
Most people associate Foresight with Scenario Planning. South Africa has a long history of developing high quality scenarios, just think about the High Road-Low Road scenarios (1980s), Mont Fleur scenarios (1992), Dinokeng (2009) and most recently the Indlulamithi scenarios (2018).
Scenarios is however just the “anchor” of a much more extensive and participatory process that should be tailor-made depending of the reason for doing foresight.
In general, Foresight can be used for different purposes:
Strategic Foresight
Participatory Foresight
Revolutionary Foresight
Transformative Foresight
Leading up to crafting a scenario, and dealing with the “so what” after a scenario has been developed, a large and extensive toolbox can be opened. On this page we will reflect on the practical application of these. We will discuss horizon scanning, causal and trend analysis, wind tunneling, Delphi, wild cards such as black swans, and many more.
So regularly come back to this page for a jargon-free (we will try our best) discussion of each.