The way we frame our thinking highly influences the way we reason. The way we act is consequentially influenced by the way we think and then we give a meaning we define our surroundings based on such framing. The combination of framing and reasoning affect the way we create hypotheses of the future, whether those are considered probable, possible, plausible, and so on.
Today, I'm grateful for the opportunity to welcome Peter Skoblik at the briefing today to talk about long-term anticipatory thinking. Peter is co-founder at Event Horizon Strategies. Welcome, Peter, and thank you for joining me at the briefing today. Thank you so much for having me. Peter, we could agree that the world is becoming more volatile and certain, complex and ambiguous. And to name a few examples that come to mind.
that, you know, could have brought us here is the increasing speed of technological change. the degree of which the society has become interconnected. There are so many variables that define our economy, social and political system. So we got to a point that we're really dealing with complexity and the future is very different. We would be very different from the present. The topic is broad and complex. So where do we start from? Which is the best way?
to share contextual details to ease our listener understanding how can we start defining long-term anticipatory thinking and really highlight the potential of this way of thinking i think that Dealing with the increasing uncertainty that you talked about, as well as the volatility, complexity and ambiguity can be completely overwhelming.
And when people think about the uncertainty of the future and especially the uncertainty of the long term future, the question that you asked immediately comes up. Where do I start? How do I even get my head around the problem? or the problems that we might be facing. What do I do next when I don't know what tomorrow is going to look like, let alone next year, five years, 10 years, whatever. I've actually found a great deal of comfort in a
An old economist, Frank Knight, who famously published a book called Risk, Uncertainty and Profit in 1921. So almost exactly 100 years ago. And it was actually derived, as you know, from his dissertation, which. Puts a little bit of pressure on those of us who have written dissertations. I doubt mine will be in publication 100 years from now. But nevertheless, so I turn back to Knight and the distinctions that he drew.
And risk tonight was a future where we knew what the possible futures were and we could attach what he called scientific or objective probabilities to them. So something like. life insurance or whatever, where you've got enough data that you can say, okay, the probability of a 45-year-old man living to be 70 is X, and you can do that. With uncertainty,
The idea was that you knew what the possible futures were, but you couldn't attach those probabilities. You could only sort of attach subjective probabilities, which is a nice way of saying you could only guess. And then more recently, Richard Zeckhauser, who's a professor at the Kennedy School at Harvard, added another category, ignorance, where we can't even imagine all the possible futures. And so I sort of.
I look at these three categories of things and I see them actually less as categories than lying on a continuum that maybe, you know, would stem from absolute certainty on one end, which we rarely have ever get to, you know, through risk to uncertainty to ignorance. And one way that I find helpful of thinking about the future is that is to ask myself, which of these buckets of things are we actually dealing with?
Because sometimes it may not be quite as daunting as it looks. It may be more of a situation of risk. And sometimes it's completely up in the air and it's a situation of ignorance. And for each of these categories. We have different tools that we can use. So that is a framework that I have found somewhat helpful in getting my head around the unknowability of the future. yeah that's fascinating i actually look into this similar topic for my dissertation and my phd which
It would be incredible if it's going to stay for 100 years as Knight. But Knight is a great person and a lot of expertise and a lot of people are referencing and citing him. Now, thank you so much for introducing a little bit of the topic because it is indeed complex. people are becoming more familiar with uncertainty and the concept of ignorance as we are living today pandemic and different challenges that we might face in the future.
And in one of your articles, you write, the practice of strategic foresight, the rigorous examination of imagined alternative futures to better sense, shape, and adapt to emerging futures. can put boundaries around future uncertainty while enabling better strategy in the present. And back to what you said before, it's very hard also to understand uncertainties and imagine uncertainties and futures. But by putting boundaries on something, we can say that...
such elements are at least defined in their attributes to some extent. So it sounds like there is a gentle balance between the complete uncertainties. and trying to put boundaries around these uncertainties. I think that's right. And I think there's obviously no clear boundary. It's impossible to put precise. boundaries on what could happen in the future. But I think it's sort of neither true nor useful to say that anything could happen in the future.
And so what we can do is employ various tools like scenario planning to begin to think about, well, what are the critical uncertainties that could affect the future? How might they combine? in ways that are perhaps stretch the limits of our imagination, hopefully do stretch the limits of our imagination, but are nevertheless plausible and once we start to construct these you know plausible imagined futures, we can get a better sense of what we might be facing.
down the road. And it helps define that space a little bit. It gives us a starting place, at least. It doesn't give us a clear answer, but as you said, it helped put some guardrails. around the uncertainty or our ignorance of the future. And that, at least by having a starting place, we can begin to get to work on crafting strategies that will set us up. any one particular future necessarily, but no matter what future comes to pass. And to that, you bring up fantastic case studies.
on the US Coast Guard that they applied. They used strategic foresight and specifically scenario planning to adapt themselves to advance their practice to be more future ready. future prepare them for the uncertainties that you mentioned before in the introduction. How did it work? You have the case study that you present in one of your reports. Tell me more details on that. be happy to. The U.S. Coast Guard is responsible for a wide range of missions in the United States.
They're a maritime military organization, but they're also a law enforcement organization and intelligence organization. They conduct some environmental monitoring and regulation or enforcement of regulation. So they've got this very diverse. mission set. And they're relatively small by US military standards anyway. But up until about 20 years ago, they were very focused on the short-term future. They had a very ingrained culture of...
So they would wait for, you know, they were always conducting their missions on a daily basis, but they would also be called in for things like hurricanes or other natural disasters, oil spills, things like that. So they were reactive. They lived in the moment. They operated in the moment. They did that very well. About 20 years ago, the then new head of the Coast Guard, a man named Admiral James Loy, came in and said, you know, simply reacting to the future as it happens does not serve us.
Well, we need to reorient ourselves to craft better strategy for the long term so that we're better prepared. for surprise for the unexpected, especially as the world becomes more uncertain. And so they they engaged actually an outside consulting firm and they conducted a sort of classic scenario planning process where they did consider. critical uncertainties about the future and how they might combine to create worlds 20 years down the line.
And in response to the scenarios that they crafted, they drew up a list of what they called robust strategies. So things that would serve them well, no matter what happened. And a lot of those strategies were not remarkably novel. Some of them were, let's just have a more agile human resources system because we don't know what skills we'll need in the future.
But what the process did was help to surface some of the ideas that had been going around in the organization for a long time and socialize them among top leaders. And then when surprises did happen, for example, when the 9-11 attacks happened in the United States and dramatically changed the Coast Guard's mission, among other things.
they were better prepared to adapt for that. And so that's a program that's continued now for going on, I guess, 23 years. And they're increasingly in times of uncertainty. turning to, in their case, specifically scenario planning to help them develop strategies for dealing with the future.
So if I'm understanding correctly, scenario planning and this exploration of possible, probable or plausible futures is not much the outcome, but it's more the process of opening people's mind and how people frame the certain situation in the short or long term futures. and increase adaptability in their way of working or preparing and strategizing.
for what that's exactly right uh the the process does produce these scenarios of the future these stories that we write these narratives that we write about the future but the point is not necessarily the narratives themselves the point is sort of as you say, in constructing them, you challenge your own assumptions about what is possible, what is plausible. refocuses you perhaps on what is important in the present and what you ought to be doing.
It, as you say, it sort of pushes your thinking beyond its usual boundaries that we all sort of find ourselves trapped in when we're operating day to day. And it also... provides a common language for an organization and its leaders to talk about the future, to consider the future, to strategize for the future. And that can be invaluable. That can be invaluable. Indeed, they become really important for the organization to reach this
common language to align on the terminology used on the practices and on the value of those practices. Why do we do this in the first place? but you know this common language it is hard to be rich sometimes, especially in large organizations where There are subcultures, sub-languages. It seems to be that something can be lost in translation, but we know the importance of having a common language. to build upon or to use. to build upon for new strategy, for new innovation projects.
But we all agree on that. So the question now that comes to mind is how can we embed this common language concept? How can we build? a common language you know how can everyone can be literate on that language within big or large or public or private organization. This is one of the more challenging questions that I think...
those of us who are interested in strategic foresight and scenario planning faces is how do you get started? And I think there is an impression among some folks that, you know, Orienting an organization toward the future is a massive undertaking that requires total organizational change.
And on the one hand, I can see the point. It is a reorientation. On the other hand, What we saw, say, with the Coast Guard was that it was the initiative of a single leader who was able to push it on the organization and use just a handful of individuals and really not... not tremendous resources financially to help develop these strategies for the future. But I would say that in my... In my research, what I have found is that The beginning of the process, the initiation, that catalyst.
often comes from a single individual or a small handful of individuals who believe that there is value in thinking long-term and thinking more about the future. And they have to have significant you know, power within the organization to begin the process. Once the process begins, once it's underway or once it's even gone, you know, through a few cycles, it often develops its own momentum and it continues on. But there's always a need for champions.
of strategic foresight. It's something you shouldn't think that you would need. champions for the future. You wouldn't think that you would need to tell organizational leaders, you know, you ought to think beyond the next quarter or the next year. And so that's, I think, the starting place often for a lot of organizations. And so having a champion in said organization is highly important. to get the energy on the practice, promote it within the organization and move it across the organization.
It is also important to do this exercise in an iterative way. That's my understanding from your words. It's not a strategic foresight. So now you're planning in this way. is done only once you know it is a one-off exercise that is done for this specific project or for this specific strategy and then the outcome are discussed evolved, changed, modified in that moment and then they can go in a drawer. But those outcomes should be in constant evolution.
Because that's the power of scenario planning is actually exploring those alternative futures and then... keeping iterating on them unless the value, the intrinsic potential of scenario planning
get lost. At least that this is my sense of the power of strategic foresight and scenario planning in this specific case. I completely agree and I think what does happen in a lot of organizations is that they do one exercise and then its findings perhaps however valuable they may be, even if they're enacted or they're just put on a shelf. And the truth is obviously that the present is constantly evolving and the plausible futures are constantly evolving.
For the process of strategic foresight really to have the effect that it can have, I think that iteration is crucial. It's an ongoing process. One of the benefits of getting that process started is you can... begin to build a base of support beyond initial champions, but people who have been exposed to different ways of thinking about the future such that they become
supporters as well and fuel for future iterations. So let's say that we have defined the intrinsic value of scenario planning and what's the benefit of doing it? But attached to doing it and to build a team to organize workshops of scenario planning, there's a cost attached to it.
So even if there is a strong champions that can promote strategic foresight and scenario planning within the organizations, then of course everything which a gatekeeper, whether it is a manager, a senior manager, a VP, or the CEO himself or herself.
um also from an economic point of view you know the classic uh what's my return of investment question you know how can we motivate people are more sensible to to numbers so how come yeah what's the secret sauce of strategic foresight and scenario planning in regards to that economic return that many organizations look at. as a value to promote innovation, novel ideas, and also way of doing things.
I think the return on investment question, the ROI question is one of the most difficult and persistent questions that strategic foresight practitioners face. And it's enormously difficult to answer in a quantitative way because, as you said, many of the returns may come in the long run. What's more, how do you value something like... changing a person's perceptions of, you know, the strategic space that an organization is operating in? How do you, you know, put a number on that?
You know, I've heard a variety of different responses to the ROI question. You know, one of them is simply it's the wrong. question, because what we should be thinking about is changing people's mental models of how the world works, or at least challenging them, if not changing them, and then questioning assumptions. developing that common language about the future that we discussed.
um are really ends in and of themselves i mean i would also note that i have yet to meet an organizational leader of any stripe whether it's a ceo or a military officer or a you know the someone at an NGO who says our organization thinks too much about the future. i mean that's never what you hear what you hear is we think too much about the short term we're swamped by emails and social media and the fire that we need to put out today and we're constantly trapped in the moment
You know, the ability to step back and look at the long term is really, it can seem like a luxury. I think it's a necessity, frankly, to step back from the immediacy of the short term. But then we also have data showing that companies that focus more on the long term suffer. companies that focus on the short term.
suffer more than those that focus on the long term. They leave money on the table. People remain unemployed. When it comes to public policy, we obviously see short-sighted public policies that lead to long-term costs, both economic and otherwise.
Again, often very difficult to value those things, but there have been efforts to do so. I think that a final... you know, a final avenue but one that really needs more shoring up are examples of where scenario planning or strategic foresight has been successful.
And there are a lot of those, but they often take the form of anecdotes and they can often be dismissed as stories or like explanations, sort of like post hoc explanations of why something was successful, but there's not really proof for it. And so this is where I think, you know, that the rigor of academic research becomes more important, where we can take things from simply being anecdotes or stories or even case studies.
to being in a position where we can say more definitively, these are the benefits that you see. for these reasons that's great peter i'm curious if we can link what we discussed so far with the with an exploration of what the future of strategic foresight could look like you know you mentioned the need to have a more solid sound case studies that can represent the practice and the inherent value. that we discussed, you know, the benefit of doing it. So what and how
does it require and does it look at the future of strategic foresight for you? I think there are a few avenues that can be pursued. I think that one avenue... You know, which is the one that I pursued with the Coast Guard, is the in-depth case study where you go sort of in a rigorous fashion, deep enough through the research that you can begin to suggest.
why certain successes could be attributable to strategic foresight. It's not proof. Qualitative, inductive work is not causal, but it can generate hypotheses about why strategic foresight is valuable. that then could perhaps be turned into hypotheses that could be tested in a deductive fashion. And that might provide, you know, more social science. sort of power to some of the case for strategic foresight.
But I think that the key thing is really looking deeply and asking how and why strategic foresight. works or does not work. And, you know, having the willingness to question that it might not always work. It might not always be the thing that makes the difference. And sort of, you know, sort of a self-reflection. as we go through our research.
That we're not simply proponents of the method because we happen to find the method or the practice interesting or powerful for ourselves, but because we have found that it is useful through dispassionate research and analysis. And in that regard, Peter, do you see more appropriate the use of strategic foresight in... public organizations where, for example, there is a policymaker that developed and implemented some policies for the private sector.
or do you see the private sector itself be beneficiaries of using strategic foresight in their operational activities. And how literate people should be across an organization. So like, you know, building this common language, should everyone be able to speak the language? I think that... It's challenging to ask everyone to be literate. I mean, there's a great attractiveness to everyone developing a degree of futures literacy.
But to some extent, because of this, at least at this point, because of this need for champions, because of this need for those people to have the influence to get the ball rolling when it comes to processes. I think that a greater degree of top-down experimentation with strategic foresight methods would be valuable. published a long report on strategic foresight within the U.S. government.
Each agency that I looked at, what I found was basically like the Coast Guard, there are pockets of strategic foresight scattered around the United States government and everywhere from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. to the Secret Service, which is responsible for protecting the president and other political VIPs.
to the Office of Personnel Management, to various components of the military, including the Coast Guard. But I think that there's no... whole of nation approach to strategic foresight that, you know, as someone who is, you know, living and working in the United States as an American, I say. I want the country to be thinking more about where it wants to be in the future and what the future might look like and how it can best prepare for that. And my my conclusion.
from the report was that if for that to take place, it really would would take the support of the president to get things rolling because there are simply. too many crises ongoing on a day-to-day basis that policymakers are dealing with for them to naturally take up. 20 years into the future. That does seem like a luxury, not a necessity. I happen to disagree, but I also understand that when the house is burning, first you have to put out the fire.
And then later you can think about, well, maybe we should build the next house a little bit to be more fire resistant or what have you. Fortunately, the country is big enough and there are enough smart people in it that it's possible to have parallel efforts where you have people that are both dealing with crisis and people who are dealing with the long term.
And the one crucial point that I want to make here is that I think that thinking about the long term helps us deal with crises in the short term. that there is a temporal link between these two things, between future thought and present action. They're not distinct. They're not totally separate activities, even though they're often
seen that way. And that's why thinking about the long term can seem like a luxury. But if in fact, it'll help prepare you for short term crisis for surprise, what have you, it's it's in fact, necessary. So that's sort of what I've been thinking about with respect to the United States. And I think, you know. To some extent, one can extrapolate out from that to other countries or to organizations or to companies.
I think that it would be a huge boon for the United States government to take up strategic foresight in a more dedicated way. It appears to me that it's a very delicate balance between short and long term thinking and doing. And I like this idea that we are talking about strategic foresight, you know, thinking about the future.
just when we enter the adult life you know we're talking these associated to government we're talking about these associated to industry but the power of the futures I think stays and lies within giving to the future generation the opportunity to hold these capabilities you know we talk about being literate you know it's something that We start becoming literate and knowing how to speak, to write at a young age, you know, elementary school. That's where we start our process of becoming literate.
But in the school sector, it's quite a rarity to have strategic foresight or let's say future-infused curriculum. in actually giving those skills, those capabilities to the young generation, which are the ones that actually are going to run the futures and make decisions in a future state. So how better he's now preparing them to have such capabilities.
and understanding of the power of framing and thinking of the situations and allow to conclusion and make decisions that are in the present there are rationalized on some futures opportunities and future scenarios. It would be interesting to explore more of the power of embedding future. curriculum in a university and the wider education system.
I think it would be fantastic to embed it early on because I do think there's a great opportunity for cross-pollination between foresight and any number of disciplines, whether it's, you know. you know having to do with with you know ecology or epidemiology or you know the future of the financial system or any number of things that you can think about And you cited the definition of strategic foresight that I use earlier. And one of the verbs in that definition is to shape the future.
And so often when we think about the future, we're thinking about it almost defensively as in we need to prepare for what's going to happen to us. But of course, there's no reason that thinking about the future shouldn't be aspirational as well, that we don't have some degree of agency in shaping the future. We do. And so when you talk about younger generations, I mean, this is.
one way to, you know, corral those aspirations in a constructive way, to put them together, to give form to them, to answer, well, if we want to make, say, social change, economic change, environmental change, what have you. What are the uncertainties that we are going to face in those efforts? What are the possible roadblocks? But what are also the possible opportunities we can take in constructing the type of world that we want to be living in?
Thank you, Peter. So far, it's been a fabulous conversation. I really enjoyed it. And I just do believe the opportunity and the power. of embedding early on foresight or future thinking in the educational system to really empower and enable the young generation as they grow up and learn more. with those skills that are are better futures. Better in terms of maybe more sustainable or more inclusive. But yeah, I do believe, I would like to see more of these practices embedded into curriculum.
So yeah, thank you so much for the conversation. Before closing, I usually ask this question to get to know more my guests. less than a professional point of view you know but more from a personal point of view I usually ask and I'm curious about what is the last or the coming book. anyone reads and I see many many books behind behind your back
So what have you been reading recently? Or are you currently reading? It's true. There are a lot of books here. And I tend to be reading a few things at any one time. Right now, I'm taking a look at or taking a look again at a book. written by Robert Jervis, who was a political scientist who died just a few weeks ago. And he's famous in part for a book that he wrote called Perception and Misperception in International Politics.
And one of the points of that book is that the traditional political science model of relations between states needs to account for. individual psychology and the motivations and the perceptions of individual policymakers. I it doesn't sound like something that is necessarily a strategic foresight book, but I think that. in trying to perceive accurately the intentions of both our allies and our adversaries to sort of reconcile this problem of misperception requires imagination.
And ultimately, when we're talking about strategic foresight, we're talking about the cultivation of imagination. And so I'm reading this or rereading it in part with the view that imagination is an undervalued strategic resource at that level. So it's a book that I've read before, but one that I'm applying a new lens to given what I've been working on lately. That's fascinating. I'm going to put that on my reading list. Can we cultivate?
imagination? It's a fantastic question and I wish I had a definitive answer. I do believe that we can cultivate imagination. I do believe that it is often a case of learning by doing. So for example, whether it's going through a scenario planning process or playing a war game or you know, envisioning an alternative future that you aspire to. These are all things that cultivate imagination, which is, I think, a facet that
You know, you spoke of, you know, the next generation and how they're, you know, the educational process they go through. We don't put. students perhaps through enough training of imagination and the deficits that result can unfortunately leave us wanting. They can cause problems. So it's something that I do believe can be cultivated and I very much hope we will do more. And with that, Peter, let me thank you so much for your time and your passion and dedication you put in making a contribution.
To the practice. So yeah, thank you. Thank you very much And you mentioned before cross-pollinate. And this podcast sits on the purpose of cross-pollinating different disciplines and make an impact. and enable people thinking and doing in a more innovative way or at least offering that opportunity to learn from others. So it's learning by doing and learning by listening. Thank you so much, Peter, and I wish you all the best. Thank you so much for the conversation. I really enjoyed it.