Month: January 2013

This draft paper, titled “Foresight, Innovation and Enterprise Modeling” (downloadable HERE), is the culmination of a decade long journey in attempting to link our evolving knowledge of emerging futures with present action, through a variety of means, innovation and enterprise development, design, activism, policy development, meditation (yes that is correct – doing absolutely nothing is a form of action;) and the like.

When I first got into futures in 2000, I was inspired by the eclecticism and range of thinking, profound, far reaching, visionary – and very much in Zia Sardar’s words I was both inspired and disturbed. And yet something was missing. I wanted a connection with our human capabilities and commitments in the present moment – what could we do today? What seeds could we plant? How do we trim the tabs, so to speak? Hence the very idea for “Action Foresight”, linking knowledge of emerging futures with empowered, intelligent and wise actions.

So I began in earnest to conceptually and practically link futures with present action. First I explored and developed ways of linking futures research with action, which emerged via the confluence of futures studies and action research / learning. I became a more committed activist and did work with the World Social Forum process and produced documentary media – my interest in Foresight Communication grew.

Another important stream was the importance of innovation, hence the idea for “Anticipatory Innovation“, and along side this futures informed enterprise development. This particular stream of my work is very dear to me, and has continued to evolve. I was fortunate to meet Adam Leggett at a birthday party for Peter Ellyard (thank you Peter) way back in 2001, and I began working on a pilot program Adam was initiating at Melbourne University called Univator. Later, from 2003-2005 I did some great research with Allan O’Connor on linking foresight and innovation, which culminated in a paper on empowering entrepreneurship and another on innovation for sustainability, and we ran a 5 day workshop for Questacon Smartmoves. All the while the thinking and practice continued to develop. In 2008 Peter Hayward invited me to write up an undergraduate unit for the school of business at Swinburne University of Technology on social enterprise, where I built in the methodology and further refined it. Most recently, 2012, I used this basic framework for the foresight methods course I taught at National University of Singapore, LKY School of Public Policy, where I developed an anticipatory policy development framework.

So it has been a long, winding and fruitful journey, and it’s not over! The paper is a “draft for comment”, and I’d like to keep the conversation open to facilitate a kind of ‘open source’ development of the methodology so anyone who adopts it can be more empowered in innovation and enterprise development that addresses the deep challenges of the 21st century.

Comments welcome here or via twitter @actionforesight

Earlier this year Dr. Vuokko Jarva, a futures scholar who works on consumer education to promote future consciousness and planetary responsibility and is developing new narrative approaches in futures studies, invited me to write an essay for the Finnish journal Futura (a publication of the Finnish Society for Futures Studies). The special edition of the journal was concerned with what in Finland is termed “close democracy”. From what I understand from Vuokko, this is not quite what is termed in English “participatory democracy”, it is more hands on, more involved, more peer to peer. I get the feeling that the Fins are way ahead of everyone else in pioneering democratic avenues of expression.

For my contribution, I decided to explore the connection between participatory democracy, peer production, the global movement for change and the commons. As it was exploratory and building the relationships between elements, it was more about understanding the connections in the emerging landscape of counter-hegemonic change. The essay is titled “Deep democracy, peer-to-peer production and our common futures / Syvädemokratia, vertaistuotanto ja yhteiset tulevaisuutemmemore“. Here is a general introduction to the themes:

In this essay I discuss an emerging perspective in the counter-hegemonic project to create social and ecological justice from the local to the global. This perspective is based on the idea that social innovators, connected within collaborative networks of social change, are the pre-figurative elements for a new type of social system to cohere and emerge. These collaborative networks are seed-beds of change and transformation, and are the foundations for emerging global movement(s) and projects for change. They are networks of people creating social alternatives, some already embodied in practices and enacted and others imagined and articulated. They have been most visible through the hundreds of social forums and the recent citizen uprisings held around the world, described by Paul Hawken as the greatest movement ever seen (Hawken, 2007). They are made up of a complex myriad of groups, networks, organizations, communities and movements, with diverse political and social views, that come together in the common struggle against political-economic corruption, and for social and ecological sustainment (Ramos, 2010). Paul Raskin (2006) considers these collaborative networks to be the foundation for building a pluralistic global citizen movement for the 21st century.

And here is an intro:

At first it was just a trickle, and then a torrent. At first a few experimented with carving our social life outside the dominant industrial system. But as the system began to capsize on the rocks of ecological and social ruin, it became an exodus. Necessity was the mother of invention, and people began to find their power by co-creating new ways of being and living, relating and transacting. People became new producers in an ecosystem of collaboration: cultural, political and economic. People began to join this new movement and create and demand the innovation of a multitude of deeply democratic social processes and institutions for the protection and production of the commons. Another World is Possible was no longer a slogan, but increasingly created in our life worlds, from the personal to the political.

I would appreciate any feedback / thoughts here or via twitter @actionforesight – many thanks!

Download the article HERE