How do we get from foresight to policy? Identifying knowledge gaps.

I’ve allowed myself the dubious luxury of not strictly adhering to academic practice concerning references, since this is not strictly an academic forum. For those who are interested in references much of this is based on the excellent Handbook of Technology Foresight: Concepts and Practice, various works by J. Irvine and B. Martin (written jointly and separately), European Commission/JRC foresight projects, and many of the resources cited in previous postings on this site.

In some previous writings I have tried to make the case that foresight and long-term planning can be a beneficial approach to policymaking in times of rapid technological development (see for ex. here, and here). However, using foresight for social policy is quite a different process than using it for research and development planning, as it was originally intended. Using foresight for social policy planning involves a broader range of stakeholders and is more about shaping, and committing to, social and cultural change. But, for that to work, we need to understand how foresight programs can be made to produce outcomes that are likely to contribute to lasting change. In a lot of what has been written on foresight programs there are unambiguous references to a link between foresight programs and qualitatively different social policies as a primary outcome. Yet, it remains unclear to me how, precisely, foresight programs lead to policy decisions and, consequently, how foresight programs should be coordinated to ensure positive policy outcomes. So what I’ve done, and what I will discuss here, is to map the processes involved in foresight programs and their outcomes to identify potential gaps in our knowledge about them that can affect the ability to produce the types of policy outcomes that are hoped for.

Foresight programs essentially create a system (as in “systems thinking“) that involves traditional policy actors’ agents (i.e. school boards, ministries and other public authorities), organizations with a stake in the issues being addressed (ex. teacher unions/organizations, business leaders, etc.), specific stakeholder groups (ex. parent organizations), subject area experts, foresight professionals/futurists, and the general public. These participants interact in an environment where they engage with inputs such as technology forecasts, social and economic trends, current research and knowledge, and ethical concerns. Within this system, the participants develop shared meaning around the concepts and forces driving change that are relevant to the issues. The system is expected to produce several outcomes, some that are developmental and accumulate continuously throughout the process, and others that are more concrete and are manufactured toward the end of the process. The ultimate aim of the process is to contribute to the development of qualitatively different policies that are based on a long-term perspective and shared vision of a preferred future.

The precise nature of a foresight program depends on the participants involved and the issues to be addressed. However, most foresight programs follow a progressive pattern. This pattern is represented in the diagram below. As will always be the case with diagrams like this, it should be regarded as an idealized representation of the process and not a precise depiction of it. Although I have identified specific stages in the foresight process that can be said to follow each other, the reality is that there will be considerable back-and-forth between these stages as concepts and considerations emerge. Nevertheless, I think this diagram can be useful for visualizing the expected progression through a foresight program.

Foresight programs generally include the follow 4 stages:

1. Input stage: Information regarding the foresight program and the issues to be addressed is imparted to participants.
2. Reflection stage: Participants engage in discourse to arrive at shared meaning of key concepts relating to the issues to be addressed.
3. Construction stage: Participants consider the forces driving change and generate visions of several potential futures, usually referred to as alternative futures.
4. Intelligence stage: Outcomes of the “construction stage” are analyzed and evaluated to arrive at preferred futures, i.e. the futures that particpants want to strive for.

As the foresight program progresses through these stages it produces 3 types of outcomes (this expands on the JRC FOR-LEARN Project’s dichotomous categorization of foresight outcomes by distinguishing between 2 types of non-substantive outcomes (FOR-LEARN authors call these intangible or informal outcomes); those that affect the individual and those that affect groups of individuals):

1. Subjective outcome: Individual participants’ skills and capacity for engaging in long-term and future-oriented policy planning. The subjective outcome is based on a view of foresight programs as training exercises, i.e. they “teach” participating individuals certain things that are relevant to the policy planning process. This outcome is unique to each individual and not necessarily immediately apparent to others, other than that the individuals are inclined to do things somewhat differently than before. These can be readily assessed with commonly used research and evaluation methods and are often the focus of foresight research. This outcome starts to emerge early on in the foresight program and accumulates as the program goes on.

2. Connective outcome: Networks and communities formed during and following the foresight programs. The social outcome involves the formation of enduring channels of communication between program participants. Like the subjective outcomes, these can easily be researched using established methods for network analysis. Like the subjective outcome, this outcome also starts to emerge early on in the foresight program and accumulates as the program goes on.

3. Substantive outcome: This is the collective vision of the future that is intended to shape long-term policy decisions. The substantive outcome can generally be communicated in a medium (ex. documents, audio, video, etc.) that can be passed along to others and it is enduring; it can easily be referred to at any point in time. This outcome is generally constructed towards, or at, the end of the foresight program.

Given that foresight programs are intended to influence policymaking, one would think that the substantive outcome would be the main focus of foresight research but that has not been the case. Foresight researchers have mostly focused on the former two, and there are practical reasons for that. The substantive outcomes are difficult to research because they are deeply rooted in subjective meanings that change over time. For example, many people are skeptical about transhumanist and post-humanist futures because they challenge their conceptualizations of “humanity”. However, a lot of technologies used today (ex. cochlear implants, pacemakers, and prosthetics) probably would have challenged common previous notions of “humanity”, but the meaning of the concept has been altered to accommodate them. Furthermore, substantive outcomes are expected to project anticipated changes over long periods. Research on them would have to take place over a substantial period of time which doesn’t happen very often in social research because of the logistical issues involved and limited funding. Subjective and connective outcomes, on the other hand, can be readily assessed with commonly used research and evaluation methods or network analysis methods and are, therefore, often the focus of foresight research.

This leaves us with a troubling gap in our knowledge base on foresight programs. There is an expectation that foresight programs will result in qualitatively different policies than already exist, and this is expressly worded in most descriptions of foresight programs that I have studied. We have evidence that this happens when foresight has been used for its original purpose, i.e. deciding how to allocate public funding for research. Irvine and Martin provide examples of many important technologies that were funded as a direct result of foresight programs. But, evidence of anything of the sort in regards to social policy is scant at best. Perhaps the closest example that I have encountered would be Finland’s educational policies that originated as a result of deliberate long-term planning throughout the 1970s and to the present. However, I’ve never seen these systematically related to specific foresight programs as such – only that they resulted from “foresightful” policymaking processes.

So, as helpful as foresight programs can be for planning social policy, the big question regarding these programs today is illustrated in the simplified diagram below.

Because our knowledge base regarding foresight programs essentially stops with the program outcomes, we don’t have a clear idea of how to proceed at that stage to produce the types of policies that are hoped for. Indeed, I have read of several foresight programs where the initial ambitions and aims start to fade at that point. In some cases there have been attempts to extend the communicative outcomes with ongoing networking and new committees, but there is no guarantee that those sorts of initiatives will be any more likely to produce the types of policies that are hoped for than the initial foresight program itself.

I think that there are two things that we need to focus on at this point to fill the knowledge gap regarding foresight programs. The first is to clearly define the types of policy outcomes that are hoped for, i.e. address the question, what are the defining characteristics of future-oriented policies? (I’ve started addressing this question here). The second is to determine what we should be trying to observe within the gap space indicated on the graphic above. This becomes a matter of defining a research agenda for studying the outcomes and results of foresight programs. Such a research agenda will greatly benefit the current and ongoing research of the process of conducting foresight programs by orienting them more specifically toward those types of outcomes that will eventually result in new types of policies.

What this new research agenda will look like is material for another article which I plan to post here in the near future. I’ll let suffice for now to say that I think one approach would be to focus on changes in organizational culture (or organizational learning) in response to organizations’ participation in foresight programs. This would build on Fullan’s claim that educational change requires cultural change and on Schön and others’ work on organizational learning and culture.

Edit (9/3/2012): Added links.