Foresight is a framework that can be used by organizations as a tool to elaborate a possible vision or visions of the future. Identifying ways to reach the future vision that is more attractive, this framework has been created from the experience and best practices of a group of professional futurologists and is used in all kinds of organizations in the public or private sectors linked in an intrinsic way to the strategic planning process, based on the constant collection of information, the creation of scenarios, and the definition of medium- to long-term visions. It is due to this complexity in their execution that the practice of foresight has generally occurred in organizations of a certain size and is not widespread among entrepreneurs, individuals, or in small teams. To address this area of opportunity the author has structured an agile and compact version of the framework, with the simplified objective of providing its users with a degree of sensitivity toward a reduced set of future options and the author has called it Lean Foresight.
Introduction
Lean Foresight is a simple method to introduce future thinking to individuals, small teams, and entrepreneurs.
When the lights finally came on, something was evident to the disconcerted spectators who had endured until the end of the screening: although it was not very clear to them what they had just seen, it was definitely something new, something they had never seen before.
This was during the first days of April 1968, when the first screenings of Stanley Kubrickās newest movie were shown in the US - 2001: A Space Odysseyā¦. 2001: A Space Odyssey, confronting the moviegoers of the time with a surprising but challenging cinematographic experience. A film that was technically impeccable, with a story that took place in three acts that traced the evolution of human consciousness, from the first hominids millions of years ago, until reaching space travel and the creation of artificial intelligence, displaying at key moments, hidden help of a superior extraterrestrial intelligence.
At the time, the audienceās reaction was ambivalent and radical. In the New York premiere about 250 people left the room, many of those who stayed preferred to talk among each other rather than watch the screening. The actor Rock Hudson not only left in the middle of an exhibition, but he did it while insulting the film. The critics were also not particularly positive with their reviews about the motion picture, calling it boring, disconnected, incomprehensible and pretentious among many other adjectives.
It was not surprising that the frightened MGM executives came to think that the film would be a failure and that they would not even recover the US$10 million invested, a formidable amount for that time; but to their surprise and against all odds, the film became the highest-grossing film of 1968, even winning an Oscar for special effects. Today 2001: A Space Odyssey is considered a masterpiece, which has aged considerably well, recognized with more awards and distinctions than anyone could have imagined in 1968.
In my opinion, 2001: A Space Odyssey is an acquired taste, a work that is unveiled layer by layer with each new visit, always leaving some space for personal interpretations. However, there is a layer, an aspect of the film that I think was fascinating from the first moment for many of the spectators and that is the amazing window that this film offered to the future. Never before had there been a film with such a consistent and meticulous prediction of the future in terms of technology, space travel, computing, and artificial intelligence; there is a huge abyss between Kubrickās vision and that of the science fiction films of the time, full of rubber monsters, silver flying saucers, and bulky robots. While these films are now ridiculous, 2001: A Space Odyssey is still an amazing show that ends up showing a version of the future not far from the one that has developed in the real world.
The key to Kubrickās success in capturing this vision was the intrinsic and sometimes stormy collaboration that he established to create 2001: A Space Odyssey with the writer, inventor, and futurologist, Arthur C. Clarke (1973).
Clarke (1973), considered not only one of the most important science fiction writers but also one of the most outstanding futurologists of the twentieth century, was co-writer of the 2001: A Space Odyssey screenplay and was also responsible in making sure that the scientific and technological aspects of the work stuck to reality, dictating the guidelines of operation and appearance of each technological aspect seen on the screen. If this Kubrick masterpiece is still valid, it is largely due to the prescient vision of the future facilitated by Clarke, which presented a rather credible scenario of what the future would be like in 2001. The scenario is so credible that it often makes us ignore its numerous inaccuracies. On the one hand the scenario shows achievements such as the existence of an international space station in orbit around the Earth that even accepted terrestrial tourists, space shuttles, the realities of space travel such as processed food and toilets in zero gravity, video calls, computers with graphical interfaces, artificial intelligence agents capable of playing chess games, of predicting by simulation equipment failures, of performing face recognition, and of understanding and responding to voice commands using natural language. There is even a moment when Discovery astronauts have breakfast prepared in what could well be a microwave while watching the news on a tablet, predecessor of current iPads.
The mistakes presented in the film are numerous but were mainly due to a very optimistic vision in the 1960s of the degree of technological advance that would bring the space career among the super powers of the time, specifically indicating that at the beginning of the twenty-first century there would be inhabited bases on the moon, that manned space trips would be made to other planets, (in this case, to Jupiter) putting the crew in suspended animation, and that since the 1990s there would be artificial intelligence agents of the caliber of HAL 9000, the computer in charge of operating the Discovery spacecraft. None of these points have been achieved until today, however nothing seems to indicate that they are not feasible in the near future.
Clarke (1973) himself claimed that trying to predict the future is a daunting and even dangerous occupation, in which your predictions invariably end up being considered conservative in one extreme or ridiculed in the other, making it almost impossible to know which of them will end up happening.
The same scheme used by Kubrick to develop the vision of 2001 leaning on the services of a futurologist is used nowadays by all kinds of organizations that seek to have an approximate vision of the future, because to try to foresee the future, even if only by approximation, is a necessary activity, indispensable even for current organizations that seek to operate under visions and premises that remain not only valid but relevant. Dedicating yourself to try to anticipate future events is no longer a charlatan task, being a futurologist is a serious profession in which you work by identifying trends, creating forecasts, developing scenarios, and establishing plans, the main tool of these professional futurologists is the framework known as Foresight.
What is Foresight?
If hindsight is the understanding of something only after it happened or having a vision of the past, and insight is the deep, intimate understanding of something or having inner vision, then foresight is the ability or method to see something that has not happened yet, or to have a vision of the future.
Although the term can be applied in various areas ranging from psychology to urban planning, we will focus exclusively on the foresight of business, sometimes called strategic foresight. We will focus on a method that can be used by organizations as a tool that allows them to elaborate a possible or possible visions of the future, defining ways to reach that vision that is more attractive.
For this purpose, foresight is a systemic structure that allows a future description of a specific subject or object that is desirable to be developed from beginning to end, and that facilitates the development of ways to achieve that vision and deal with the implications of obtaining it. To focus on its practical application, we could also define Foresight as a framework that has been created from the experience and best practices of a group of professional futurologists and is used in all kinds of organizations in the public or private sectors, linked in an intrinsic way to the strategic planning process, based on the constant collection of information, the creation of scenarios, and the definition of medium- to long-term visions. This process is usually carried out by individuals specialized in this practice who collaborate with multidisciplinary teams of the organization. These efforts usually require the creation of organizational structures for their support during extended periods of time. It is due to this complexity in their execution that the practice of foresight has generally occurred in organizations of a certain size and is not widespread among entrepreneurs, individuals, or in small work teams, to address this area of opportunity we have structured an agile and compact version of the framework, which seeks to provide its users with a degree of sensitivity toward a reduced set of future options and we have called it Lean Foresight.
Introducing Lean Foresight
In this chapter we present a compact version of the foresight framework, to be used by individuals or small teams in order to allow them to easily explore a reduced set of future options and their implications in order to define objectives and action plans to follow for their achievement, that is why this version is ideal for entrepreneurs who want to acquire sensitivity about the future possibilities of their area of entrepreneurship.
We will introduce Lean Foresight in the form of a four-step process, that is, we will present a sequential work structure formed by four spaces, four placeholders, which can be filled with different methods, to a greater or lesser degree at the practitionerās choice, however in this chapter we will show only the first basic set of methods.
In this way, Lean Foresight presents an actionable sequence of four actions that take us from the selection of a starting point to the identification of a desired future, and those activities that will be necessary to carry out its achievement.
Lean Foresight is formed by these four stages or sequential spaces:
1. Frame
2. Explore
3. Envision
4. Design
To develop a Lean Foresight project, it is necessary first to have a topic to explore, from which we will seek to identify future implications, which is why Frame is the stage with which the process begins.
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