For the past many years, future and foresight practitioners have been able to base their work on ground that is stable enough to support reasoned assumptions and thoughtful scenario development. But what happens when the ground beneath us shifts momentously, leaving no solid place to stand?
In recent years, foresight work has anticipated many profound changes – such as the shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world, the vulnerabilities in global supply chains, the increasing impacts of global warming. The last few months, though, have seemed remarkably uncertain, both in effect and speed. For those of us in Europe (for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Britain, its recent nationalist hiccup notwithstanding, is in Europe), the sudden shift of the USA from partner to competitor, if not downright opponent, is especially destabilising. Such a swift change in defence, trade, and longstanding geopolitical assumptions has emphasised the limitations of planning – and forecasting – that relies too heavily on history.
We are, it feels, at that point where we pass even more swiftly into the future through the pinch point of the now. It is a time when futures thinking is both more important than ever; and at the same time more difficult for stakeholders and policy makers to engage with, simply because there is so much going on now (in that lovely line from Auden’s “For the Time Being”, written itself in the depths of the second world war, that “In the meantime / There are bills to be paid, machines to keep in repair, /irregular verbs to learn…”).
Still, no matter how uncertain now actually is, it will quickly become the past – so the only certainty is the future. It is up to us to create that future, and up to futurists to imagine it: it is the arena of possibility, shaped through our conscious choices. It’s that thinking which will be critical to overcoming both the confusion of the present and our stuckness within it. Carlo Rovelli says “The future is open because it depends on our actions. The present exists only as a thin border where the past and the future meet.” And if we’re on that thin border, we need to forget about the past, with all of its apparently solid comforts, and get used to standing on the uncertain ground of the present in order to move forwards. Despite the inevitable uncertainty of the present, therefore, we have genuine agency precisely because of and within that uncertainty. The present is an actively generative instant.
Living with the present uncertainty in the context of long-term ambition, of course, has been a part of strategic thinking for a while. Mintzberg argues that “emergent strategy” is appropriate for dynamic, uncertain environments; Taleb’s concept of “antifragility” shows how to ready organisations for confused and confusing times. Both rely on introducing a degree of flexibility to rigid, brittle organisations, allowing them to survive and develop even as their environments change around them.
Ideally, this becomes part of a company’s, organisation’s, or government’s resilience strategy. Embracing uncertainty, prioritising agility, broadening reference points and fostering continuous learning, all contribute to a flexible, responsive and resilient approach.
And we have tools for exactly this, methods which can deliver (as our tagline says) “Robust decisions in uncertain times”. They include:
Wild card analysis – a way of introducing shock and discontinuity to plans which challenge the foundations of the future simply being “business as normal plus”.
Counterfactual futures – constructing alternate pasts allows us to consider a wider range of alternate futures (how, for instance, might Europe’s security landscape look today if Europe had swung fully behind Ukraine a decade ago?)
Sensemaking – the set of skills and methods borrowed from complexity science, sensemaking encourages a real-time analysis of many different courses to construct a coherent understanding of rapidly changing situations. Such techniques as network analysis, social listening and – increasingly – some form of AI-assisted trend monitoring helps track emerging disruptions as they appear.
Horizon scanning for weak signals – Basic horizon scanning often relies on strong signals – which tend to be clear trends with visible momentum. But all of these start as weak signals, which can be barely perceptible at first. Of course, some of these will putter out into nothing, technological or political change that simply turns into a dead end or a blip. But some – in today’s context, think about shifts in AI regulation, the increasing closeness which leads to new geopolitical alliances, the emergence of a new disease far away – may simply be the precursor to something which will upend comfortable assumptions.
Scenario planning – multiple possible futures more confidently envision possible events better than single point forecasts. Properly done, they build robustness into planning – provided they are taken seriously by policymakers and decision makers. The danger, without the participation of senior people, is that scenarios are done as an exercise rather than as a serious part of strategic thinking, and so their recommendations get watered down or carefully shelved.
Other techniques – including Three Horizons, Causal Layered Analysis and Participatory Futures – all bring richness and real thinking future issues. Together, they all bring confidence not only in dealing with the future, but in being able to move away from the cluttered present.
Businesses, and governments, like stability. They do not like moments in history where climate change impacts become “global weirding”, reliable trade partners suddenly become competitors, defence structures fray. In a time when all are happening, all at once, and the solid ground beneath our feet seems suddenly shaky, we must use the tools and methods at our disposal to understand, and help create, the future we want. If we do not, our future looks as shaky as our present. And that is no good place to stand either.
Written by Jonathan Blanchard Smith, SAMI Director
The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily of SAMI Consulting.
Achieve more by understanding what the future may bring. We bring skills developed over thirty years of international and national projects to create actionable, transformative strategy. Futures, foresight and scenario planning to make robust decisions in uncertain times. Find out more at www.samiconsulting.co.uk
Featured image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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