While policy researchers would prefer an investigation into the future that was more shortterm,
immediately beneficial to the organization, and framed within the language of the
organization, by and large, futures research is often less concerned with predicting the future
than with attempting to envision novel ways of organising how decisions are reached and who is
eligible to participate in these decisions. It does this by asking participants to envision their
ideal organisational world and then it aids in creating strategies to realise that world.
Moreover, from a critical view, to suggest that policy futures statements must be clear to the
policymaker is at some level just banal. Institutions create obscure language because that
language serves particular interests. It is the analysis of those interests (and the mechanisms
they employ to seek and maintain power) that becomes the vehicle for investigating what
images of the future are possible and which are likely to become reality. In this sense, how to
make better policy or more future-oriented policy without investigating the political interests of
certain policies is equally banal. Organizations stay focused in the present as bureaucrats and
others are served by the current structure. Attempts to create new futures can undermine
present power structures. Administrators agree to consider the future only to gain new political
alliances or to achieve modernity (gain funding or prestige) but rarely to make structural or
consciousness changes.