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IFF is the International Futures Forum: we do engage in thinking about the future. We maintain an active scanning community keeping track of the way the world is changing, and our membership includes proponents and practitioners of different schools of futures thinking, notably scenario planning.
Our approach to thinking about the future is strongly influenced by Pierre Wack, one of the founders of scenario planning. Thus we understand futures thinking as ‘the art of strategic conversation’. And we remember Wack’s insight that thinking about the future is in practice no more than ‘the gentle art of reperceiving the present’. There is more on Pierre Wack and his approach in our report on setting up a foresight capacity for the Scottish Parliament.
Further, we note that different kinds of futures thinking tend to emphasise either agency (our capacity to plot a course into the future) or uncertainty (the myriad circumstances we may have to navigate on the way). A variety of approaches is mapped on to the simple grid below.
IFF’s preference is to emphasise both uncertainty and agency. We accept an operating context of boundless complexity, rapid change and radical interconnectedness. And our approach from the start has been to find ways of taking more effective action in such circumstances. Hence our preference for ‘reflexive’ futures thinking – in which we include ourselves as creative agents, capable of influencing which future emerges around us. This is the domain of practical hope and wise initiative.
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