Foresight’s FOUR Frames

• Main Author: David Harries
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Risk Institute, Trieste- Geneva 2017-10-01
• Series: Cadmus
• Online Access: http://cadmusjournal.org/article/volume-3/issue-3/foresights-four-frames

Strategic Foresight is usually understood to be a process for exploring possible and plausible futures, or an ability to better anticipate and prepare for what those futures may hold. This perspective may reflect the majority of foresight practice, but, intellectually and in terms of potential value, it is incomplete and unnecessarily constrains the scope and clarity of insights Foresight could provide. The article argues for Foresight to be deployed on the full context of the selected theme; on the dynamically evolving set of factors of four frames. The frames are the past, the present, the future, and the commitment those contributing to the Foresight bring to the exercise. Each of the four frames is influenced, more or less depending on the theme and the timing, by the state of one or more of the other three. A Foresight exercise that omits consideration of even only one frame weakens its output and may, in times of unexpected or extreme disruption for the theme being explored, render the output unusable without major adjustment.