 Foresight Definitions and Frameworks - Global List Frameworks are definitions, learning models, and lists of knowledge, methods and skills that various educators, researchers, and practitioners consider important to foresight education and practice. This page includes:
The key elements of any knowledge domain, including strategic foresight, can be grouped into four categories:
The last three of these, theory, methods, and knowledge, can be grouped together into disciplines or specialties. Our terminology becomes community-validated when we can find our way to shared frameworks, which doesn't happen easily, particularly in newly formed, complex, and politically-sensitive domains like foresight. Section A below gives a few Foresight definitions. This is a starter list. Section B below features Foresight Education Frameworks (learning models) for methods and theory which are taught in various organizational, undergraduate, graduate, MS and PhD educational programs in foresight/futures studies around the world today. Each can be considered competing yet complementary ways to educate foresight students. Section C below gives examples of the more numerous Foresight Practice Frameworks (skills and procedures), a collection of formal ways people and organizations practice foresight on a particular topic. Pick the framework that works best for you, whether in education or practice. It's best to hold each one lightly in your studies and in your work, as each has its strengths and limitations. Frameworks are listed in alpha order by their generic name, if known, or otherwise by the name of the institution that uses them. A. Foresight Definitions Below are some useful definitions of Foresight. This is a starter list. Futures Studies (Wikipedia) Futurist (ASF) Strategic Foresight (Wikipedia) Primary and Secondary Foresight (FERN) Acceleration Studies Foundation Framework ASF's definition of primary, secondary, and domain-specific foresight specialties (methods and theories). ASF proposes that Masters and PhD foresight programs should strive to provide basic literacy and proficiency in all the primary specialties (the core curriculum of professional foresight), and basic familiarity with the secondary specialties (many of which can be taken as graduate degrees in other departments). Electives and thesis topics should be possible in primary, secondary, and other foresight specialties.
Acceleration Studies Foundation - 3P's/Evo Devo Foresight Framework (for the Specialties Above) These three foresight specialties (primary, secondary, and other) can also be classified as three fundamental foresight perspectives, using Roy Amara's 3P's foresight framework. This perspective-driven framework groups specialties into whether they explore Possible futures (what could happen), Preferable futures (what we want) and Probable futures (what seems most likely, in spite of our personal preferences) futures. The 3P's framework can alternatively be called an Evo Devo foresight framework, as it divides foresight into "Evolutionary" (possible), "Developmental" (probable), and "Evo Devo" (preferable) futures. ASF classifies acceleration studies (systems of change that go measurably faster every year, such as IT productivity, information growth, nanotech performance in various domains) as a subset of development studies (probable, directional environmental change). Below are some additional terms that can be loosely associated with Amara's three basic foresight perspectives: Possible Futures (evolution, innovation, experimentation, creativity, art, belief) Preferable Futures (evo devo, management, values, laws, agendas, consensus, practice) Probable Futures (development (of the predictable), sustainability (of projected system needs), discovery (of system rules), science)
Primary and Secondary Foresight Specialties (Listed by 3P's Category)
ASF's specialties framework is roughly balanced across Amara's three fundamental foresight perspectives, with a slight emphasis on preferred (also called normative) futures. Acceleration Studies Foundation- Integral Foresight Skills Framework (for the Specialties Above) ASF's primary and secondary foresight specialties can also be categorized into four fundamental foresight skills(creating/innovating, discovering/predicting, planning/negotiating, or benefiting from/measuring progress toward the future). Depending on context, each particular specialty (e.g., Roadmapping, Systems Thinking) may be viewed as being employed in service to one, two, three, or all four of these fundamental foresight skills. The philosopher Ken Wilber (A Brief History of Everything) proposes the following Integral/Four Quadrant Framework as a way to categorize fundamental complementary processes of human cognition and change. Using this integral framework, we can propose four fundamental foresight skills, represented as follows. ASF's four integral foresight skills were constructed by starting with the Wilber framework and extrapolating these to the foresight domain. One implication is that learning to use all four of these foresight skills will make you a well-balanced futurist. Neglect to learn any one of these you may have an incomplete and underdeveloped foresight model and skillset. All four seem necessary if one is to be a "whole" or "integral" futurist, with broad social and process effectiveness. For example, many self-proclaimed futurists lack an adequate knowledge of science and systems, and may even state, both confidently and ignorantly, that "the future cannot be predicted." That is hogwash, a blanket statement that ignores many classes of predictive dynamics. Aside from physics, chemistry, and biology, we know that even many aspects of our sociocultural future are statistically predictable (eg., accelerating technological change, transparency, democratization, civil rights advance, etc.). Science and history reveal extensive pattern and predictability in the human domain, as long as we approach predictability from a statistical or probabilistic framework. As forecasting and actuarial work have long shown, many well-established and/or well-understood trends and cycles allow deep insights into complex aspects of society. Among other less-than-integral foresight professionals are some who love to create/imagine and even plan, but whonever engage in social or quantitative attempts to measure the benefit(or the lack thereof) of their creations and plans. Merging these two frameworks, we can classify the four integral foresight skills from an Evo Devo Foresight perspective by regrouping them into Evolutionary, Developmental, and Evo Devo categories. Creating/Innovating may thus be tentatively defined as most essentially an evolutionary process, discovering/predicting as most essentially a developmental process, and planning/negotiating and benefiting/measuring are both evo devo (adaptation, intersection) processes. Consider how creating/innovating the future (an innovative, intrinsically unpredictable process) is fundamentally different from discovering universal constraints, such as scientific laws, suspected laws, and regularities that in turn let you reliably predict certain special subsets of future dynamics, but only in a probabilistic sense. By contrast, Planning/Negotiating for and Quantitatively Benefiting from/Measuring Progress towardtoward the future are particularly adaptive and practical skills, seeming to involve both creating/innovating and discovering/predicting, in relation to human problems, goals and values. Corvinus University of Budapest - Foresight Education Framework To be acquired. CNAM / Lab for Investigations in Prospective Strategy and Organizational Research (LIPSOR) - Foresight Education Framework To be acquired. European Joint (U Malta, U Potsdam, Teeside U, Turku Sch. of Econ) - Foresight Education Framework To be acquired. Fo Guang University / Graduate Institute of Futures Studies -Foresight Education Framework To be acquired. To be acquired. Regent University - Foresight Education Framework  The Master of Arts in Strategic Foresight (MSF) at Regent University, an interdenominational Christian university, is under its School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship. The MSF empowers mid-career leaders, average age 40 years old, to help their organizations adapt to changing industries and global environments. Offered online, the program prepares graduates to serve as professional futurists, strategy consultants, research analysts, creativity trainers, entrepreneurs or managers of innovation. Dr. Jay Gary is the program director, teaching there since 2003. The MSF is one of five degrees at the School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship, many which carry their own foresight emphasis.There are five primary learning objectives for Regent MSF students: 1. Develop leadership skills that help organizations navigate the challenges of chaos, complexity and globalization. 2. Demonstrate an openness to change, growth and development of your life, spanning moral, emotional, spiritual, intellectual and ego growth, across the post-conventional spectrum of adult development. 3. Develop the foresight knowledge and skills to help strategic leadership teams in decision making, planning and forecasting, as well as communication, facilitation, group process, and teamwork. 4. Develop a specialization as a professional futurist built on prior work experience that brings value to an industry or service sector. 5. Integrate one's faith into one's learning through research, writing and speaking. There are eleven primary learning outcomes for Regent MSF students, achieved through service to your own or client organizations: 1. Employ key concepts and paradigms of organizational leadership and futures studies as mid-career professionals. 2. Document new and emerging trends relevant to your organization, and explore the nature of these driving forces, in terms of system dynamics, social change or alternative images of the future. 3. Create an environmental scanning system, enabling an organization's strategic leaders to track patterns of change across trends, events and issues. 4. Create system thinking models that map problems which organizations face in their internal and external environments. 5. Create a baseline forecast of trends for an organization which contains alternative futures, uncertainties, and wildcards relating to their competitive advantage. 6. Lead a departmental team to develop a strategic plan, which includes mission, vision, and goals, appropriately matched to the near-term competitive, customer and industry environment. 7. Lead a scenario learning process for a leadership team that tests team strategy against a range of possible futures. 8. Forecast the economic, workforce and community development needs of a city, one or two decades out and match these with emerging technologies and social innovations. 9. Evaluate the impact of a policy intervention in the context of national or regional change amidst 21st century driving forces. 10. Present one's ideas, concepts, and best practices in appropriate media such as, but not limited to popular press articles, lectures, and conferences. 11. Create and maintain a comprehensive portfolio of your work as a foresight professional for career advancement. Regent also offers a Doctor of Strategic Leadership with a third year foresight track for those who want to build and lead transformative organizations. Regent’s doctoral approach to strategic foresight is built on a unique framework of 1) leadership theory, 2) organizational sciences and 3) strategic management practices. Scholarship is balanced by additional work in: 4) personal development, 5) critical theory, and 6) post-conventional Christian spirituality. Each year approximately 100 students at Regent take a variety of foresight courses, ranging from the MBA to the PhD. Twenty three students are presently enrolled in the MSF. [As of: 5/25/2008] Swinburne University of Technology - Foresight Education Framework To be acquired. Tamkang University / Graduate Institute of Futures Studies - Foresight Education Framework To be acquired. Turku School of Economics /Finland Futures Research Centre - Foresight Education Framework To be acquired. U of Hawaii - Foresight Education Framework To be acquired. U of Houston - Foresight Education Framework Below are the twenty-three primary learning objectives (classified as skills, knowledge, and products) for the MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston, in the College of Technology, under Dr. Peter Bishop who has taught FS at U. Houston since 1982. Started in 1975, U. Houston's program is the oldest in the world and has graduated hundreds of students. Houston's program is focused primarily on the training of foresight professionals for the business environment, but has attracted some nonprofit, institutional, government, military and academic futurists.
University of Stellenbosch - Foresight Education Framework To be acquired. WFS Futures Education Section-Foresight Education Framework (Introductory College Course) The Educational Standards Working Group (ESWG) of the WFS FES seeks to create "a fundamental framework for all Futuring courses offered by institutions of higher education." Below is a provisional framework for an introductory college course in futures studies. They prefer the term 'futuring,' as opposed to foresight, after the book by the same name, Futuring: The Exploration of the Future, 2005 by Ed Cornish, founder of the World Future Society.
This seems a good introductory framework for the freshman/sophomore level. The ESWG is surveying futures professionals for their feedback and alternative suggestions. Additional Foresight Education Frameworks Please list additional education frameworks here, or link to them in comments at the bottom of this page. Thank you! C. Foresight Practice Frameworks (skills and procedures) Listed alpha by Developing Institution (or by Framework Title if not specific to any institution). Acceleration Studies Foundation - Roadmapping Framework This twenty-one category research framework was used for a year long research project, ASF's Metaverse Roadmap survey of the future of the 3D web. It is an adaptation of Peter Bishop's (U Houston) Forecasting Framework model. I. INDUSTRY CONDITIONS Association of Professional Futurists - Foresight Practice Frameworks ForesightPlanning.eu Foresight Planning for Business Development (Greater Stavanger Economic Development, Stavanger, Norway) A model of foresight as the intersection of 1) futures studies, 2) strategic planning, and 3) policy analysis. Marshall McLuhan - Tetrad System for Technology Analysis Please list additional practice frameworks here. McLuhan analyzed technology's impact on society using four questions: What does any artifact enlarge or enhance? What does it erode or obsolesce? What does it retrieve that had been earlier obsolesced? What does it reverse or flip into when pushed to the limits of its potential?He considered these a holistic, integral system for understanding past, present, and future impacts. For more see this web outline, with past, present, and future analysis examples, or any of his books. SRI International - Structured Evidential Argumentation System (SEAS) SEAS is a software tool developed by SRI International for intelligence analysts that records analytic reasoning and methods which supports collaborative analysis across contemporary and historical situations, and has broad applicability for foresight beyond intelligence analysis. STEEP and STEEPCOP Foresight Practice Frameworks STEEP is a generic foresight framework developed for environmental scanning purposes, as a minimal taxonomy of categories in which to place environmental "scan hits" collected in futures research. It has been used by the foresight community at least since the 1960's (see Handbook of Futures Research, Jib Fowles and Robert B. Fowles (eds.), 1978). It stands for: Society Technology Environment Economics Politics STEEPCOP is a more comprehensive foresight practice framework, used in ASF's introductory foresight development courses for environmental scanning and knowledge base development. It stands for: Science Technology Environment Economics (and Finance and Capitalism - National and Global) Politics Social Big -Cutural (and Rights, Ethics/Behavior, Media, Education, Religion, etc.) Social Medium -Organizational (Entrepreneurship, Innovation, IP, Management, Org. Dev., etc.) Social Small -Personal (Relationships, Family, Leadership, Personal Development, Personal Health, Career, etc.) In STEEPCOP, Science is separated out and placed first, as basic science research is the most fundamental driver and enabler of Technology. Science is clearly a different animal from Technology (applied knowledge). Finally, certain domains of the sciences (information and computer sciences, neuroscience, nanotechnology) are among the most powerful and accelerative (fastest changing) areas of human inquiry. The COP framework splits the otherwise large social domain into cultural, organizational, and individual levels of knowledge collection and analysis. Note also that Economics (and Finance and Capitalism) are national or international level systems and knowledge domains, which can be usefully differentiated from Social Medium - Organizational level systems and issues (Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Development, etc.). Technology Futures Inc. "Five Views" Foresight Practice Framework  Analytical, survey, and alternative futures theory and methods. Nice detail. U of Houston - Management Foresight Practice Framework: Peter Bishop of U. Houston proposes that good organizational management involves at least the following six competency stages: Foresight > Forecasting > Planning > R&D > Operations > Evaluation In most companies, planning (initial and periodic business plans, strategic plans, operational plans), and R&Dare the typical ways managers think about and orient their operations toward the future. But as this framework shows, there are two entire stages (practices or departments) that should exist ahead of planning (foresight and forecasting) in any significant organization, and one after operations (evaluation, which cycles back to improve all the prior stages) which must be mastered by the effective management team. In addition to good planning, R&D, and operations, managers need to build a forecasting competency to feed valuable quantitative and qualitative projections to the planning group, and a foresight competency which does environmental scanning, scenarios, expert surveys, and other futures work to improve qualitative and quantitative forecasts and achieve more robust and practical plans. Finally, all of these competencies need to be continually evaluated and improved in the competitive environment. U of Houston - Foresight Forecasting Framework (Add Bishop's Forecasting Framework here) Additional Foresight Practice Frameworks | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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