Contributor Daegon Lee
Many people have never heard of the words foresight or futures studies, or even if they did, they don’t know exactly what they mean. Webster’s Dictionary defines foresight as ‘an act or the power of foreseeing’ or ‘an act of looking forward’. In other words, foresight means work or action to see the future, and the result.
So some of you may ask, ‘Is foresight predicting the future?’ or ‘Are you a psychic?’ Futurists for foresight are different from fortune tellers for prophecy. Foresight collects information from the past and present and uses it to create multiple future scenarios that are likely to occur through causality, logic, and rational creativity. Foresight differs from prediction, which uses magical powers inaccessible to ordinary people to ‘precise blow’ a single future.
I mentioned earlier that futurists create ‘multiple future scenarios’. Why does foresight create more than one future scenario? Numerous influencing factors work together to shape our future. Let’s take a simple example. If we eat a healthy breakfast, energy will be generated in our body so that we can focus on our studies and work, and as a result, we will be able to receive good work performance or test results, right? However, in the real world, there are a huge variety of influencers, but we do not know when and how each of them will appear. That is why we hypothesize that the factors that are particularly important for shaping the future are identified and that they interact in various ways. Combining these influencing factors and interactions results in a variety of future scenarios. From another point of view, although some futures may be beyond our control, in many cases a new shape of the future is created by our will. If our future isn’t changed or shaped by our efforts, probably all of us will make no effort in life. Some people won’t be happy no matter how hard they try, and some people won’t try to do anything for themselves or the world if they’re going to be happy without doing anything. Therefore, there can be various versions of the future that can unfold before us, and foresight considers all of them.
What is the value of these various versions of the future look? In foresight, each version of the future is called a scenario. And according to each scenario, we think about how we can respond from now on. Specifically, when an unfavorable future scenario is drawn, we ponder what to do to prevent this unwanted future from becoming a reality. And when a really fantastic scenario is drawn, we think about how to make this scenario 100% real or even better. This is one of the most important aids foresight has to offer to the world.
So how are these future scenarios created? Futurists can study the future on any subject imaginable in our lives. However, it is impossible to study the future that encompasses all the future aspects of the world at once. Instead, futurists conduct their research by clearly defining specific topics. There are many ways futurists can shape the future. They research information in the past and present that can be the seeds of the future that we can access. And it estimates what kind of flowers those seeds will bloom in the future. The seed referred to here can be a number that can be used for mathematical statistics, it can be the latest technology that is being studied secretly, or it can be a social issue that has received a lot of attention in the past but is now on the decline. Another way, experts in each field create future scenarios by aggregating their insights or opinions about the future.
Is creating future scenarios something only a professional futurist can do? Absolutely not. Anyone with the ability to gather reliable information and think logically can create future scenarios. Or, it is a meaningful foresight activity that people can do to first decide what we want to be or do in the future, and then decide what to do to make it a reality. In fact, even now, many futurists are trying to make foresight activities easier for many people. For those of you reading this who are interested in the future, please keep your interest in foresight.
