Last year I contributed to the development of the Strategic Foresight Analysis 2023 (SFA23), undertaken by the Strategic Foresight Branch of NATO’s Allied Command Transformation. This was a more-than-year-long effort combining the expertise of some 800 workshop participants, together with the experience of around 20 or so members of a core reference team who got to see, comment upon, and make suggestions for inclusion into, earlier draft versions of the Report (see page 98 of the SFA23 to see their names). It was amazing to see the document take shape over that time.
Part of this development process included a symposium in Washington DC in June 2023 where intelligence analysts and foresight analysts came together to share insights and tradecraft. As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog (and 23 years ago in my first formally published academic foresight paper), intelligence analysts and futures analysts are engaged in basically the same activity. For much of that time I’ve considered them to be cousins. More recently, I upgraded that to siblings, but — after the Washington Symposium — I now regard intelligence and futures folks as, basically, fraternal twins. Not identical, mind you, but very, very closely related. At least, that was what it felt like to be hanging around with some of the people who produce the US National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends report, and the UK Ministry of Defence Global Strategic Trends documents. This has re-affirmed my view of “futures intelligence” as a capacity to develop further and more formally, with input from both intelligence folks and futurists.
One of the core dynamics discussed in the SFA23 is The International Order in Transition. Now that is a topic that one could easily spend a great deal of time researching and thinking about…
The Voroscope 