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.

When you use Strategic Foresight you are turning the tables by looking to the future, identifying what is possible and, most importantly, what you can influence, which puts you in a position of ability (you are ABLE to do something about a given situation).

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.

The behaviour of a mess depends more on how the different parts/problems within it interact than on how they act independently of one another. This means that you can’t really solve a mess, but you can manage it.

The reason that you develop a strategy is to make sure that you/your business remains continuously relevant to the unfolding future so that you can flourish and endure not just today but also tomorrow. You need to navigate the ship of yourself (or your organisation) over time and into the future as that future unfolds and becomes the present.

Recognising systems allows you to look for patterns in their interactions.

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

This is where Strategic Foresight comes into its own. It builds on (and around) the more structured frameworks to help you to discover, assess and map the uncertainties that are part of your system.

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