Whereas forecast is an attempt to answer the question "what will happen tomorrow?" foresight practitioners help organizations find an answer to another question: "What future would we like to have?". The future is not predictable, but it is creatable. The purpose of a foresight game, thus, is not to guess or calculate the future but to imagine the world in which team members would like to live, or the world they would like to avoid.
- Both forecasters and foresight experts use today's facts to think about the future. But forecasters rather use firm facts and evidence, whereas futurists pay much attention to emerging issues.
- Forecasters may look into the future for one year or even for one quarter. However, foresight experts rarely opt for less than a ten-year horizon.
- The best KPI for a forecaster is accuracy. If a forecast comes true, the forecaster is a hero. The primary objective of a foresight project is to unleash a team's creativity by stimulating their imagination. Futurists don't aim to build an accurate picture of the future (which is impossible); they work with plausible scenarios of the possible future.
Both forecasts and foresight are used for strategic planning purposes. But we use them for different kinds of reasoning:
Forecast:
"What do we know about today, and how
will it change our world tomorrow? How can we use this knowledge for long-term planning?"
Foresight: "What do we know about tomorrow, and how
may it change our world tomorrow? Would we like to speed up these changes or slow them down? What can we do to create a world we would like to live in based on weak signals of change we can observe today?"
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