A Constellation of Possible Futures

Now is a good time to think about how we think about the future.

Very often, the people who tell the most listened-to stories about the future – the people who set the tone and the parameters for others’ expectations – are the ones with the most traditional power. Some are billionaires sending rockets into space; others are consultants or shareholders or politicians – the kind of people who write influential reports or give after-dinner speeches, move markets or make legislation.

But in the last eighteen months, shared social reality has changed, and it has become clear that both the market and the state are limited in the control they can exert upon either the present or the future.  In 2021, making personal plans for three or six months’ time requires the kind of faith and forecasting that used to be reserved for dreaming about 2030 or beyond. Uncertainty has become a certain fixture, and the pandemic has brought to the fore social tensions and disadvantages that many would have been unable to imagine in December 2019. It has also redistributed responsibilities, blurred the definition of what is meant by “home life”, and “created an expanded space for political and economic discourse”[1]. New tools and methods for showing what can and will come next have never been more urgent. 

The Civil Society Foresight Observatory is an experiment to develop a foresight commons. Showing and sharing futures that are rooted in communities not board rooms, and bringing them to life in accessible ways that can be used and reused by funders, policy makers and civil society organisations. 

At the heart of our project is a methodology we have named “relational foresight” that aims to be a more dynamic, pluralistic way of showing competing and complementary realites. This report explains the research that has informed that methodology, where our work fits in the wider landscape, and sets out how we plan to test it in the coming months. 

Our ambition is to create a resource that can power collective intelligence and investment from funders, while also inspiring more strategic leaps in those working to shape futures. If you are interested in contributing to the next stage of the Observatory, we would love to hear from you. 

Rachel Coldicutt, Anna Williams, Dominique Barron

August 2021

[1] Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin, “The Coming Battle for the COVID-19 Narrative,” VoxEU.Org (blog), April 10, 2020, https://voxeu.org/article/coming-battle-covid-19-narrative

The Foresight Observatory has been seed funded by The National Lottery Community Fund.