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The Case for Foresight in Organisations
AFI Student and Alumni Community Meeting 2 of 2004, Monday 29th March 2004
Below you will find the pre-work from this meeting. The use of
archetypes and story-telling were introduced as another futures approach that can be practiced by the group. A summary of common archetypes and a story-telling outline for a typical "hero's story" are included in the "Workshop Outputs" section at the bottom of this page. You will also find some comments summarising the workshop outputs and two interesting stories that were generated at this workshop.
Background Material
There are many commonly cited reasons why foresight should be used by organisations, yet convincing these organisations to use foresight in any serious way still proves to be elusive. During this workshop we will consider how we can better articulate the benefits of foresight approaches and contrast these with the reasons why organisations don't use foresight. Working through this process and looking at contradictions and commonalities will help us define in clearer terms what the compelling reasons for foresight adoption might be and how these should be best communicated. Your involvement and contribution in this interactive workshop will help you refine your own thinking and marketability as well as providing the whole foresight field with some renewed marketing messages that can be used to spread the word more effectively.
During this session, we will collectively address the challenges that we face in convincing organisations to use foresight. As usual we are trying to use a "foresight approach/method" as part of our process, so during this session we will look at archetypes and story telling as a way of uncovering meaning (even in the most pragmatic of settings!)
The attached background reading provides numerous "gems" gathered by Rowena Morrow and Serafino - extracted from research work/essays we completed as AFI students. This is a 7 page document, but it is an easy flick through read and should serve as a handy reference for your continuing use. If you could at least spend a few minutes to glance through pages 1 and 2 before the session that would be great!
Why foresight?
Workshop Outputs
The workshop commenced by reviewing the reasons why foresight isn't used extensively at present, this is summarised in the following document:
The Case For Foresight Reviewed
The typical "hero's story" was then introduced. This document provides a summary of common archetypes and a story-telling outline for a typical "hero's story". It allows you to understand the main structure and approach used to create the "hero's story".
Writers Journey Archetypes and Plot.pdf
And finally this document contains two sample stories that were generated during the workshop.
Sample Foresight Hero Stories
