Foresight in action
How foresight can bring people together to solve big-picture problems
Many of the funding organisations we spoke with in the first part of our research project told us they were not familiar with using foresight activities, with many focussed on moving from the immediate present rather than shaping the future. In response to this, Careful Industries developed the Relational Foresight methodology to help civil society think about the far future in an unconstrained way, one that allows for uncomfortable and invisible futures to emerge.
The role that funders play through the design of their funding programmes ultimately shapes the activities and agenda of civil society, and the charity sector as a whole. The way funding streams are designed and the topics and causes they support or omit, has a powerful influence on shaping society in the medium to long term. Through the course of the Civil Society Foresight Project, we have been testing ideas to foster new ways of collating unseen or unheard futures from civil society.
Our ultimate goal is that these invisible futures from civil society are made visible and can be used by Funding Organisations to develop proactive funding streams. Building an infrastructure that brings to life the types of creative future visions that civil society rarely gets the chance to talk about.
There is precedent for this kind of collaboration.
“Destino Colombia” was a project led by Adam Kahane of Reos Partners, which used foresight workshops and scenario planning to explore the Colombia’s future. It brought together politicians, guerillas, military officers, journalists, and business people to explore the current state of affairs in the country and how it could evolve in the future. The former Colombian president and Noble Peace Prize Winner Juan Manuel Santos said Adam Kahane’s workshops were “one of the most significant events in the country’s search for peace.”
REOS Partners 2013 Scenarios Case Study Series - Destino Colombia: A transformative scenarios process to discover new ways new ways to deal with a complex conflict
Agenda setting on a different scale, the ‘Nordic Cities Beyond Digital Disruption: A Novel Way to Develop Cities.’ was a strategic foresight project run over two years. The Centre for Sustainable Communications at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Demos Helsinki and 12 Nordic cities, companies and universities worked together to explore how urban life could be improved using new services and technologies. They specifically used backcasting and scenario workshops to explore the future.
The Nordic Cities project culminated in three global scenarios that could combat the complex problems of city living for future city dwellers. It grappled with the reality that in 30 years time, the majority of urban dwellers will still live in neighborhoods built in the 20th Century. Through the programme they used foresight activities; backcasting to collate new learning and developing urban renewal models through scenarios. Ultimately the scenarios contributed to a framework for urban transformation, one that is playful, incorporating creativity and dialogue through the backcasting process.
Foresight provides a great opportunity for funders to explore the future from new perspectives, and to play a role in pro-actively shaping it. The Relational Foresight Methodology will be useful in allowing more civil society futures to be made visible to funding organisations. We hope that funders will be able utilise these futures for strategy setting, allowing them to creativity build futures with civil society.
