Search results

The purpose of this article is to clarify the difference between futuring and visioning and to suggest how they may be better implemented as complementary approaches to strategic decision‐making.

A veteran of more than 80 scenario development projects, the author describes the tools required and the best practices for defining the mission, setting the goals, developing a vision, and making plans that move a business beyond the familiar of today to the uncertainties of tomorrow

Offers examples of companies that used futuring and visioning tools to prepare product scenarios that anticipated the future, unarticulated voice of the customer.

Guidance for leadership: Recognize the difference between futuring and visioning, and do both in a complementary way. Encourage, if not require, people to think about the future of both customers and products. Set up a futuring unit to prepare trend monitoring and scanning, trend analysis, build forecasting models, and prepare narrations on the future of the external business environment for the entire company. Set up a program whereby employees have opportunities to participate in visioning exercises, especially when the topic question involves visioning at their own operational levels. Use the products of futuring as a frame of reference for visioning exercises. Develop a vision for the company based upon wide participation and using both futuring and visioning. Consistently articulate the vision for both external and internal audiences.

The article provides guidance about the process of learning about the future so that organizations can routinely integrate futuring and visioning into a vision statement and strategic plans

The implications of Africa’s growth and urbanisation are the subject of much interest and speculation, and are central to the vision of the African Union’s Agenda 2063. The purpose of this paper is to compare the dominant perspectives on urban futures in Africa to emerging directions in futures and urban thinking, suggesting alternative policy approaches for Africa’s urban agenda.

The paper scans and sorts through how Africa’s growth and urbanisation are being understood and framed by various futurists and other futures-commentators. It takes the form of a discussion of the issue of how, why and by whom a series of data points, trends and their implications are being computed and combined, and with what validity, so to inform policy and planning responses.

The paper argues from its findings that futuring about urban Africa has been intense, but not particularly objective, neutral or even empirically grounded. Emerging directions in anticipation theorisation and experimental approaches such as “urban tinkering” are proposed as possibly offering alternative approaches to how nations and policymakers might think and act on urban Africa’s futures.

This original interrogation of which and how actors anticipate Africa’s urban futures could be used to expand beyond the urban visions, assumptions and futuring conventions reflected in Africa’s Agenda 2063, as well as processes advancing the global sustainable development goals and UNHabitat’s new urban agenda.

The author, a veteran futurist, aims to trace the history of the scenario process, starting with those developed by the Shell team that anticipated an OPEC manipulation of oil supplies and prices that occurred in 1973. Largely on the basis of the Shell scenario's brilliant insight, the methodology initially seemed to offer organizations a chance to bet on the future before it happened.

The paper describes how the best practices in the scenario process identified in this historical review can be adopted by current leaders.

The paper reveals that, in cases where the scenarios have effectively influenced corporate decision making, it was because the scenario team stayed together to execute the foresights they reached in the scenario process.”

Scenarios encourage strategic thinking about long‐term futures and potential discontinuities in a world that obsesses about the short‐term.

The paper concludes that scenarios, to be most effective, demand a rigor that consumes time and resources. They require leaders to open conduits to information, promote group interactions, encourage disciplined imagination and demand persistent follow‐through.

The Food Systems Leadership Institute (FSLI) is a 2-year leadership development program consisting of 3 intensive in-person immersion retreats, and a robust and customizable distance-based program. Participants come primarily from land-grant and public universities and learn about personal, organizational and system leadership with a focus on food systems as an organizing theme. For this study, program graduates from FSLI Cohorts 4-6 (n=60) were asked to complete an online retrospective pre- and post-test of skill competency and skill use for 20 competencies addressed in the program, with 47 (78%) completing the survey. Data indicate participants’ ratings of skill competency increased significantly across all 20 targeted areas.Participants further noted that they used these skills more after completing the program as compared to prior to the Fellowship training. Data suggest the FSLI model of leadership development can have a significant impact on participants’ perceived skill level in and use of important skills in both personal and organizational leadership in academic and food system settings.

The purpose of this paper is to propose that conceptions of time and future that are currently in use restrict the possibilities for framing decision making. By privileging the notion of present moment over that of linear time, a more comprehensive framing of what it means to consider what influences our judgements. The ontology of the present moment provides a theoretical context for knowing what we can of the future in a more comprehensive way.

A review of ways of knowing the future that extends beyond linear assumptions of time leads to consideration of anticipatory systems and of the relationship between purpose and causality. It leads further into conjecture that the present moment is more ontologically fundamental than what we customarily refer to as past, present and future.

On this foundation, examination of experience of now reveals a multidimensionality which can include retrocausality, the possibility of the future influencing the present and the importance of latent patterning in determining events.

The notion of the present moment has much in common with second order cybernetics and indicates a possible way of bringing systems thinking, especially boundary critique, to futures thinking and strategic decision making.

Although basically a theoretical paper, the framework does suggest possibilities for redesigning futures practice through using the present moment as a meta‐framing critique technique to reveal more clearly underlying assumptions in both futures studies and systems thinking.

In the context of a world where serious inability to see what is coming is pervasive in management and governance, a fresh look at fundamental assumptions may reveal flawed decision thinking and indicate ways of improvement.

The purpose of the study is to investigate the role of the strategy tripod premises, mediated by future foresight and its effect on merger effectiveness in the higher education industry.

A quantitative survey method was implemented, with the data provided by senior managers of 14 universities that went through a merger from the years 2013–2016. The proposed model was tested using partial least squares (PLS) of structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results indicate that government support, competitive intensity and knowledge creation capability relate positivity to merger effectiveness, and these relationships are mediated by future foresight competence.

The study provides a better understanding of merger effectiveness in the higher education industry by identifying the role of future foresight competence in the application of strategy tripod and its contribution on merger effectiveness. Results indicate that future foresight competence contributes to the merger effectiveness and enables the effective implementation of the strategy tripod dimensions in higher education mergers.

The purpose of this paper is to develop queer futuring strategies that take into consideration adult learners’ needs in support of transformational and sustainable change for social justice and equity.

This paper develops the construct of queer futuring, which engages queer theory perspectives in a critical futures framework. Adult learning theory informs queer futuring strategies to support adults and inform education to sustain transformational changes for social justice and equity.

With social justice in mind, queer futuring opens spaces and supports opportunities for adults to engage in learning activities that address historical and layered forms of oppression. Building on learning needs of adults to create meaning and make a difference in the world around them, queer futuring strategies provide tools for activism, advocacy and building new relationships and ways of being-with.

The sustainability of our current system of growth and financial well-being has already been called into question, and the current pandemic provides tangible evidence of values for contribution, connection and concern for others, even in the midst of political strife and conspiracy theories. These shifting values and values conflict of society point to the questions of equity and narrative inclusivity, challenging and disrupting dominant paradigms and structures that have perpetuated power and authority “over” rather than social participation “with” and harmony. Queer futuring is just the beginning of a bigger conversation about transforming society.

Queering spaces from the perspective of queer futuring keeps the adult learner and queering processes in mind with an emphasis on affiliation and belonging, identity and resistance and politics and change.

The authors suggest queer futuring makes room for opening spaces of creativity and insight as traditional and reified rationality is problematized, further supporting development of emergentist relationships with the future as spaces of possibility and innovation.

Queer futuring connects ethical and pragmatic approaches to futuring for creating the kinds of futures needed to decolonize, delegitimize and disrupt hegemonic and categorical thinking and social structures. It builds on queer theory’s critical perspective, engaging critical futures strategies with adult learners at the forefront.