Building a foresight habit in government

Many future-oriented works in governments fail due to very obvious reasons. Much of this work usually lives in a single unit and produces interesting outputs, but is not connected to any policy cycles. Often, it is also highly dependent on a few champions and is not built on an internal skills base that prevents it from being expert-led forever.

This**** OECD's Public Governance Reviewprovides practical tools for people working to make long-term thinking stick within government systems. The main takeaway from the report is that foresight is not a tool that you use once, but is a capability or a skill you build for which you need roles, incentives, routines, and learning loops.

Who is this report for? This report is useful for those attempting to strengthen a foresight function in their government, senior leaders seeking long-term planning to survive political cycles, and professionals dissatisfied with good workshops that do not produce results.

What is in the report? The report provides a practical definition of strategic foresight, an anticipatory governance lens, a set of institutional functions, a tailored guidebook, and a curriculum map for building skills across different roles. It also provides detailed learnings from three countries: Lithuania, Malta, and Italy.

Some key takeaways I found useful for professionals:

1. Avoiding thinking in silos and building a foresight ecosystem: One of the strongest messages of the report is that foresight works best when it is viewed as an ecosystem of people, institutions, and routines instead of being viewed as just a unit that continuously produces reports. There are several instances in the report where emphasis has been placed on networking and forming shared standards and communities of practice that can act as the glue, making foresight useful across different institutions.

2. Adopting a staged approach to creating a futures unit: The report encourages practitioners to treat foresight as a service that is being designed. This is useful as it treats institutionalisation as an adaptive process rather than just a one-time reform. A three-step approach is suggested:

• Framing: During this process, we try to understand and determine where foresight fits in our political, administrative, and societal context. Some important questions to ask during this process can be: What long-term issues keep blindsiding us? Who currently makes long-term decisions? What processes already exist?

• Designing: During this phase, we identify skills, data, tools, incentives, and capacity that will help or block foresight. We ask the question of what we can realistically build given the constraints and decide what level of capability is feasible.

• Optioning: After completing the first two steps, we choose a model by scoring options against criteria such as cost, political support, speed to launch, sustainability, and impact.

3. Avoid copy-pasting models: One of the best parts of the report is that it provides us with a menu of six common institutional set-ups for strategic foresight. It encourages governments to combine, mix, and match these models depending on the capacity, politics, and the end goal.

4. Using pain points to build foresight: Instead of treating foresight as an afterthought, the report encourages governments to address five common pain points. It notes that foresight is still an unfamiliar concept that is underutilised, which makes policies reactive and strategies rigid with little flexibility under uncertainty. Another issue noted is that stakeholder engagement does not consistently produce productive insights, and many long-term initiatives fail due to political or organisational discontinuity and weak collaboration between different institutions. Framing these challenges is useful as it helps build foresight to address everyday operational weaknesses that constrain institutions from thinking long-term.

5. Prioritising measurement and accountability

The report encourages practitioners to define responsible parties and outputs so that it is clear who is in charge of which tasks. It also emphasizes the importance of establishing clear milestones to track progress. A great example is provided in the form of Lithuania’s action plan, which is laid out as a simple project plan that includes concrete metrics such as creating communities of practice. These metrics force foresight to take place routinely and create accountability and continuity.

Ultimately, the main focus of the report is to encourage governments to build foresight as a habit instead of a one- off exercises so that it can survive staff turnover and different political cycles. To do this, it stresses the importance of embedding clear ownership, repeated methods, and regular links to policy cycles, instead of leaving it as an isolated workshop output.

Read the full report here.