Strategic Foresight

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.

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

The order in which the parts are assembled or arranged affects the system’s performance (if parts aren’t connected properly to the motherboard, the system won’t work)

Mapping is a tool to capture what happens during this experimentation and enabling you to respond to the feedback as it happens.

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.

Strategic Foresight is open to alternative futures, that is, you work with several futures (certainly more than one!) because you know that you can’t predict the future and it most certainly won’t be an extrapolation from the past. It can evolve in different directions and, using Strategic Foresight, you can determine which are possible, which are

Systems thinking is a discipline, and it has its own vocabulary and maps. It is one of several frameworks that have been developed to help people work effectively with systems, understanding the implications of interdependent parts and enabling them to make robust decisions in uncertain, emerging and unclear space.

Questions can open the mind to possibility; enquiry is the source of creativity and innovation.

For, as futurist author William Gibson said, “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.”19