Space For All Our Stuff
Foresight is all about the present. Sounds paradoxical, but I firmly believe it. Let me explain.
What started me on this train of thought is a passage in The Screwtape Letters, 20th century scholar C. S. Lewis’ droll version of advice offered to a junior devil by his more experienced uncle Screwtape. In one of his letters Screwtape points out:
To be sure, the Enemy [God] wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present.
Admittedly I’ve extracted this from the middle of some spiritual points Lewis is making. But whether or not you are interested in those points, Lewis is fundamentally right about one thing. While we may invest a great deal of effort in anticipating the future, our only opportunity to act is in the present. In fact, thinking about the future in a way that leads to endless recreational speculation, or to “paralysis by analysis,” or to crippling fear is counterproductive because it prevents us from taking action. We think about the future in order to decide what we should do today.
At Foresight Alliance that truth guides us in several ways:
- We diligently explore and report the implications of the trends, scenarios, and driving forces we identify.
- We apply foresight to innovation, anticipating the future to identify present opportunities.
- We apply foresight to strategic planning, anticipating the future to guide present decisions.
In the end, foresight is all about the present.
Image: Next TwentyEight (Flickr)
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