[Reviewed
in THE FUTURIST,
November-December 2007]
Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight,
edited by Andy Hines and Peter Bishop. Social Technologies. 2007. 253 pages.
Paperback. $19.95. Buy
Book.
Methods for Thinking about the Future
Review by
Patrick Tucker
Two practicing foresight experts lay out guidelines for strategic
thinking professionals.
"If you don't know where you're going, you may wind up somewhere else,"
baseball player Yogi Berra famously said. This singular quote encapsulates
perfectly the danger of operating without a clear objective, much less a
plan to reach that objective. If a corporation or organization can't even
give words to the place it would like to be, then it will likely lack the
vocabulary to describe why things went askew (when they inevitably do) or
how to get back on a more desirable course. "Knowing where you're going" is
also the animating theme of Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for
Strategic Foresight, edited by futurists Andy Hines and Peter Bishop.
"Many practicing analysts today have little experience or formal training
in strategic foresight," they write in the introduction. "This work
addresses that gap by cataloging the best guidelines for successfully
applying strategic foresight, offered by professionals in the field today.
It is intended both for those new to strategic foresight who would benefit
from a reference guide, and for more experienced practitioners, who will be
able to pick out ideas to refine and improve their practices."
The book's principal sections focus on framing, scanning, forecasting,
visioning, planning, and acting. Each contains what Hines and Bishop feel
are the most important guidelines for creating workable action agendas and
institutionalizing strategic thinking and intelligence systems at the
leadership level.
- Framing: "defines the scope and focus of problems requiring
strategic foresight," they write. This might include exploring the amount of
research required to address a certain objective before beginning an actual
course of research and constructing both positive and negative images of the
future. "Consciously develop positive expectations from the very beginning
of a foresight activity," the book urges. "Deal with any cynicism and
criticality right away. A common mistake of teams in a foresight activity is
to look only for negative signs and miss the positive ones."
- Scanning: "Once the team is clear about the boundaries and
scope of an activity, it begins to scan the external environments for
information and trends relating to the issue at hand," write Hines and
Bishop, who advise would-be strategists to look at how the past and present
are affecting the issue at hand and familiarize themselves with sources or
the views that might, at first glance, seem tangential to the topic. To
ignore potential influences simply because you don't have an apparatus to
deal with them carries the risk of not developing effective strategies.
Hines and Bishop cite the experience of consulting futurist Joe Coates who
was engaged by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review
emerging environmental issues. He pointed out that noise can also be a
source of pollution as it can add to stress and hearing loss. The EPA,
however, did not have a mechanism to deal with the unorthodox concept of
noise as a pollutant. As a result, noise pollution has risen as a threat to
human health.
- Forecasting: defined by the authors as "generating the
widest range of creative possibilities, then consolidating and prioritizing
the most useful for the organization to actively consider or prepare for as
it moves forward." One strategy, follow the example of science-fiction
writers, and "think of alternative futures and alternative realities.
Non-invasive injections, communicators, voice control, and pervasive
computing on the technical side, U.S.-Russian cooperation, feminization, and
race integration on the sociopolitical side were in books and on television
screens long before they diffused to everyday life."
- Visioning: according to the authors, is how one brings "the
consideration of the future back to the present by addressing the question,
'So what?' Given the future possibilities outlined by Forecasting, what does
the organization want to do?" The keys to successful visioning, Hines and
Bishop write, are identifying implications, challenging assumptions, and
thinking "visionary," meaning, big.
- Planning: the bridge between vision and action. This step of
the strategic process involves evaluating strategic options. "Make the human
context central to any strategic foresight activity. Do not be overly
enamored with industry analysis, technology, or business trends and forget
to overlook the role of people," the authors warn. "Many activities produce
impressive reams of data but haven't thought through how the people affected
would react or respond in the proposed future. Considering different
sociological contests can help the organization respond to a wider range of
needs--be they demographic, sociological, and ethnographic physiological,
psychological, etc."
- Acting is the final stage of the strategic foresight
activity. While it seems straightforward enough, this stage should,
according to the authors, involve the creation of a comprehensive
intelligence system to provide ongoing external and internal feedback on the
effectiveness of the strategy that has been implemented.
Poking through the neatly segmented subsections and copious bullet-points
in Thinking About the Future, the casual reader may be daunted by the
complexity of these various, strategies, and best-practice methods, many of
which seem gratuitous if not redundant. In terms of completing the mundane
chores that make up daily life for the majority of the world's inhabitants,
the subtle difference between forecasting and visioning seems a point
unworthy of serious consideration, much less its own book chapter. If you
attempted to frame, scan, and plan all the possible ramifications of getting
a glass of water from the tap, as opposed to buying a bottle, or waiting for
the icebergs to melt, etc., you would likely faint from dehydration.
But, as is so often the case, behavior that is neurotic on the level of
the individual may make perfect sense for corporate boards, organizations,
or any other body where a handful of unfortunate souls are tasked with
making decisions that could affect hundreds, if not thousands of people. Few
could dispute that Captain E.J. Smith and his crew should have been thinking
strategically well before that iceberg appeared on the port bow of the Titanic.
In this way, Hines, Bishop, and the other contributors perform a valuable
service by reminding us that it's best to plan, not only for the known
journey, but also for dealing with the obstacles along the way, and thus
avoiding, in the words of Berra, "winding up someplace else."
About the Reviewer
Patrick Tucker is the associate editor of THE FUTURIST and the director
of communications for the World Future Society.
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