Category: Uncategorized

The most recent development, Network Foresight (NF), involves approaches that use networked ICT systems on web based, open, “web 2.0” style interactive platforms. Some of these engage in crowdsourcing and collective intelligence (principle of the wisdom of crowds), others employ large scale scanning systems and interactive processes for idea generation and visioning:  TechCast, developed by William Halal, was one of the first forms of collaborative virtual expert based forecasting. Shaping Tomorrow has become the biggest user group for crowdsourced trends. iknow is the European Union’s collective scanning and analysis system. Finpro is one of the best examples of organizational crowdsourcing of foresight data, where employees form an important part of the scanning capacity that leads to business / industry intelligence.

The Institute for the Future runs a variety of Massively Multi-player Online Games (MMOGs) which engages thousands of people in creatively engaging with scenarios and situations. The Open Foresight Project, created by Venessa Miemis, was an open source project, relying on off the shelf social media platforms, to conduct social foresight inquiry. FutureScaper, created by Noah Raford, is a scenario planning platform that uses crowdsourcing and collaborative interaction. Each of these, and other notable examples unmentioned here, have experienced different levels of success in engaging online audiences in foresight processes. Because this form of engagement is still young, it is expected to develop significantly in the years to come (Ramos, 2012). Network Foresight approaches are part of a broader shift into a network intensive era, typified by a number of key changes. Eight of these key changes are highlighted here:

1. Funding – NT can draw on public / distributed crowd-funding opportunities
2. Audience – NT can engage a global public citizen sphere of interest
3. Legitimacy – peer publics become moderators of the validity of anticipatory truths
4. Instantiation – activity can be highly localized, swarms or flash mobs, using mobile networking for instantaneous or improvisational self organization
5. Replication – NT platforms can be copied or franchised from one locale to many
6. Participation – NT can engage a broad public
7. Ownership – as citizens become key contributors there is an emerging expectation for a global knowledge commons (e.g. “it belongs to all”)
8. Transparency – contributors want foresight approaches to be ‘naked’, that is, the process should be open for people to understand, critique, replicate, etc. (Ramos, 2012)

There are some similarities to Integrated Governmental Foresight (IGF), as IGF strategies usually employ large scale and robust ICT system to coordinate knowledge sharing and management. IGF approaches usually differ, however, because they are ‘in-house’ systems that are closed off from wider internet participation. Network Foresight is generally open to anyone who has the capabilities to contribute. For example the Singapore government’s RAHS system uses a sophisticated crowdsourced data development strategy. However, it remains closed to all except a select few organizations outside of government, with little intention to engage a global audience in participatory sensing and analysis.

Over the past decade or so, a new approach to Anticipatory Governance has been developed which integrates intelligence and foresight activities across governmental departments, harnessing synergies that overlaps toward systemic policy insights. While still broadly focused on national priorities and challenges, “public health, national security, or the environment,” [etc] (Habegger, 2010, p.50) this mode of foresight activity cuts across traditional policy areas and departments, and puts a premium on cooperation and collaboration across departments. It typically requires large scale knowledge management systems for scanning databases and subsequent analysis, and can be considered a limited type of organizational “crowd sourcing”.

Its end purpose is to assists policy makers with strategic thinking and decision- making. Habegger (2010) analyzed three important examples of this mode of foresight activity (UK, Netherlands, Singapore), arguing:

“Only few contemporary challenges can be confined to one policy area anymore, and governments have realized that a single-issue focus is in many instances insufficient. Consequently, they have started to experiment with foresight that cuts across the traditional boundaries of policy areas and government departments.” (Habegger, 2010, p.50)

While such an approach to governmental foresight has distinct instrumental advantages, for example the Singapore government’s Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning (RAHS) program’s capacity to identify early warning signs of potential risk, Habegger argues that the cultural benefits of this approach are perhaps even deeper, where process-based foresight among inter-organizational learning networks create conditions for cultural change toward adaptive and agile policy development. Such approaches foster cross-departmental sharing and collaboration, building in a culture of learning networks and organizations, breaking down traditional silos among government areas. Or as Habegger articulated, the IGF is:

“characterized by a long-term, interdisciplinary, participative, and communicative perspective that attempts to build networks across professional communities, enables broad-based social learning, generates scenario-based knowledge, and eventually results in visions of (alternative) policies.” (Habegger, 2010, p.50)

A precursor to integrated governmental foresight may also be noted in early experiments with what Bezold (2006) describes as “legislative foresight”. Experiments in the US at the federal level in integrating futures studies approaches into legislative processes attempted to build in environmental scanning and forecasts that could have implications for existing legislation, as well as foster coordination across legislative committees to look at intended and unintended future consequences of legislation: to establish more coordinated and coherent. As such legislative foresight played a kind of oversight function on all legislative activity (Bezold, 1978, p.124 in Bezold, 2006). While this kind of legislative foresight is distinctly different to the IGF described by Habegger, it still holds significant potential for those considering a broad strategy mix and designing Anticipatory Governance approaches.

Transition Management (TM) is a long term multi-generational and systemic strategy for reaching sustainable development goals and visions. It engages and empowers diverse stakeholders in a wicked problem area, or what is termed in TM discourse as an ‘Arena’, focused on targeting and engaging key domains or wicked issues. As an approach employed by governments to enact sustainable development goals, a key strategy entails creating a pioneer social innovator group that has political sanction to formulate change initiatives. In this way it draws on a synergy between governmental champions and pioneer social innovator groups or networks (it uses outsiders and insiders as an emerging alliance of change agents). The TM change strategy entails initiating “seeds of change” at a local level that can be scaled up (which serves the dual purpose of mitigating the risks of over generatized policy doctrine and developing experiments that provide long term resilience).

It is quintessentially a strategic foresight approach where global scanning is conducted but applied to local sustainability challenges, and thus it takes advantage of the emerging global knowledge commons for localized applications. It links a long term understanding of alternative futures with shorter term policy and development priorities.

“By building up a broadening network of diverse actors that share the debate, thinking and experimenting, conditions are created for up-scaling breakthroughs in innovations. We will argue that this is at the heart of transition management: by actually implementing transition management in a structured co-production process, new insights emerge, are implemented and reflected upon in a continuing way”. (Loorbach, 2010, p.238)

Transition management makes a distinction between different temporal levels of social change and opportunities for action. At the strategic level, long-term sustainability challenges and alternative futures are explored, connected to complex and wicked social problems – futures studies as an approach for generating new strategic visions, preferred futures and pathways is the methodology par excellence. At the tactical level, TM applies itself toward rethinking key system structures such as “institutions, regulation, physical infrastructures, financial infrastructures” within the context of broader sustainability challenges. At the operational level, TM attempts to generate new activities, decisions and innovations that individuals and groups can generate on a day-to-day basis in order to influence tactical change, but in the context of broader strategic foresight (Loorbach, 2010, p.238). As can be seen from this explanation, TM is unique in its strategy and methodology in terms of linking the very long-term sustainability challenges we face with specific and focused “operational” scale interventions and actions.

The transition management cycle is reminiscent of action learning and action research cycles, but where localized action recurs in the context of the movement toward long-term sustainability goals and visions. Is highly synthetic and its incorporation of elements of the action research cycle works across diverse stakeholder and participant configurations looking for leverage points of change and insight. The formulation of a problem context or “transition arena” may be followed by generating images of sustainability and transition paths, which then flows into transition experiments in the mobilization of transition networks, which is then evaluated and reflected upon,  which in turn provides the basis for a new cycle (Loorbach, 2010, p.238).

“The very idea behind transition management is to create a societal movement through new coalitions, partnerships and networks around arenas that allow for building up continuous pressure on the political and market arena to safeguard the long-term orientation and goals of the transition process.” (Loorbach, 2010, p.239)

At different levels of government, from local to states and federal, a large body of practice and literature relates to planning processes that are informed by strategic foresight approaches. If a government is considering a planning process that will have implications for 5, 10, or 20 years, often they will apply some type of foresight approach to informing the planning process. Such foresight informed planning processes are most often participatory – which engage key stakeholders in a locale that might represent the broader system) in order to discuss the long-term issues being mutually experienced. It employs workshop based approaches to foresight and requires expert facilitators and facilitation.

There are a wide variety of approaches to foresight informed planning, including search conference methods (Ludema, 2002; Weisbord, 1992), scenario planning (Mahmud, 2011) and others.

Gould and Daffara (Gould, 2007, p.2) articulate the value of foresight for planning and engaging a community in decision-making, providing participants with a deepened understanding of social change trajectories, providing an opportunity for participants to articulate and imagine their preferred futures, and to foster action plans and processes that can get integrated into achieving the futures that participants prefer. Further they argue that such approaches allow for greater transparency through open communication and involvement, where existing assumptions about the future can be made more explicit, challenged and evaluated, as well as creating opportunities for collaboration across government and citizen boundaries. Such processes bring forth new talents among people, surface existing issues and conflicts for resolution, develop the community’s capacity to question assumptions and builds hope among people. For government such processes allow policies to be informed by a deeper understanding of long-term change, deepen the rigor of existing planning schemes, help develop collaborations across sectors and provide opportunities to integrate policy (Gould and Daffara, 2007, p.3).

Futures commissions (FC) are another important tradition in the Anticipatory Governance milieu. Futures commissions are semi-independent research and communication institutes or agencies established to provide a foresight function for both government and the public.

A key opportunity in FCs is to develop futures research which can influence policy development as well as communicate with the public to enhance the level of debate in the public sphere. Often government-funded, their semi-independent nature (as a commission) allows them more liberty in providing critical commentary within both policy development processes and public discourse. This semi-independence can also become a weakness if political winds change and those in power are at odds with the research and communication flowing from such a futures commission.

As Bezold argued, these FC can be both powerful and precarious, “critical in giving government greater foresight, more conscious direction setting, and greater capacity to create positive change” – or can waste public money (Bezold, 2006, p.46).

Notable examples of such commissions include Australian FC (now defunct), and Swedish FC. Bezold (2006) documented 36 US states that created FCs since the 1990s, often within particular state jurisdictions.

Bezold described the function of FCs to:

“stimulate imagination and creativity in considering options; track emerging trends and relate these trends to current policies; develop alternative scenarios; inform and involve the public and key stakeholders; and allow the public to link policy options and trends to priority setting for state policies and the budget.” (Bezold, 2006, p.47)

Overall FCs are high impact but require significant resources and political support. Their success factors include having strong leadership support (e.g. a governor, chief justice), involving other key stakeholders, including the legislature and media, and having public learning and public involvement components (Bezold, 2006).

Usually of a robust scale, built into states or federal funding, FCs can also be found in places of smaller scale, such as in inter-organizational networks; the FCs can be used to connect a number of different jurisdictions through intergovernmental commissions. Their frequency and flexibility warrant their inclusion as a critical strategy in developing Anticipatory Governance.

The term “Anticipatory Democracy” came from the seminal futurist Alvin Toffler, famous for his solution to what he considered to be “future shock”. Because Toffler considered anticipated changes to be so disruptive, he argued for large-scale citizen engagement in diagnosing change and influencing society.

As Bezold (2006) explains:

“The simplest definition of anticipatory democracy … is that it is a process for combining citizen participation with future consciousness” (Bezold, 1978 in Bezold, 2010).

Bezold “argued that representative government was the key political technology of the industrial era and that new forms must be invented in the face of the crushing decisional overload, or political future shock, that we faced.” (Bezold, 2006, p.39)

Anticipatory democracy (AD) developed in the 1970s in the United States. Bezold (1978) documented dozens of projects across the United States which engaged citizens, community leaders, business owners, religious, networks, community organizations, and policy makers in processes of formulating policy development and political direction in the context of emerging futures. Some of the processes would engage hundreds of citizens (in a few cases thousands) within a state or region, thus enacting a large scale participatory development of alternative futures and visions, which would leads to policy preferences and budget priorities in the style of participatory democracy.

But AD shouldn’t simply be seen as having purely US origins. Indeed, the development of the World Future Studies Federation in the late 1960s contained aspirations for democratizing knowledge and capacity in futures thinking. Eminent scholars and WFSF founders, such Robert Jungk with the development of future workshops (Jungk, 1987), Johan Galtung’s Transcend Method, and Fred Polak’s (1961) work, further developed by Elise Boulding (Boulding, 1978), provided impetus for citizen engagement in understanding and envisioning change and deliberating on new directions.

AD can be seen as part of a broader critique of representative democracy in the face of the rising social complexity that could not be absorbed or effectively addressed by representative systems of governance (Dator, 2007).

One of the key points of dynamism and challenge with a process such as this, is the deep diversity it engenders in the process. People with very different values come together in a public deliberation on futures. Tensions and conflicts are inevitable, or as Bezold argues:

“many individuals live within levels or memes that do not value those at other levels. Becoming conscious of these levels will be important for enhancing effective democracy.” (Bezold, 2006, p.49)

Bezold therefore argues that making AD work requires making values explicit through foresight tools and techniques that deal with social complexity, perception, values and worldviews (e.g. using Causal Layered Analysis, Integral Theory, etc.) And by using this processes, build common ground between participants for a shared vision.

On a more pragmatic basis, Baker’s analysis (Bezold, 2006, p.39) of success criteria for anticipatory democracy projects included the following important points:

1. Obtain adequate funding ($100,000USD per year in the mid 1970s – or about $360,000 USD in 2005 dollars
2. Face political realities
3. Decide on the major research/goals topics early
4. Build ties with the bureaucracy
5. Design and implement a process that involves policy makers from the start;
6. And present findings early and throughout the life of the process.

Science, technology and innovation foresight (STIF) programs are perhaps the oldest form of formal foresight activity for governments. Starting in the 1960s, such programs were developed to guide large scale allocation of research resources and funding toward those research and development areas, often in the interstices between scientific research and industry-based commercialization, that were considered to have the greatest potential or were a matter of national strategic interest. Examples of STIF programs include the US Critical Technologies Program, French Key Technologies Programme, Czech Foresight Exercise, UK Technology Foresight Programme, Technology Foresight Towards 2020 in China and Japan’s long-standing MITI Technology Forecasting. They have been fundamentally connected to supporting national innovation systems. They entail a process of high level policy and priority setting which are “designed to inform Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) decision-making around the world” (Miles, 2012). Or in Georghiou and Harper’s (2010) characterization:

“The predominant focus of foresight is frequently national research policy and strategy, usually with the broad aim of selecting priorities for research investments.” (Georghiou, 2011, p.243)

Because this type of futures research entails understanding the development of science and technology in specialist domains, STIF often uses expert based approaches to futures research such as Delphi forecasting. Yet, STIF focused foresight has in some cases broadened to encompass systemic social concerns (Urashima, 2012) connecting stakeholders in STIF processes for coordinated exploration and articulation of strategic foresight. Miles (2012) explains how STIF approaches have evolved recently to incorporate more systemically complex, wicked (problem) and participatory approaches to exploring technology forecasting. He characterized more recent approaches as “fully-fledged foresight” which

“combined prospective analysis (futures studies’ insistence on the importance of relating present choices to awareness of long term future prospects, and to the need to pay due regard to agency, uncertainty, and the associated scope for alternative futures), with a participatory orientation (paying due regard to the dispersion of knowledge and agency across multiple stakeholders, whose insights and engagement need to be mobilised), and a practical relevance being closely related to actual decision making and strategy formation actions…” (Miles, 2012, p.71)

Miles ranking of priorities and objectives for STIF programs around the world reveals that such approaches have evolved considerably since their beginnings: 37

1. Orienting policy formulation and decisions
2. Supporting STI strategy- and priority-setting
3. Fostering STI cooperation and networking
4. Generating visions and images of the future
5. Triggering actions and promoting public debate
6. Recognising key barriers and drivers of STI
7. Identifying research/investment opportunities
8. Encouraging strategic and futures thinking
9. Helping to cope with Grand Challenges (Miles, 2012, p.72)