in terms of simple causality. This is just not now the world works, and any time you see someone mention a “driver” of change, you should immediately start to question them.

No change is not directly caused, it emerges from many other changes and is therefore influenced by uncountable factors. Scenarios built upon a foundation of single causation are making the very mistakes that foresight was developed to correct. Foresight is about judging an appropriate response to the complexities of change. If the scenarios are built with a belief that change is simple, then it is not preparing you to manage anything complicated.

Despite this most people working in business believe in single causation to some degree. While this is a big problem, the impact of this wrong-headed thinking is felt more strongly in foresight analysis. Drivers of change come in clusters, where the changes they represent push the development of a single thing. Where there is a single “driver” of change, this should be treated as the unicorn that it is. Beware those who only find drivers of change.

+      Tech signals are only tech signals – The future will not just be technologicized. There is nothing worse than a scenario, or any vision of the future, that is only about technology. This is just a homogenous explanation of a heterogeneous world.

+      Ethics in Practice – There is an ethical component in doing a foresight project. Weak research is actually unethical because while it is possible to build a potential vision of the future, and socialize it so everyone is happy, if it is not built on solid bottom-up processes, then it is just an opinion. Should you trust your company’s strategy to an opinion?

The Singularity

+      Putting a Date on It – Good foresight is about anticipation and preparation. It is not about prediction. When you see anything that purports to predict the future, be sceptical and challenge it. The likelihood is that it is more about arguing a perspective than it is a vision of the future based on rigorous effort. You need only think about the promises of flying cars or the potential of miniaturized atomic reactors to see that many predictive visions were wrong and were really about pushing an agenda. Finding a date range, or projecting across a horizon of 5-10 years is an essential piece of serious foresight. Naming the year of the apocalypse is just hype.

+      Beware the keynote prophet – Rigorous foresight practitioners work with you to help you understand your organizations future. They do not necessarily know how it will turn out when you start your engagement. But if you meet someone who comes in with a prepackaged vision, be careful. Prophets of a utopian or dystopian future probably just want to sell you vitamins so you can live forever. TED talks are fun, but they are more entertainment than serious foresight.

+      Sizzle over Steak – Good foresight comes from many sources, and there are many good practitioners. However, the established brands in market research or consulting often do not have the training, education, or rigour necessary to conduct a carefully managed foresight project. You will need to see through the brand names and understand how they work. Just because they used to work for a big consulting firm, does not mean they can do foresight work.

QUESTIONS TO ASK

+      What experience do you have developing and applying foresight?

+      With whom? What type of partners have you worked with?

+      What hard vs. soft impacts did this work have?

+      Where do you start? How do we begin a foresight engagement?

+      Given our business challenge and needs, what is the foresight-based outcome we should be working towards?

+      How will this “foresight” impact us? What should- or will we be able to do with it?

+      Who should participate in this engagement / exercise? Why / why not?

+      What type of inputs do you typically gather or recommend gathering during a foresight engagement?

+      What’s the difference between an emerging trend and a weak signal? Why does this matter?

+      How do we challenge and or overcome internal biases in the research and analysis?

+      What is role and/or purpose of world building vs scenario development?

+      What logic / frameworks do you use to build these worlds and/or scenarios? Why?

+      In what ways does your process integrate quantitative methods and/or techniques?

+      How can I be more certain - or at least more confident in - the hypotheses and/or recommendations being generated? How do you test, validate, and/or refine them?

+      We are trying to integrate “foresight” and “futures thinking” more broadly into the organization – what approaches do you recommend?

+      How do you do research for your scenario builds?

+      What sources to you use for your signal scanning?

+      Do you have subject-matter experts examining the signals for their validity?

+      Why are you only giving me < 80 signals?

+      What are signals for?

+      How do you build scenarios?

+      Can we participate in building the themes?

+      What is a macro-trend? What is a meso-trend? What is a micro-trend?

+      Is this scenario just an opinion, or is it solid enough to provide a foundation for my business?

[i] For an excellent quick primer in foresight, we recommend the Policy Horizon Canada’s resource page. You can find it here: https://horizons.gc.ca/en/resources/

Paul Hartley