March 2010 - Issue #9
Human antennae tuned to the future
Story by Dr Gio Braidotti
View articles in related topics: Business & Workplace, Education
That humans can look to the past for guidance and learn by means of ‘hindsight’ is common knowledge and practice. However, the idea that the future too can guide, inform and awaken can seem, at first, a fanciful proposition. Yet that is what future studies tries to do … better understand and use the human capacity for ‘foresight’. That the capacity exists is easily demonstrated, says foresight practitioner and educator Dr Peter Hayward.
Just compare how humans and dogs cross a road, he says. Where the dog plunges in preoccupied with whatever has its attention in the present, humans can foresee consequences and can devise a strategy to realise a preferred future outcome. Should that involve reaching the other side safely, then humans ‘look right, look left’.
That simple ‘look right, look left’ protocol, Dr Hayward says, is probably the simplest and most common ‘strategic foresight process’ taught to humans. But what he and his colleagues at Swinburne University of Technology are endeavouring to do in their classrooms is take engagement with future outcomes to a higher level.
“The idea is to treat the future as an open space, exploring possibilities and responsibilities as a way to inform action in the present,” Dr Hayward says. “We find that can be a powerful approach, especially if thinking and action are stagnating for an individual or organisation. Once trained, foresight practitioners can help solve problems by facilitating the creation of new perspectives, directions and strategies by moving from the limited perspective of past and present.”
Of course, if the future is treated as an open space its landscape is not hills, trees and rivers. Instead it is a space teeming with cultural expectations, economic imperatives, social structures, community bonds, personal aspirations, technology and existential angst … for it is also where death is situated. Inevitably, foresight can provide points of view that are provocative to business-as-usual approaches to life.
Dr Hayward says that there are many ambient structures, institutions and processes that prompt people to simply accept one way of looking at the world and its vision of the future. This is how we often do business, government, even marketing, he says, although the point can extend to spirituality, personal relationships, family and community groups.
He acknowledges that people can be extremely uncomfortable questioning life’s most basic habits and assumptions. But there is also a subset of people who become increasingly aware that these structures make decisions on their behalf and they start to question whether they are being taken in the right direction.
“A point students often reiterate is that they have been uncomfortable for a while with the direction they have been taking but they struggle to articulate the sense of unease or to engage others in a conversation about their concerns or distress,” Dr Hayward says.
“That is what our classrooms provide – a safe place to engage with futures inquiry, contact with other people who are questioning directions, and an opportunity to encounter and use foresight processes and practices that can shift perspectives in ways that make a difference.”
The Swinburne Foresight Masters neither advocates for a particular future nor provides its students with a standard set of answers.
“This is not a course that offers disciplinary dogma,” Dr Hayward says. “It provides guiding frameworks for how people can ask quite profound questions about their future. And I try to find out right from the beginning whether our prospective students are comfortable with that open-ended and conversational approach, and with taking views that are provocative to the status quo.”
Swinburne’s Masters of Management (Strategic Foresight) is the only one of its kind in Australia and its academics network with the half dozen or so American and European universities that also teach strategic foresight. Swinburne has offered postgraduate courses for several years, usually to mid-career professionals, but as of 2010 undergraduate units are also being made available. In addition, staff and students are active as foresight practitioners within organisations such as the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre (CRC), where they help scan, analyse and act on emerging trends, needs and aspirations.
“The prime way that foresight and organisations interact is when students, who are from organisations, come to the course and then take foresight back to their workplace,” Dr Hayward says. “By doing so the student then creates an opening to use foresight within the organisation.”
The City of Boroondara is an example where a staff member attended the course on their own initiative but, as a result of building up foresight capacity in the workplace, the organisation now provides annual scholarships to staff to take a Masters of Strategic Foresight degree.
“If someone gets an early warning of a particular future as it opens up, that person gets the earliest opportunity to leverage and benefit from those changes, which is why corporations like Shell operate their own foresight units,” Dr Hayward says. “There’s no doubt that successful leaders are good at this – in fact, you don’t have to go far into a foresight course before you start bumping into issues of leadership.”
Ultimately, foresight is a “perspective of leadership”, he says, with the quintessential questions being where you want to take yourself, family, community, organisation or business. And you cannot answer the destination question unless you have started to ask questions about the future, he says.
“So it does culminate with people needing to be clear about their motives for the future they want. And at that point, that means dealing with moral issues, questions of consequences and responsibility.”
Foresight practitioners especially need to be clear about their motives and distinguish between the future they want and the future they are prepared to assist someone else create.
“Eventually future studies is also a moral discussion,” Dr Hayward says. “In the classroom, we don’t start there but that is often where we end up if people are serious about being foresight practitioners.”
Through the looking glass
In the classroom we teach by running futures inquiry processes that our graduates will eventually use in their organisations, but with theory and conversation thrown in. What we don’t do is tell the student what to think about the future.
We start by using knowledge about the way the world ‘out there’ operates. That means discussing things that are external to us, such as technology, climate change, population growth, or whatever students are passionate about. So we start with an inquiry that is about scanning the future and the ability to anticipate ‘weak’ or emerging signals of change. This is what 50 per cent of futures work involves and for some people that is all they want. These foresight tools can be put to use in many contexts, including corporate, governmental, educational and community domains.
At a certain point the conversation starts to move to interior spaces – to why people believe certain things and view the world in certain ways. Then we introduce the idea that the future involves not just technical knowledge but subjective issues of identity, needs, morality, and hopes. We can then probe the cultural frames that bind societies together – the shared worldviews and interior beliefs. This is important because there are some problems – especially community-based problems – that cannot be resolved in the present until the community can visualise and agree to the future that is being created once the problem is solved in a particular way.
So there are exterior and interior frameworks and we want people to integrate all those domains – the interior of the individual, knowledge of the way the world operates, a good knowledge of the cultural frames that the world sits on, and an understanding of how you change yourself and the world.
Ultimately, we want people to be aware of their own personal motivation in seeking out this knowledge. So the final set of challenges involves moral preferences and in some courses we teach moral philosophy. Not to indoctrinate a particular view, but to give students the ability to see how different moral positions influence what the future can become.
– Peter Hayward
