81
edits
Futures: Difference between revisions
→Strategic Foresight
| Line 28: | Line 28: | ||
==== Strategic Foresight ==== | ==== Strategic Foresight ==== | ||
During the Cold War, the need to anticipate technological and geopolitical changes led to the refinement of Futures research. | During the Cold War, the need to anticipate technological and geopolitical changes led to the refinement of Futures research. | ||
Over the next sixty years, futures research evolved from basic forecasting to complex, creative methodologies: starting with the RAND Corporation's post-World War Two scenarios, evolving into the systemic thinking of the 1970s, and the development of computational techniques, global modelling and machine learning. Governments, businesses, and academic institutions adopted foresight techniques to better anticipate and prepare for a wider range of potential future disruptions amidst rapidly changing events and unpredictable developments. | |||
Strategic Foresight uses techniques like scenario planning and trend analysis to anticipate and influence future outcomes. Unlike predictions and forecasting, Strategic Foresight made use of qualitative methods to navigate complex, volatile uncertainty and the “wicked problems” about the future. In recent decades, Sohail Inayatullah's "Six Pillars" framework and causal layered analysis (CLA) transformed futures studies by including multiple perspectives, societal narratives, worldviews, myths and metaphors in commonly used research practices.<ref>Inayatullah, Sohail. "[https://www.metafuture.org/library1/FuturesStudies/Six-pillars-Foresight-2008.pdf Six Pillars: Futures Thinking for Transforming]". Foresight, 10(1), 4-21, 2008.</ref>. This evolution reflects a growing emphasis on complexity, inclusivity, creativity and the weird in anticipatory and readiness research. | |||
==== Scenarios ==== | ==== Scenarios ==== | ||