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Dear Colleague

In this months newsletter
  • Approaches to Global Foresight
  • Organisational Self-Assessment Tool

More and more organisations – in and outside the humanitarian sector – are exploring approaches to global foresight, or ways to increase organisational capacities to deal with ever more complex futures.

One example that has considerable relevance for the humanitarian sector took place in a workshop organised by the Geneva Innovation Movement on 24 March. Among the various participants, the International Committee of the Red Cross provided insightful reflections on how it would use futures methodologies. It intended to ‘test the viability of training foresight on a grand scale’ by bringing together ‘the entire institution to three workshops: Introduction to Strategic Foresight, Horizon Scanning and Trends & Impact.’ 

From that base, it would begin to co-design events with those participants to identify possible future pathways. ‘Ideally,” said the ICRC representative, ‘this will result in the creation of a community-designed system capable of supporting and sustaining foresight within the institution.’

The ICRC’s initiative is an important step towards more systematic ways of planning from the future, and raises another issue which those venturing down that path need to consider, namely, how will such initiatives be sustained and permeate into the fabric of the organisation.
 

In a recent project undertaken by the UK Ministry of Defence’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl), the project designers used uncertainty of the future to encourage audiences to query their anticipatory assumptions and cognitive biases. In so doing, they emphasised that a fundamental and positive aspect of speculation was ‘familiarising users with the feeling of unfamiliarity, itself.’ 

As noted in their article, Estrangement, Immersion and the Future: Designing the Speculative Environments of the virtual reality: “Museum of the Future”, the designers emphasised that of fundamental importance in futures thinking was not to maintain mental and emotional constructs that ensured certitude, but rather to promote a degree of cognitive flexibility and challenge the conceptual security protected by ‘knowledge shields’. The project’s destination at this stage is

... to offer insights not as a template for delivering a way of making policy about the future to policymakers but rather as an ethically self-reflexive speculation about how to approach the problems and opportunities of future policy; how to set about effecting an institutional shift in behaviours and practices of futures-thinking and -making; and how to undertake a meaningful assessment of what futures thinking is —and could be – in an institutional context ripe for change.

Conceptually and practically, the MOD/Dstl initiative can be regarded as a breakthrough for organisations interested in holistic organisational approaches for dealing with ever more complex and uncertain futures. 
 

Though accepting the growing importance of global foresight, many readers may still feel uncertain about the extent to which their organisations have the capacities to deal with the uncertainties and complexities of the future. For that reason, we are offering our  Organisational Self-Assessment Tool (OSAT) so that you and your colleagues can determine what you will need to do to prepare from the future for the future.

If you had a moment, the HF Team would truly value your own ideas and approaches to futures planning. Do let us know, and if you wanted to share them with others, we would be delighted to consider adding them to the HF platform. And, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments about the OSAT, please also let us know.

In the meantime, very best wishes from
 
The Humanitarian Futures team


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