Foresight: 50 ways to think of Futures

Cuhls, K.; Dönitz, E.; Erdmann, L.; Gransche, B.; Kimpeler, S.; Schirrmeister, E.; Warnke, P. (2024): Foresight: Fifty Years to Think Your Futures. In: Edler, J.; Walz, R. (Ed): Systems and Innovation Research in Transition. Research Questions and Trends in Historical Perspective. Cham: Springer.

The past

In the last 50 years, foresight has come a long way from a seemingly obscure activity in small expert circles and niche domains to an established element of strategy development in a wide range of policy fields and sectors. Institutionally, it has matured into an academic field with a differentiated community in dedicated networks, organizations, conferences and journals. In this article, we highlight some of the key ways in which foresight has evolved over the last 50 years, and we explain some of the changing aspects that researchers are addressing.

1. From identifying a single future to exploring multiple open futures

The epistemological basis of foresight has shifted from a predictive forecasting mode to an emphasis on finding better ways of handling uncertainty and complexity through exploring multiple futures. Consequently, foresight practitioners now emphasize whole-process bene-fits (such as gaining resilience) just as much as generating anticipatory intelligence as a means of supporting decision making.

2. From narrow to broad participation

While integrating diverse perspectives has been an important element of foresight from the very beginning, the notion of “participation” has substantially evolved. Early foresight activi-ties incorporated people with a range of professional backgrounds within narrow expert cir-cles — but nowadays, foresight seeks diversity along many different dimensions and often addresses ordinary citizens as “experts in everyday life”. Stakeholder analyses, which aim to broaden participation from the stakeholders that are dominant today to the ones who will matter tomorrow, have become a core element of foresight theory and practice.

3. Foresight and innovation systems — from wiring up to re-wiring

Innovation policy was one of the earliest areas to apply foresight and is still among the most active today. Accordingly, the evolution of innovation systems theory has heavily impacted foresight, leading its role to develop from purely informing clients and stakeholders to wir-ing up and transforming innovation systems. Much of the drive toward broadening participa-tion was grounded in the widening of perspectives on innovation systems.

4. Toward conscious integration of machine learning-based approaches

One of the most striking developments in the field is the fast uptake of novel approaches to capturing and analyzing data. As data availability, computing capacities and algorithms for machine-based analysis began increasing, they led to a plethora of new strategies for identi-fying emerging changes, under the umbrella term of “horizon scanning”. Early enthusiasm was followed by conscious design of hybrid approaches that combined (or learned) the ad-vantages of both human sense-making and machine-based analysis.

5. Toward new combinations of quantitative and qualitative methods

The uptake of machine-learning approaches supplemented a process that was already taking place: integrating quantitative modeling into qualitative foresight scenarios. Even though the foresight and modeling communities are still fairly separate, bridging attempts such as par-ticipatory modeling, as it is known, are becoming increasingly frequent and sophisticated.

The future(s)

Across these dimensions of change, we want to highlight a few emerging issues that in our view may well shape the coming five decades.

• Foresight will be increasingly requested to take up a position with respect to trans-formative, mission-oriented agendas. Balancing this normative focus with foresight’s insistence on the openness of the future and the inherent uncertainty of complex sys-tems will most likely remain a highly dynamic and contested field of evolution in the coming years.
• The second game-changer comes in the form of machine-based approaches, which are opening up a whole range of new possibilities and bringing in various perspec-tives — but are simultaneously posing major challenges when it comes to conducting adequate sense-making activities. There is a risk of reversing the focus on reflexive processes and of purely predictive and deterministic approaches re-emerging.
• Thirdly, foresight is increasingly being embedded into wider policy and strategy pro-cesses. This may open up new inroads to implementing foresight insights in real life and strengthening anticipatory culture in organizations. At the same time, achieving a careful balance between institutional influence and provocative questioning of an-ticipatory assumptions poses a challenge to foresight practitioners who are embed-ded in institutional thinking.

To sum up, the developments in foresight during the last 50 years are heralding major op-portunities for strengthening foresight’s outreach and impact, but they also carry a tendency to draw foresight back into the deterministic paradigms of what is referred to as the “plan-ning decade”. Reaping these opportunities while avoiding the risks will most certainly be a major challenge for foresight in the coming decade. To conquer it, foresight will need to extend its international cooperation efforts even further and keep on developing its episte-mological premises.

Layout: Renata Sas; Icons: Anatolii Babii/creativemarket, Renata Sas