Strategic Futures International's experience suggests that few organizations concerned with bringing useful information about the future into the strategic management process have articulated the philosophy that governs how they address the future. There's a good deal on why and when and by whom--and much of this is beyond dispute. The harder part today is defining the underlying what. This is not a question of methods. It is a question of one's stance on what should be done. How should futures-related problems on the most senior policy levels be addressed? What should be sought?

Every attempt to answer this question counts, since the results clearly separate one school of thought from another in futures research. As indicated at SFI's Home Page and explained at length in the Futures Seminar, SFI believes that applied futures research is only one of the elements of the strategic futures approach, but it is at the core. In that context, and in ordinary English, SFI offers its own one-page answer, which still appears to be unique:

At SFI, applied futures research is viewed as a research strategy . . .

. . . that seeks to provide decisionmakers with sound policy options

. . . by carefully describing and evaluating important alternative images of the future

. . .all of them rigorously derived from a well-developed image of the "most likely" future

. . .which is itself constructed through nine activities, undertaken simultaneously:

1. Adopting and maintaining the appropriate strategic time horizon.

2. Defining and forecasting the future robustly:

Crossing disciplinary and functional lines.

Looking closely at possible developments in all three relevant domains: the internal environment, the competitive environment, and the macro-environment.

Integrating objective and subjective considerations.

Attending to hierarchical relationships, logical as well as empirical.

Exploiting relevant historical data and information.

3. Accounting systematically for causal relationships among forecasted developments.

4. Dealing explicitly with risk and uncertainty.

5. Melding exploratory and normative perspectives.

6. Letting the problem determine the choice of research techniques, not vice versa.

7. Always focusing on policy issues, including potential impacts of developments on each stakeholder.

8. Constantly questioning basics, especially the assumptions underlying the question as given, the data put forward to support these assumptions, and the forecasts to which these data are believed to lead.

9. Emphasizing process as much as product.

. . . recognizing that:


All forecasted futures will be imperfect.

Group judgments, properly obtained and synthesized, will almost always be more useful than the judgment of a solitary individual when constructing futures and evaluating policy options under this strategy.

Bias is unavoidable, but it can and should be made explicit.

The only reasonable criteria for evaluating the results are, in the end, soft.

Creativity matters greatly.

It takes more than a few minutes to explain fully this characterization of applied futures research, because the specifics have profound implications for applications of the strategic futures approach. Nevertheless, on its level, this brief statement expresses SFI's philosophy. Comments and queries are invited.

SFI's Home Page Comments & Queries

Strategic Futures International
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