FUTURES ANALYSTS NETWORK NEWSETTER

NOVEMBER 2007

Introduction

The November 2007 meeting of the FAN Club was organised around the theme Where next for Government Futures?

The purpose of this meeting was to explore how futures thinking in government needs to develop. To help participants consider the issue, the meeting heard from a number of speakers:

• Ian Watmore, Permanent Secretary at the Department for Innovation (DIUS), Universities and Skills spoke about the practical ways in which futures thinking can help leaders in government;
• Karl Cunion, from Foresight, presented the recent developments in the way Foresight approaches projects;
• Andrew Curry from Henley Centre Headlight Vision offered his views on the challenges in using futures thinking to stimulate change;
• Wendy Schultz from Infinite Futures spoke about the cultural clash between evidence based policy making and horizon scanning activity – where the data gathered is often not as robust as other forms of evidence.

FAN Club members also took part in a series of best practice workshops led by practitioners who are using futures thinking to change thinking and policy making in government and beyond and. In the afternoon, they had a chance to describe their vision for future thinking in Government in the future.

Futures thinking for leaders

In his introduction to the event, Ian Watmore explained that futures thinking is an important part of his role as a leader and a manager.

Ian observed that leaders need a combination of intuitive and rational thinking to be successful. People who are only intuitive can have strong successes, but they can also crash and burn; whereas people who are purely rational tend to miss out on great opportunities.

Ian’s view was that the strongest and best leaders are therefore those who try and combine both rational and intuitive approaches. He suggested that futures thinking and horizon scanning are techniques which aim to create that combination, bringing objectivity, rational data and evidence-based thinking with a sense of where leaders intuitively believe the future is going.

Ian then set out 12 examples – the 12 points of practice – where futures thinking can help leaders to achieve this balance:

• Strategy and strategic policymaking
• Contingency planning
• Spotting what’s coming
• Creating competitive advantage
• Shifting paradigms
• Separating the blips from the trend
• Starting the journey
• Facing up to threats
• Expecting the unexpected
• Scaling up innovation
• Preparing to be flexible
• Betting on the future

21st Century Challenges

Karl Cunion from Foresight gave a talk about Foresight’s forward work programme.

Foresight’s aim is to strengthen strategic policy making by embedding a futures approach across Government. The programme provides support for evidence-based policy making, based on science (in its widest context) and a means of thinking about the future that is focussed towards taking policy decisions now. Projects normally look ahead at least ten years, and sometimes as far as 100 years.

To support its aim, Foresight has developed a new set of strategic objectives for the period through to 2011; they are to:

• enhance the communication and impact of project findings across government
• strengthen Foresight’s profile and demonstrate its effectiveness to external stakeholders
• retain and strengthen the basic model for Foresight projects
• further develop the Horizon Scanning Centre

HSC will continue its work carrying out scanning across government with a greater emphasis on evidence and methodologies. There may be fewer projects, less single client Departments and some non-client led projects.

Foresight’s future challenges around working with government are

• working with complex issues that often have no simple solutions
• cross cutting - vertical structure of departments
• breaking through the short term outlook of policy makers
• managing the problems of uncertainty

Futures Perspectives

Andrew Curry from Henley Centre Headlight Vision spoke about the context for futures thinking, the futures cycle and the role of futures in organizational change. Andrew suggested that the pragmatic reason why we do futures thinking is because we want to have agile and responsive organisations which can manage in uncertain environments and are able to identify opportunities and risks early. More profoundly, he suggested that all organizations are now open systems that influence and are influenced by the value shifts taking place in the outside world. In order t survive in this environment, organizations need to be able to constantly scan for and adapt to changes in the external environment.

Andrew went on to describe the futures cycle that organizations use to scan, understand, interpret and implement change. His thesis was that many organizations have a problem closing the cycle and that it breaks most commonly between the scanning and implementation stages.

This creates a real challenge for organisations to develop futures capability that can close the gap and allow the cycle to complete. To do so, organizations need to build

• familiarity with futures concepts and ideas
• a range of futures tools and methods
• futures processes that are embodied in a range of applications
• social capacity for foresight as an emergent property

This last factor is critical and organizations need to develop social processes that allow individuals at the boundary between the internal and external environments to share their observations and knowledge.

Download Andrew’s presentation here. (1,821kb)

The cultural contradictions of scanning in an evidence-based policy environment

Dr Wendy Schultz of Infinite Futures delivered this presentation which drew on both theoretical knowledge - the conceptual foundations of futures research in emerging issues analysis and systems thinking - and practical experience of designing and implementing horizon scanning databases for use in several United Kingdom government agencies.

The cultural contradiction of the title of Wendy’s talk emerges from Government’s need to look responsible and authoritative, not tentative. Consequently, government uses research criteria to establish credibility of the facts and patterns of present observations that are cited as evidence in policy formulation and decision-making (the left hand column in the slide below). A cultural contradiction arises because any emerging issue unusual enough to be useful will probably lack apparent credibility – because it is likely to register on the opposite end of the continua these criteria represent (the right hand column in the slide below).

Wendy went on to describe how to validate scanning data through confirmation (accruing multiple citations), convergence (emerging scientific consensus) or parallax (collecting views from multiple perspectives) and how to overcome the frustrations of scanning (information overload and familiarity breeding boredom).

In the final part of her presentation, Wendy explored ways to add analytical depth to scanning activity through (for example) integral futures, causal layered analysis and spiral dynamics. She finished by observing that

• Excellent scanning generates shockwaves.
• Those shockwaves shake assumptions.
• Shaking assumptions creates turbulence:
  • creativity emerges
  • but controversy emerges as well.
• Is excellent scanning even possible in a policy environment?

Download a copy of Wendy’s presentation here. (1,543kb)

Good practice workshops

Following the presentations, FAN Club members took part in a series of best practice workshops led by practitioners who are using futures thinking to change thinking and policy making across government and beyond. There were 7 workshops:

• Tackling Obesities: Future Choices led by Bryony Butland, Foresight
• Strategic Trends led by Mark Ronald, Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre
• Horizon scanning to protect the future environment led by Malcolm Gorton, Environment Agency
• Wider Implications of Science and Technology (WIST) led by Harry Woodroof, HSC
• Setting up a horizon scanning centre led by Geoff Royston, Department of Health
• Identifying future uncertainties and priorities for environmental research in the UK led by Mary Barkham, Environment Research Funders’ Forum
• Humanitarian Futures Programme led by Rudolph Kent, Kings College, London

The consistent good practice messages coming from these workshops were

• Link futures work to current concerns: futures thinking may be seen by some as a marginal activity. One way to dispel this myth is to take a pragmatic approach to scanning that recognises the short term needs of the organisation as well as the long term needs. Creating some quick wins – where scanning activity provides insights on issues of current concern - is invaluable.
• Inform business planning: focussing effort on ideas that link into the business plan is equally important. There may be merit in using current strategic plans and objectives to structure part of an organisation’s scanning activity.
• Communication is key: scanning can produce some challenging and difficult messages and these need to be communicated carefully, clearly and in an engaging way. Story telling is a powerful tool and it is critical to remember that different audiences probably need to hear messages in different ways.
• Build networks: building networks of futures thinkers can pay dividends – particularly in multiple partner exercises. Networks learn from each other and increase the reach of scanning activity. Where possible, include people on the edge of formal thinking – they have important insights and ideas that need to be captured.

Developing the Sigma and Delta Scans

In the afternoon participants were able to explore the future of the Sigma and Delta scans or to discuss the future of futures thinking in government.

Alun Rhydderch from HSC led the discussion on the Sigma and Delta scans and highlighted a number of key features:

• Delta is science and technology focussed
• Sigma is a “scan of scans” that is a review of over 50 influential future scans to identify map of future. It bounded only by relevance to UK public policy and is structured around STEEP drivers
• There are 146 entries in Sigma and 100 entries in Delta
• The private version of Sigma allows
  • access to papers in private space
  • data manipulation features
  • generation of PDFs of scanned issues
  • feedback
  • links to be added which could be build more of a community

Participants were positive about the scans, citing (in particular) that Sigma is

• a good place to get started in scanning
• a good source of a range of material
• easier to engage with than Google
• evidence and analysis based – a good USP
• an excellent way to get into linked papers and sources
• a helpful source of information about
  • Early indicators
  • Drivers and inhibitors
  • Other government and public projects (like the Netherlands work)

They also offered a number of reflections and comments about ways to develop the scans:

• Horizon Scanning should be continuous and it would be useful if the scan was a more dynamic tool
• We should therefore try to encourage more dynamic use and development through the user spaces.
• Mover variety might be useful.
• Combining Delta and Sigma might be a good idea.

These comments will be fed into the current review of the Scans that HSC is carrying out.

The future of futures thinking in government

In the second group of workshops, FAN Club members discussed the current state of futures thinking in government and described their vision for the future of futures thinking. The discussions focussed around five main questions:

• What works well in government futures?
• What could be better?
• Where would you like futures work in government to be in 5 years time?
• What can FAN Club members do to make that happen?
• What can HSC/GO Science do to make that happen?

Their vision is a future where futures thinking enjoys:

• Better integration across government and its partners
• Easy translation of futures work into policy development
• Wider use to promote cross functional working
• Wider engagement of stakeholders
• Wider use by leaders

Members also identified some intriguing questions for how to achieve their vision:

• Should HSC move away from its concentration on Science and Technology futures?
• What are the effective mechanisms that can be used to share knowledge and data? Who should set them up?
• Should horizon scanning be given a wider public profile?

A full report of the meeting and the discussions from all workshops can be downloaded here. (Adobe Acrobat 397kb)

Next meeting

The next meeting of the FAN club "The role of futures thinking in Government Strategy" will take place on 12 February 2008 at 1 Birdcage Walk. This will be a joint meeting with the Strategy Unit and National School of Government on National Futures - Informing Government Strategy. It will pick up a number of the themes and issues raised during the November meeting and develop them further.