Social change organizations currently are doing scenario planning to prepare for 2025. These plans are designed to build organizational understanding of near-term threats or opportunities. They are mostly binary: “If McCain, then X. If Obama, then Y.” In short (and with apologies to those who recall Donald Rumsfeld), it focuses on the “known-unknowns.”
But how can organizations remain prepared even after the near-term future is revealed? In other words, what about the unknown-unknowns?
They can be equally mission-critical. These are some unknown-unknowns I’ve observed in the last few decades, and their consequences:
- A national security expert passes away unexpectedly, forcing the closure of his respected DC policy shop when major donors discontinue funding.
- A US ally suffers a military invasion, causing thousands to flee to the United States in search of protection over a few short months.
- Gaping holes are created in program budgets when a criminal justice reform foundation (defrauded by Bernie Madoff) shutters overnight.
- Thousands of concerned citizens donate funds in the space of one week to aid workplace sexual harassment survivors after perpetrators are called out by prominent artists.
- Anti-Muslim policies impel immigrant physicians to leave rural areas of the US for more congenial coastal cities.
Volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) are drivers of the unknown-unknown. VUCA belies our human tendency to assume that the future will be more or less like the recent past. While VUCA is everywhere and can’t be avoided, the unknown-unknowns can be systematically addressed. Futures and Foresight can help.
What Are Futures and Foresight?
“Futures Studies” is an academic field that systematically studies the future. Its overall goal is a better understanding of the role that future(s) play in current development of strategy. In the global North and West, “Foresight” tools have been developed from scholarship to apply Futures Studies concepts to support decision-making.
Foresight trains organizational staff to keep one eye on the social, technological, economic, and policy developments that impact their work. It provides a counterweight to “market” pressures to use planning time solely on immediate tactics (which leaves organizations vulnerable to VUCA).
“Futures Studies” is not solely “Western,” and it’s not new. Societies across human history have “used the future” to make meaning in the present, often through storytelling and other art forms. So while the focus of this post is “Western”-developed Futures Studies and Foresight, it is important to acknowledge the ongoing importance of rich “futures” traditions (which currently manifest in AfroFuturism and indigenous spiritual practices, to name a few). (Bisht 2017; Policysolve 2022; Shallowe et al. 2020)
“Western” Futures Studies has its recent roots in military and industrial think-tanks after WWII. Several dozen master’s and PhD level Futures Studies programs now operate across the world in both the global North and South. There are governmental Foresight offices in many countries (although few in the US), and several US and international professional associations of Foresight practitioners.
In recent years, evaluators, strategic planners, and policy strategists have embraced Foresight to help programs increase their flexibility and resilience. (Carden 2023) Democracy Fund is among the US philanthropies that maintain a specific Futures / Foresight program.
How Does Foresight Help Organizations Build Resilience?
Foresight uses approaches and tools derived from peer-reviewed literature to help teams to identify the “drivers of change” (macro forces) for their work. Foresight investigates how these drivers interact, and the implications for teams’ goals, their work, and their stakeholders.
Foresight:
- Can build from scenario planning that teams are doing now.
- Are powerful, but not complex or costly. (Many can be done in a matter of hours, with pencil and paper.)
- Are proven: Based on decades of peer-reviewed research and practice in nonprofit, business, and government settings.
Foresight can “stress test” proposed strategies developed during strategic planning to uncover trends and uncertainties that face the organization’s field, and help articulate how key players may act as social, technological, economic, environmental, or policy environments change. (UK Office for Science 2017)
Evaluators use Foresight exercises to ensure that programs fully articulate the environmental and other assumptions that are the “starting point” for learning that truly informs strategy, and to focus the universe of results that MLE work will measure.
No matter what the organization’s Foresight “entry point” is, its greatest benefit happens over time.
This is because Foresight makes the likelihood of the unexpected more anticipated and familiar, “normalizing” VUCA as an environmental and operational consideration in the minds of organization staff. It keeps a range of divergent futures in the planning mix, helping teams plan to address specific risks to future success – for example, through diversification of services or partnerships — and otherwise respond more effectively when the unexpected pops up. (CoLab 2019)
Why Foresight Is an Excellent Adjunct to a Scenario Planning Investment
Organizations – including those that have done formal or informal “scenario planning”) — can use Foresight to maintain staff “muscle” for strategic thinking and planning beyond the immediate set of threats or opportunities. By working with Foresight, they can gather “unknown-unknowns” and “work with” these futures to inform current strategy.(CoLab 2019)
These are some benefits of Foresight for organizations that want to maintain “readiness mode””:
- Can be accomplished in a matter of hours with pencil-and-paper tools, and returned to periodically.
- Identifies developments that over time may come together to significantly influence strategy, despite not seeming mission-critical right now. Creation of a “permission structure” for staff to think about outside-the-current-mainstream trends or “signals of change” that merit light monitoring
- Provides a “container” for conserving, and reviewing / updating / discarding (as appropriate), these “just over the horizon” observations and considering which may be developing into significant issues.
- Engages the insights and enthusiasm of diverse staff. Because Foresight is about “what could happen” and not about immediate implementation of specific tactics, many people who embrace the organization’s vision and mission can add value – from longtime leaders to new back-office staff. (Experts advise that frontline and marginalized communities are important experts, as they are often first to see “signals” of changes in systems that impact all of us. (Ruedy and Glayser 2024))
Teams using Foresight “widen the lens” on assumptions about the future, understanding that some may come to pass over time. And, even if they don’t, when something else “highly unlikely” happens, the organization will have the mindset needed to adjust projects and deploy expertise accordingly. (Ruedy and Glayser 2024)
To make this very concrete: If starting in January 2021 your organization consistently “scanned the future” for emerging trends and their potential impacts – would you be in the same place now? Would your 2025 scenario planning be better informed? More solidly grounded?
Taking Scenario Planning Investments Forward
This is how I see the relationship between scenario planning investments that many groups are currently making, and ongoing Foresight:
| Elements | Scenario Planning | Foresight |
| Objective | Near-term preparedness / resilience to upcoming risk | Preparedness / resilience over time |
| Goal | Address “known unknowns” of a specific challenge or opportunity on the horizon | Maintain awareness of and respond to enterprise-challenging “unknown unknowns” (favorable and unfavorable) over time |
| Focus | Generally binary (if A happens, then we do B; if C happens, then we do D) | Events and trends that become “drivers” that could create significant risks or opportunities to the organization |
| Uses the Future | As a focus of tactical readiness | For long-term preparedness: As a tool for “widening the lens” on assumptions about the current operational environment and how key actors may react to future events |
| Organizational Participants | Usually leadership and / or project implementer staff | Benefits from diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints (leadership, implementers, back-office, other stakeholders) |
| Effort | Intensive effort over a short time period | Modest, consistent effort over a longer time period |
| Timing | Often one-time (prior to the defining “unknown”) | An ongoing / periodic set of practices |
| Products | Options or plans for rapid implementation | Set of trends that may impact the organization’s success or viability and that merit monitoring. Methods for early identification of them over time. Exploratory initiatives to address them. |
Foresight Practice: Three Powerful Approaches
In Fall 2024 I am assisting Foresight experts in conference workshops on Foresight fundamentals for members of the European Evaluation Society and the American Evaluation Association. Participants in those workshops will be working with these Foresight approaches:
- Trends Analysis / Driver Mapping: A Foresight method to identify implications and directions of change across six dimensions: Social, Technological, Economy, Environment, Policy + Values (known by the acronym STEEP-V, or, alternatively, PESTLE). (CPD 2024; UK Office for Science 2017) Trends Analysis highlights important environmental assumptions that impact how a social change program is developed and operates. It’s also valuable to help evaluation clients to identify aspects of their program that may be gaining in importance (trends in the field) and that therefore may be priorities for measurement.
- Futures Wheel: The Futures Wheel is a participatory structured brainstorming process to identify multiple layers of “results” / impacts / consequences that trends or activities (such as program interventions) are expected to create. It helps identify sequences and connections between the results or impact layers. For measurement and learning, it helps a group identify the results that are most mission-critical to learn about, and to discuss what it would take to make measurement realistically feasible. (Glenn 2021; Bengston 2015; Swanson 2020)
- Alternative Scenarios / Wind Tunneling: The Foresight scenarios approach we are using in our trainings involves analyzing the robustness of a current program in light of four alternative hypothetical “day in the life” settings we have drafted for the year 2040. (Schultz 2015) Participants discuss the appropriateness of a particular program if the environment is unchanged from the present; dystopian; highly technologically controlled; or more inclusive / values based than the present day. For measurement and learning, wind tunneling helps teams to more broadly consider the assumptions and environments that impact their programs, and “play out” the roles that the program may be called to undertake as the future develops.
It’s important to note that these and other peer-reviewed Foresight approaches work simply by channeling the judgment of a particular group of “experts” in a structured way. They are paper-and-pencil exercises that can be done without prior training and accomplished in an hour or two each. (Other Foresight techniques, outside the scope of my work, involve complex modeling or simulations and thus are computer-reliant.) (Bishop et al. 2007)
Please Join the Conversation
I’m grateful for the opportunity to share with you my excitement about using Foresight to increase organizational resilience. Are you using Foresight? Are you interested in learning more? Please be in touch.
Bibliography
Bengston, David N (2015). “The Futures Wheel: A Method for Exploring the Implications of Social-Ecological Change” https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/50218
Bishop, Peter et al. (Feb. 2007). “The current state of scenario development: an overview of techniques. Foresight https://doi.org/10.1108/14636680710727516
Bisht, Pupul (2017). “Decolonizing Futures: Exploring Storytelling as a Tool for Inclusion in Foresight.” Available at: www.core.ac.uk/ reader/154171898
Carden, Fred (April 2023). “Back to the Future: Are we trapped in our past?” Science Direct https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0149718923000411
CIPD (March 2024). “PESTLE Analysis Fact Sheet.” https://www.cipd.org/en/knowledge/factsheets/pestle-analysis-factsheet/
CoLab (2019). There may be zombies. A Field Guide to Strategic Foresight. https://open.alberta.ca/publications/there-may-be-zombies-a-field-guide-to-strategic-foresight
Glenn, Jerome C (Feb 2021). “The Futures Wheel.” Futures Methodology 3.0 (The Millennium Project https://www.researchgate.net/publication/349335014_THE_FUTURES_WHEEL
Patton, Michael Quinn (2011). Developmental Evaluation: Applying Complexity Concepts to Enhance Innovation and Use. (Guilford Press).
Policysolve (2022). “Resources: Decolonizing Our Future” Decolonizing Futures | mysite (policysolve.com)
Ruedy, Liz and Tim Glayser (May 2024). “On Black Swans, Gray Rhinos, and the 2024 Election” https://democracyfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/On-Black-Swans-Gray-Rhinos-and-the-2024-Election.pdf
Schultz, Wendy L (2015). “Manoa: The future is not binary.” https://www.academia.edu/12075841/Manoa_The_future_is_not_binary
Shallowe, Adanna et al. (October 2020). “A Stitch In Time: Realizing the Value of Futures and Foresight.” RSA https://www.thersa.org/reports/futures-thinking-foresight
Swanson, Jason (April 2020). “Futures Thinking Now: Futures Wheels” https://knowledgeworks.org/resources/futures-thinking-now-futures-wheels/
UK Government Office for Science (Nov. 2017). Tools for Futures Thinking and Foresight Across the UK Government. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/futures-toolkit-for-policy-makers-and-analysts
