Last week, I was invited to attend and present at the First Allied Foresight Conference, organised by NATO’s Allied Command Transformation in conjunction with the Finnish Ministry of Defence. This follows a very successful Foresight Symposium held in Washington DC around this time last year.
It was a packed program of plenary presentations and panels, with about 215 or so registered participants, as well as several concurrent break-out sessions. There was a lot to see and hear, and it would have been good to have had one of those time-shifting devices that Hermione Granger had in the Harry Potter universe, where she could effectively be in several places at the same time! Alas, in our real universe, it was necessary to only sample each break-out session in part…
We were greeted by the Finnish Minster of Defence, Antti Häkkänen, as well as the Supreme Allied Commander Transformation (SACT), General Philippe Lavigne. There were high-level folks from the Allied countries (and some partner countries, too, which is how I got an invite), as well as experts in various aspects of defence, national security, and international relations. One key take-away for me was the way that Sweden (the most recent member to join the Alliance) does their defence planning using foresight. I snapped a few photos of the process diagram, and will definitely try to get hold of any public domain discussions of it.
My contribution was to provide a countervailing view to the presentation by Andy Hines. He spoke about why we need foresight, whereas I was asked to speak about why foresight fails, to which I added some ideas for how we might mitigate these possible failures. Developing the presentation had me re-visit some ancient work I did back in the noughties about philosophical research paradigms and their influence on how one carries out knowledge work, including futures research. This led to a pretty neat way to consider both the ‘hindrances’ to foresight, as well as what mitigations might be possible.
It also led me to revisit the Viable System Model that Peter Hayward introduced into our course materials, since it was then, and still is, one of the most useful models for how information flows in an organisation. His paper on foresight and the VSM is essentially half of a pair, the other one being my paper on the Generic Foresight Process, which discusses what Peter’s paper identifies as System 4 of the 6 VSM sub-systems. Read them together to get a much clearer sense of how we conceptualised the role of foresight in organisations around 20 years ago. And that perspective still stands the test of time, I would say, having re-looked at it again recently. I may even write up the presentation as a journal article one of these days…
In all, it was a very flying visit, though. I spent almost as much time travelling to and from as I did being at the Conference. Hopefully, as SACT General Lavigne said at the end of the conference during his wrapping-up reflections, a second conference will soon be planned and held, at which point such Allied Foresight Conferences will become a ‘tradition’. I do hope that long may such be the case.
The Voroscope 