Second volume in a series of three summaries. After thehistory of foresight, here we look at the challenges facing foresight today. What's at stake? One immediate observation is that foresight, particularly in France, has remained almost stuck on concepts and methods that have hardly changed since the late 80s, whereas the world has changed, as has the context of foresight. There is also a striking gap between the changes taking place in our societies and our ability to grasp and respond to them.
The need for foresight to equip itself with suitable tools goes hand in hand with a thirst for refoundation, by going back to basics and thus to the "foresight attitude" of Gaston Berger. In our view, re-founding foresight requires us to re-interrogate this activity from top to bottom, re-examining its premises, aims, means, relationships with values, the social imaginary, ideology, utopia, and the fields of action with which it interacts (decision-making, innovation, etc.). Foresight has begun to open up to modes of thinking, of embodying the future, of exploring the future, of reflecting on the desirable, that it had not considered until now, notably those based on sensitive experience, such as science fiction, art and design.
In this necessary renewal, we highlight a number of issues, such as that of the image, whose properties have hitherto been little used by foresight; that of controversy (what place should be given to controversy, and what can be drawn from it, whereas foresight is traditionally a machine for producing consensus?); that of the division between exploratory and normative work: should we really explore the field of possibilities before embarking on a phase of reflection on what is desirable?; that of values...
At another level, the challenge of rewriting the "software" of foresight leads us to rethink the mechanisms in which foresight is used, and the role of foresight in organizations. Finally, the difficulty for foresight to influence decision-making, and more generally the field of action, is a central issue.
Read more " Foresight - Current issues " / Cédric Polère for Millennium3
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