A PDF copy of this rationale is available at the bottom of this page.

Foresight Isn’t What It Used To Be!

Rationale for the Focus and Design of the

2nd Canadian Conference on Strategic Foresight

Background

• Futures research was born into the post-WWII world of the late 1940s and early 1950s. It blossomed in Canada in the 1970s. The Canadian Association for Futures Studies was formed in 1976. Ruben Nelson was one of the founders and its third president.
• The world of the mid-20th Century has changed beyond recognition. However, too much of the practice of future-thinking still reflects its origins and has not kept pace with new epistemologies, knowledge and techniques.
• Happily, especially in the last decade, serious futures work has begun to change in several profound ways.
  • Newtonian models have been augments by living systems and complexity.
  • Piece-meal approaches have been augmented by systems and integral views.
  • A static sense of reality has been replaced by a dynamic and evolving sense.
  • Superficiality (a focus on surface features) has been augmented by a new sense of the
  • depths of reality.
  • A fixation on linear rates of change has been augmented by non-linear change.
  • Impersonal objectivity has been augmented by reliable personal knowing.
  • Futures Research 1.0 is evolving into Strategic Foresight 2.0.
• If Canadians are to among the best, we need opportunities to learn the emerging practices of Foresight  2.0 – strategic foresight that is fit for the 21st Century.
• As one of its inventors, Foresight Canada is committed to nurturing the practice of strategic foresight 2.0 at a high professional level.

Focus

The focus this year is the deep human work of making sense of our world and our future and doing so reliably. Every speaker, panel and Table Group task is designed to nurture our understanding of high-quality foresight work and develop our capacity to undertake it.

Design

These events have a high ratio of time for digestion compared to time for listening. They also have a lot of time devoted to informal networking and processing what you are learning.

Please Join Us!