In today’s complex and turbulent environment, organisations need’foresight’ to be able to respond promptly to various change driversincluding technology, sustainability, globalisation and the economy.Essentially ‘foresight’ is a participative approach to creating sharedlong-term visions to inform short term decision-making processes (see Foresight-Network).

During a recent webinar, DaveSnowden (Cognitive Edge) and Mike Jackson (Shaping Tomorrow)outlined how horizon scanning and social computing can helporganisations plan for the future, protect themselves againstunexpected threats and exploit forthcoming opportunities.

Jackson outlined the following five components of foresight development and managing change:

• ID and Monitor Change: Identify patterns from the stories,fragments of information and behaviours of many participants in asystem or network and decide how those patterns impact business.
• Critique implications: Inform the impact assessment with across-section of information not just intelligence regarding one’s ownindustry. That means monitoring much more change and developing abetter peripheral vision to be able to understand the broaderimplications for the business.
• Imagine difference: Establish the risks and alternatives for different scenarios.
• Envision preferred route forward: Established where you are,then determine where you want to go by scanning plausible, possible andprobable ideas and changes for the future.
• Plan and implement: Identify goals, resources, strategiesand stakeholders required to create change and help them cope with theinherently uncertain future.

The participatory, evolutionary and social nature of ‘foresight’development makes for a snug fit with social computing (i.e the simplermore networked online applications that connect people and allow themto pool their knowledge and interact better with those in theirnetwork). More specifically, social computing enables the content andonline interactions to constantly shift so as to better reflect theknowledge, ideas, opinions, preferences and even aspirations of allcontributors. Not only does this allow us to develop a better radar ofwhat is happening across our network, it also provides us with higherlevel of collaborative intelligence: a range of opportunities andoutputs that could not be created by any number of individuals or smallgroups working alone.

(Interestingly, these are also features of complex adaptive systems(emergent, highly connected and simple on the micro level; complex andunpredictable on the macro level) which evolve through rapid feedbackloops making them highly adaptive to changing conditions.)

Snowden picked up here, talking about complexity theory, thecreation of human sensor networks and the need to manage theevolutionary potential of the present as an alternative to traditionalscenario planning. Referring to his recent blog Think anew, Act anew: Scenario Planning, Snowden cited a wonderful quote from Seneca:

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation,which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have inour power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and sorelinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

This quote emphasises that what matters now is managing the presentby switching from “fail safe design strategies to safe failexperimentation”. That involves the use of small early interventions inthe form of exploratory behaviour, allowing the ones with good resultsto be amplified and the ones that don’t work to be eliminated.

Snowden went on to outlined the three fundamental consequences ofcomplexity theory, which need to be present to mange a complex system,which he covers in great depth along with a critique of horizonscanning and scenario planning, in his post mentioned above.

• Need for distributed cognition. The crux of this isdecentralisation and mass participation. The idea that the few candecide for the many, whether it be drawing up scenarios, selectingtechnology, imposing structures or the like, is inherently unstable.Instead, we need to start to use large numbers of people to feeddecision making processes with current information and diverseperspectives.
• Fragments are key. Material that is used must be finelygranulated. A big problem with traditional scenario planning is that itproduces ‘chunked’ reports. The human brain has evolved to handlefragmented data patterns – pictures, comments, captions, labels, etc.One of the reasons social computing is so successful is that itpresents information in multiple inter-threaded fragments, so that thebrain can ‘conceptually blend’ those and link those fragments todetermine how to move forward. Documents don’t tune in to theevolutionary nature of humans. Fragmented information has evolutionaryadvantage.
• Overcome disintermediation. People making decisions aboutthe future have to have direct contact with raw intelligence. Theycan’t afford to have middle management or processes mediating,summarising or grouping information. The information must come fromtrusted sources and permit interaction with those sources (so theinformation can be validated).

In Part II of this post I will look at some of the implications of this participative evolutionary approach for traditional current awareness, decision-making and information creation and categorisation processes.