Futures thinking and policy

The great strength of futures work is that it can help policy makers look at today’s challenges from a different perspective. Identifying and examining current factors and trends and how they might play out in the future gives policy makers a sense of what a policy world might look like and then allows them to test various responses to minimise costs or maximise benefits.

Often the futures process will uncover unexpected results. Some trends may have a greater (or lesser) impact than expected; others may impact sooner than expected. Interventions designed to tackle a policy issues in one part of the system may have unintended consequences – perhaps far-reaching – in other parts of the system. One particularly useful aspect of futures is to use gaming approaches that invite policy makers to look at a policy issue through the eyes of different stakeholders and to see it, consequently, in a fresh light.

A futures workshop is, effectively, a laboratory where policy makers can experiment with ideas, ask ‘what if?’ questions and test the impact and consequences of policy. Futures themselves are never designed to be predictions, but to stimulate thought and to spell out the opportunities and threats we might face. They allow policy makers to judge the risks of acting – and not acting – and to rehearse the decisions they might need to make to maximise those opportunities. They can even be used to test (windtunnel) existing policy approaches to see if they would benefit from modifications.