Strategic Foresight in Context
The current public discourse and zeitgeist is certainly frightening. Not only are experiences of polycrisis increasing polarization and fragmentation of our political, economic, and social systems, these experiences are making people sick. Anxiety, doubt, and mistrust have captured our bodies, hearts, and minds. Adam Tooze has observed that news and mainstream media have become a collage of human suffering.
The current moment has been building from decades now and is finally become unbearable. The World Economic Forum identifies key drivers as widening economic inequality, politicization, multilateral geopolitics, and a collapsing natural environment. The consequences of these drivers cannot be reduced to a single factor and, rather, have exponential and interconnected influences on each other. The results is extreme uncertainty. Among which the importance of applying systems-thinking to conceptions of the future is more important than ever, even though our institutions are not well structured or incentivized to do this.
The Observatory of Public Sector Innovation claims that more urgently than ever, governments need to reinvent how they approach strategy and policymaking. In a presentation to Canada’s School of Public Service (2024), applied health futurist Dr. Zayna Khayat emphasized that Futurism and foresight are becoming core competences for public servants. The Dubai Future Forum highlighted cultivation of cultures and infrastructures that enhance collective imagination as a principles to guide citizens, policymakers, leaders, organizations, and communities in their work. This all requires more creativity.
Sensemaking and futures thinking are creative disciplines. The horizon scanning and scenario planning used in strategic foresight encourage imaginative thinking. Although these mindsets and skills are highly valued, their expression encounters significant barriers. Namely barriers brought about by bias towards popular, familiar, or consensual ideas. In certain circumstances, conformity and constraint can boost creativity and help people develop their own creative styles; in others too many constraints, and pressure to conform, can lead to convergence of ideas. People will often defy their own values in favour of following the crowd.
I wonder if the creative defiance required to enact transformative change threatens bureaucracy in the 21st century?
“The whole purpose of the exercise is to develop a future landscape where the result of research in high technology could be employed for the evolution of better strategies to ensure that the status quo is maintained: Western control and domination of non-Western cultures continues unabated.”
In contrast, early future studies work was more characterized by the dangers to human survival presented by runaway, reckless technology, pollution, depletion of natural resources, urban deterioration, and population explosion. From this perspective, deliberate investigation of “The preferred vision of future was crucial for nations, institutions, and organizations in not just adapting to the changing future, but in creating radical possibilities,” says Sohail Inayatullah.
I believe that strategic foresight is a creative, constitutive, and constructive method for generating qualitative research insights. As such, it should provide ways of challenging views of reality in order to destabilize and reconstitute those views towards a desired future. Aren’t these the roots of creative work and innovation?
Although creativity and innovative mindsets are called valuable, the immutable superstructure of bureaucracy can be inescapable. Recognized famously by German philosopher Max Weber and Czech writer Franz Kafka, calling bureaucracy an “iron cage” for its inflexibility and insistence that government agencies treat clients the same way regardless of social class or popularity, this superstructure is entrenched.
Calls for strategic foresight in pursuit of risk management and system maintenance may not be overcoming the superstructure. Creative contributions that redirect the status quo and defy traditions of governance and public administration already tend to be unwelcomed. But conformity is not innate to human beings—it is a learned survival strategy imposed on people by the majority opinion.
And so, while the invitations for creative practice in government have been sent, I wonder if the stage is set and if the cast and crew are well rehearsed. What do you think?
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