One of the problems with foresight is time. Most foresight work takes years, sometimes decades, to be fully work through. Despite this, there is a need to know in the present if a particular project was a worthwhile venture. The desire to appreciate a particular piece of foresight leads us to ask if there is some form of Gold Standard for foresight? An ideal piece of work against which any given piece could be judged. And if there is, what would that ideal piece of foresight look like? More importantly, based on the Gold Standard, could we reverse engineer a piece of foresight to ensure that we can consistently produce good work?
We can appraise foresight from one of two perspectives. First, there is the internal value of a piece of foresight. In this case, the exercise provides value because it was a project that was worth doing in itself. Alternatively, we could view the piece of foresight from an external perspective. In this case, the foresight would be worth doing because we can appraise it as a thing of beauty. There are a number of points to touch upon here.
To begin with, foresight produces a work of art rather than a scientific calculation. The calculation of the future belongs more with forecasting, which has a place in foresight, but not as an end result. A key axiom of foresight is that there is more than one possible future and a good foresight project will capture this plurality of futures. Like most works of art, foresight can be appreciated as the result of a series of techniques, which leans more towards the internal appraisal of foresight. Equally, a piece of foresight could be appreciated as a resultant totality, in which case we would be taking more of an external appraisal of the piece of foresight. Sometimes, these approaches can generate a sharp contrast.
For example, there are those who maintain that - in order to be a good piece of foresight - reference has to be made to certain issues. One that commonly is encountered is climate change. Climate change is important, but should it be present in all pieces of foresight? Perhaps not. Alternatively, there are those who insist that the issue of civilisational collapse is included in all works of foresight. Once again, this is an important issue, but perhaps not an all-consuming issue?
In my view, these positions are a little too prescriptive for my liking. To put this another way, I am reluctant to with-hold the validation of a foresight project simply because it does not adhere to a subjective frame of reference. Like most subjective frames of reference, these are often held quite violently by their adherents. In my view, this is an extremist position. I know that it's hard to think of futurists as Jihadists, but some can be over their respective beliefs.
My own view is that the validation of foresight should stem from the internal logic of a piece of foresight. To begin with, it needs to be well crafted technically - using the right tool - to the right level of maturity, and answering the question set rather than the question that ought to have been set. We may have to wait some time to be able to appraise the utility of the particular work, but we can discern early clues as to it's validity. Is it internally consistent? Does it answer the question asked? Was the right tool used? For an appropriate time horizon? Does it fit in with broadly similar - but independent - works of foresight? Has it provided a set of milestones into the future by which we can determine which outcome events are tending towards? If all of these elements are there, then the chances are that valid results have been produced.
I'm not sure that there is a Gold Standard for foresight. To me that suggests too prescriptive a framework that merely reinforces a conventional wisdom. There are a number of conviction futurists who would disagree with me on this point, but I would suggest that their convictions are blinding them to the possibility that they might be wrong. I am of the view that there are any number of possible futures that we might experience and that there is no single way to unlock those futures. For this reason, there can be no Gold Standard.
Stephen Aguilar-Millan
© The European Futures Observatory 2020
No comments:
Post a Comment