The goal of any strategic foresight investigation is to transform how we have
come to think and know our ideas and images used to define ‘the future’. We
can use our images and ideas to forecast, compete and/or create alternatives.
However it is more important to think about how we can change how we get to
know the future rather than what we do with our dominant ideas and images of
the future. If we can critique and develop a new understanding of how we have
come to know the future we can transform our futures thinking. Transformed
futures thinking can then be used to explore other creative imaginings and ideas
for the future. Bringing our transformative futures thinking results into our
present re-shapes our understanding of the concept called ‘the future’. Interestingly, most of
us think the future is something outside of ourselves, something out there in the distance.
Rather, as Professor Ivana Milojević, articulates:
“The future is not an empty space but like the past an active aspect of the present”
Similarly, how we have come to know and fill our understanding of the past as history, we are
similarly compelled to fill the empty space called the future with our forecasts and predictions,
our ideas and images. This filling the space, we call the future, means we are endeavouring to
create certainty, clarity on our destinations and meaning or purpose for destinations as
visions.