Strategic Foresight

It’s a discovery process; you are looking to find out what is out there, what could potentially occur.

To go and successfully explore somewhere totally unknown, you need to be prepared for whatever you may face. You need to anticipate potential needs that might arise. Sometimes you won’t have enough information, yet you still need to understand when a choice or decision has to be made.

When you don’t know the purpose of a system it is very hard to understand its behaviour and the impact of actions on the system.

Filling in the map as we go – sharing collective knowledge where none of us is sure what we know – will help build a bridge to the future – or even to a new and deeper understanding of the present. It will help you to recognise, map and navigate around the obstacles you find. So, you can prepare to just tweak the steering a bit or to change directi

Systems try to maintain equilibrium through feedback (which in the case of a PC usually means it tells you to reboot).

Obvious and complicated contexts assume that the universe is ordered, that you can see cause and effect relationships and there will be a right answer or answers.

The differences between simple problems and wicked problems affect the way you deal with them, so it is very important to understand (and agree) how to talk about and work with these problems. This means challenging every assumption you have that an obstacle, problem or mess is made up of a simple or tame problem – it is very likely that it is neit

Messes are exacerbated by complexity. Complexity tends to encourage fragmented thinking (which isn’t a good thing if you want to manage a mess) by making it more difficult to get to a shared, agreed understanding of a mess.

Snowden differentiates between complex contexts where cause and effect are difficult to see and perhaps can only be seen in retrospect and chaotic contexts where cause and effect are constantly shifting.

Patterns are what you might notice if you look at all the events together.