“But our paradigms are changing, it has not gone unnoticed. Some people call it a Fourth Industrial Revolution, there are other names for it, but we appear to be in a transformative moment. Where are we prepared for this? Where are we not prepared? What do we need to develop? Who do we need to network with?”-Dr. Amy Zulman Strategic Foresight and Shifting Paradigms via The Convergence
The consideration of a variety and diversity of emerging futures, in many ways, has not and continues to not be a mindset that we currently embrace. We tend to be locked in to the linear, very often to an antiquated map that keeps us marching towards one, often ill-contemplated future. We have a difficult time disrupting that internal model. We tend to perceive the future as something that happens to us, that comes at us haphazardly, rather than approaching it as what we do in the present, the design of the decisions we make now, will having utmost bearing and shape on how those futures eventually evolve and unfold.
Which will require us to replace short-sighted perspectives in favor of embracing the long view…that we may disengage “event” thinking towards accepting the endless journey of “continuous” learning.
It will require a greater sense of awareness, anticipation, and imagination, as well as deeper levels of foresight if we are to effectively begin to equip ourselves with the vision, learning, understandings, and capacities to strategically design our way forward. For, it is with that awareness, anticipation and imagination that we are able to become more introspective and reflective of moving past linear thinking and incrementalism, to being able to consider a diversity of futures emerging. Thereby allowing ourselves the willingness to initiate a variety of scenarios, from probable to possible, that allow us and our organizations to better prepare for what will emerge from a context that is continually contending with growing levels of ambiguity, uncertainty, and the need for constant and ongoing adaptation.
Which means that strategic foresight can no longer appropriately serve us well as “event” planning, but must integrate itself into our organizational thinking and processes. Especially as the deep work within our organizations continues tip the scales from the complicated toward the complex.
As Dr. Zulman shares in the opening quote, it will require many more questions from us and our organizations, and not just veneer questions. But the willingness to ponder, engage and wrestle with deep and difficult questions, without defaulting to the quickest or easiest answer(s). We are in a time when we must willingly lean into our most challenging spaces with an openness to learn and grow. We can no longer use ambiguity and uncertainty of outcomes as an excuse to default to the safety of the known. Rather, we must determine how to allow ourselves as individuals and organizations the space for discovery and experimental learning to drive us through the ambiguity and uncertainty that is littered across those spaces, if we are to move towards better outcomes, towards better futures.
Foresight, when used strategically, prepares us to loosen our etched in mental models and maps that entrench us in linear perceptions of how the world works and how we believe it will continue to work. We have to be willing and open to the provocations that the current levels of ambiguity and uncertainty are asking of us to tolerate, both as individuals and organizations, if we are to begin to navigate these dynamic environments in a much more meaningful, effective and relevant manner. Which will require us to let go of the past, to let go of overlaying those outdated models and maps of how we see the world upon the present, thereby distorting and often hiding new possibilities of what can and will emerge in those future spaces.
- We have to let go of the idea of one future, to recognize emerging possibilities.
- We have to let go of the idea of certainty, to recognize the need for clarity.
- We have to let go of the idea of the future happening to us, toward a willingness to anticipate and design our way forward.
- We have to let go of models and maps that keep us entrenched in the past, for updates that open up new possibilities for the future.
We can no longer think in incremental ways, in a world of exponential change.
We have to be much more open to scanning the horizon to determine what the future is trying to tell us, of how it is looking to inform the present. But it is also in understanding that foresight is not about predicting the future. This is not crystal ball work. Rather, it is about rigorously studying and searching out both the weak and strong signals and determining what those signals are telling us? How those signals can support us in making better decisions in the present?
As Joern Buehring shares in Foresight and Design: New Support for Decision Making,
Foresight will not only open us up to those signals, it will require us to reframe, reset and create new maps and models for the future that is unfolding before us.
As we are seeing, when our mental models our grounded in a historical context of the work we do, of the services and support we provide, and when that context is confronted by the disruptive changes we are facing in the present, we find ourselves and our organizations moving from complicated territory and into deep complexity. From which, we can either choose to hide ourselves in those models and maps of the past, or determine ourselves and our organizations too much needed updates for an exponentially changing world. But sometimes, we choose to close the curtains to these changes, pretending that they don’t exist. Choosing to hide in the familiarity of the past, over the growing uncertainty of the future.
However, Dr. Zulman shares in Strategic Foresight and Shifting Paradigms a historical perspective about the military that is very important to all of our organizations moving forward, and especially education. Dr. Zulman asks this question of the military, “What is the proportion of war-fighting that the military has done as compared to the amount of disaster-relief and other work it has done in the past year?” For which Dr. Zulman adds, the point of the question is that the discourse and the narrative of what the military has historically done, what has been their purpose from the beginning, has that in some ways changed? Is that actually what the military is actually doing most of the time now?
Which means, that if the primary activity of what an organization has historically done is actually changing, does the organization itself realize that change? Do the individuals in the organization realize that change? Or does it push forward unrealized and unrecognized of this shift?
Which is incredibly important for education in this moment, is taking stock of where we are, what we provide, and recognize or realize if we are in the midst of a paradigm-shift? Or better yet, has that paradigm-shift already occurred and we have not recognized how our work has and will continue to change?
Which are questions that educational organizations and educators are going to need to ask of themselves moving forward, if we are to effectively remain relevant as organizations and institutions in support of our students and stakeholders. We are going to have to determine if we are in the midst of or have already undergone a paradigm-shift, and strategically speaking, if so, how can engaging foresight then allow us to determine what the signals of this paradigm-shift is it relaying to us from the future, that we may better prepare our students, parents, stakeholders, educators, educational leaders, and educational organizations for this non-obvious and exponentially changing future we are heading towards?
“The future, rather, is as yet unformed. It is open to our creative imagination, to our ability to innovate and to design new things, not only open to technological innovations but also to the invention of new human character, new ways of life, new social arrangements, and even new cultural values.” –J. Rudkin via Designing Foresight and Foresighting Design: Opportunities for Learning and Collaboration via Scenarios
