Relational Foresight

Very often, the people who tell the most listened-to stories about the future – people setting 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.

Over the past two years Careful Industries has been researching and prototyping a foresight method that could show and share futures that are rooted in communities - not only 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 this is a methodology we have named ‘relational foresight’ that aims to be a more dynamic, pluralistic way of showing competing and complementary realities.  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. 

Over the past two years we have been researching what needs to be in place to make this happen. Our conclusion is that, in order to address the power imbalance, Foresight could be improved  through a relational way of doing and thinking. This is based on what Donna Haraway calls a collective ‘response-ability’ for our world and our futures, and our ambition is to demonstrate the continuous co-existence and interconnection of multiple realities for different communities. 

Our previous research has highlighted the connections and differences between the kind of “top-down” foresight typically produced by powerful bodies such as governments and big business and the continuous, emergent sensing that takes place in civil society. As we found in the Glimmers Project, there is an abundance of empirical and qualitative knowledge in civil society that is rarely shared outside of its immediate context: in contrast, the McKinsey paper “The next normal arrives: Trends that will define 2021 – and beyond” is an attempt to aggregate the near-future trends that matter to global business. Working from home is described as a productivity booster; the pandemic a spur to innovation; and the speed of crisis response finally makes the elusive Fourth Industrial Revolution a tantalising possibility. Covid-19 is depicted as a large-scale disruptor that has allowed businesses to put rapid system development first, and the emphasis is on maintaining that momentum while getting ahead of substantial growth opportunities provided by going green. It is a largely dispassionate view of a world, in which business growth is the ultimate driver.

But how could the same scenarios look from the perspective of the workers powering supply chains in the context of climate hostility or, delivering more productivity from the kitchen table? What might the aggregate picture look like if it considered the unpaid care work that happens in families and communities, the impact of Long Covid, or the context of global grief? The aim of relational foresight is to show how  some of these futures coexist, impact and affect one another and capture some of the texture of “a world where many worlds fit”. 

Through designing bespoke participatory activities involving lived, learnt and practitioner experience, our aim is to capture the early signs of systemic changes as they become audible to those who choose to listen. This is intentionally different from participatory foresight practices that are more commonly deployed to work through shared social divisions and dilemmas, which we discuss in more detail in section 4 of our report “A constellation of Possible Futures”. While this type of ‘bottom-up’ public participation can be a democratic good, it is not always optimised to capture disparate weak signals. Multiple possible futures could be unfolding within any mini-public, but the emphasis on collaboration and consensus around clearly emerging and existing dilemmas is often a higher priority than capturing these shared and unfolding points of difference. 

This kind of ‘bottom-up’ participatory practice also needs ‘official’ permission to happen. Mini-publics are often convened to deliberate on issues that can be observed or anticipated by those with traditional power, and so there is a limit to the possibility of opening up opportunities for alternative futures to arise. Rather than shaping ‘unofficial futures’ to fit within the boundaries set by the perspectives and rhetoric of these dominant narratives, relational foresight pushes us to engage the space between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ futures and to expand the parameters of our considerations.

Values 

To understand how to make this relational practice a possibility, we have reviewed existing foresight practices. Relational foresight is dependent upon: 

• Ensuring foresight from all sources has equal status 

• Establishing an alternative to ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ foresight practices that allows for collective problem making.

• Creating a new space for relational foresight that draws on the differences or convergences between official and unofficial futures.

• Being useful and intelligible to everyone - not only corporates 

If you would like to see the results from our Relational Foresight process, Belonging, Care and Repair is one example of the complexity of output which can be achieved.