I’m responding to some requests to place the ‘diverse positions’ ideas that I woffled on about at the Seminar. Here’s the ‘bones’ of them:
- Futures thinking involves informed rehearsal; it isn’t about prediction. In one sense it isn’t about the future, but about how we get there from where we’ve been.
- In Futures work we pay too much attention to the ‘strong signals’ – because they’re agreed and prioritised we lock on to them and then use them to inform strategy. It’s like the drunk looking under the street lamp for his key because there’s more light there. We should pay more attention to the ‘weak signals’, those ideas in futures thinking that are contentious, muddling, perhaps important but perhaps not – they’re the ones that often emerge as really crucial. We can understand this better if we reverse engineer futures thinking and pick a point in the past and then roll forward, examining what actually proved certain and uncertain, influential and otherwise.
- For individuals, futures thinking is important at a psycholical level for their own wellbeing. We need to be able to do it. Externally there is an issue with ‘ownership’ of futures thinking. The corporate and governmental models seem to ‘do it on behalf of’ and ‘do it to’, as if they have already staked their claim on the future. The State absorbs radical thinking, systematises it and emasculates it. We’ve had a thoughtectomy in futures work.
- Futures work can be like expanding a sensory spectrum – we can learn to pick up and examine signals that we previously didn’t register. There’s a close relationship with intuition and creativity there.
There you go ….

I think one of the questions raised by Simon’s comment is – what counts as a ‘weak signal’? What seems like a blindingly obvious future trajectory for one group may seem a marginal idea for others. To me, this suggests the need for interdisciplinary thinking and participation in diverse interest groups, which is problematic given John Furlong’s call at the end of seminar 1 for a return to the disciplines in education.

Perhaps it is by resurrecting the disciplines, by attempting to make visible the different ‘takes’ on the future that they bring, by attempting to articulate the divergent forms of evidence and insight that they use to inform their models of change, and by bringing these into conflict/contention, that we can make visible to ourselves the extent to which we are all too often just working in the little pools of light cast by our own preconceptions. This links, I think, with Chantal Mouffe’s recent calls for an agonistic democracy – a recognition of difference, a return to debate, and a resistance to simply smoothing over and achieving consensus.

Looking forward to finding out what the ‘rough edges’ are to our assumptions about the future at the second seminar…

When I said ‘weak signal’ I was drawing on the sort of horizon scanning work I have been working on recently, where in gathering the ideas across a fairly large and diverse group of people, we characterised ‘clusters’ of ideas into those where there was high agreement regarding high importance/priority; where there was high agreement regarding low importance/priority; where there was high levels of disagreement regarding importance/priority level; and where there was something more akin to a confusion of views and what was rejection or dismissal rather than low prioritisation of ideas. The point being that in examining each of the ideas that seemed to sit in this last area, it often appeared to be the case that with a little more ‘digging’ that is where the far more interesting stuff was situated – giving rise to questioning why there was such contention or dismissal. Not an absolute proposition in any way, but certainly close, in my view, to what Keri says about Mouffe’s calls.