What the Foresight

Book excerpt: Designers, futurists, and innovators of all kind often apply the long view toward businesses and the world at large; but how often do we apply this perspective to our personal lives? Alida Draudt and Julia Rose West have taken the complex tools of foresight and distilled them to their simplest forms in order to tackle this challenge. Together they have written a workbook that focuses on ten-minute mini workshops around personal futures - introducing not only foresight, but the idea of multiple potential futures to the realm of the individual. This workbook will give you a few tools to shift the long view from business-oriented to highly personal. "Finally, methodologies leveraged by leading strategic foresight practitioners have been made accessible. If there is one thing to takeaway from What the Foresight, it's this: the future is for everyone. In the book, authors Alida Draudt and Julia West brilliantly break down the guiding principles of futures work in an easy to understand set of materials and activities that anyone can use to imagine their own futures. Read this book! The future is a cause worth fighting for." - Matthew Manos, Founder and Managing Director of verynice. Creator of Models of Impact, author of Toward Preemptive Social Enterprise, and author of How to Give Half of Your Work Away for Free "What the Foresight is one of those rare feats - it is well informed, easy to understand and broadly applicable. If you're looking to take that first step into futures thinking here's your road map." - Brian David Johnson, Futurist and author of Science Fiction Prototyping "Going through the exercises in What the Foresight helps you envision multiple possible futures and then choose the path that suits you best. It's a imaginative and useful tool for anyone who wants to expand their options and explore more paths." - Christopher Ireland, Co-author of Rise of the DEO "Foresight is an emerging skill that is becoming more visible and more common around the world - that is, among adults. Young people are not yet included in the discussion of the future these days, and it's their future more than ours! Almost no schools teach students how to anticipate and influence change, much less about the plausible futures that await them later in life. Now Draudt and West have provided us with What the Foresight, a clever, beautifully designed approach to the future for young and old alike. Thank you!" - Peter C. Bishop, Ph.D. Executive Director of Teach the Future, Inc. and co-author of Thinking About the Future