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Futures Scanning

05/13/2019

Past, Present, and Futures

There’s only one past and present, but there’s an infinite number of possible futures. Futurists use what we know now to forecast the most likely ones.

We may not be able to see the future, but we can look at what’s happening right now and try to forecast where that might lead. The present contains four sets of building blocks that we can use later in the FORESIGHT process when imagining different futures (what we call “scenarios of possible futures”):

  1. Which forces have we seen drive change in the past that may be at work again today?

    The answer to this first question will need to be based on an examination of what has driven change in our chosen area—health and well-being—in the past (we call these “historical drivers”).

  2. What new sources of change do we think we are detecting?

    There are two subcategories of new sources of change: trends and emerging issues. We’ll get back to those in a moment.

For decades, health care businesses have been merging and we can see that this consolidation—which has driven us to where we are today—continues in the present, as the CVS-Aetna mega-merger continues through regulatory processes, and Cigna’s merger with Express Scripts creates another industry giant.
  1. What forces are present today that might slow down or even prevent change?
    Impediments to change—also called “stabilities”—help us better understand how changes might not go exactly where we’d expect them to. Stabilities (such as rules, traditions, behavior patterns, powerful stakeholders, and even the laws of physics) can slow or stop a trend line before it would run out of momentum on its own.

    What’s the opposite of stabilities?

    The opposite of stabilities are trends and emerging issues! Those two categories encompass all agents of change.

In the US House of Representatives, candidates who are already in office keep their seats in over ninety percent of elections despite low average approval ratings. This “incumbent advantage” suppresses change, because extra votes are needed to overcome this bias and elect someone with different ideas.
  1. What are the lived experiences and aspirations of everyday people (from diverse populations) in relation to health and well-being?

    We need to ask everyone—especially residents from marginalized populations who are not often listened to—about their experiences related to health and well-being, as well as the changes they’d like to see in the future to improve those experiences. FORESIGHT’s process will ask up to 8,000 people to explore the scenarios and react to them, telling us what excites and concerns them. We will collect a diversity of perspectives, continuing to prioritize groups that have traditionally been excluded.

To some decision makers, free or reduced-price school lunches may seem like a low priority—perhaps even something they can sacrifice in pursuit of another objective. They might be less likely to do so if they hear from the families with children who rely on school lunches as their only meal of the day, and learn more about what families experience when those free meals are taken away.

What Can We Learn From Today?

Trends are changes over time in a certain direction that we can quantitatively measure to make trend line graphs. It’s important to note that trends only describe the past and are never statements about the future—they merely imply a particular future if you assume the trend lines don’t change, which is far from certain. And often, we aren’t even concerned with the trend itself—instead, we’re really using the trend as a tool to shed light on the underlying forces that are causing it.

graphic image

Emerging issues, on the other hand, are weak signals of change that may or may not drive things in the future—think new prototype technologies, or new policy ideas that are starting to be discussed on the fringes of government. They may someday grow into full-blown trends, or they may fizzle out of existence—and they can be quite hard to detect.
As we develop stronger artificial intelligences and involve machines more deeply in our lives, we are approaching a point where some people are talking about the ethical treatment of machines—though for now, that debate’s mostly limited to academic settings and science fiction.
For a few decades now, housing prices have ballooned to the point of affordable housing crises in some urban areas, such as San Francisco, New York City, and Boston. This trend may continue, but we can’t know for sure whether the momentum behind the trend might cause it to bend one way or the other—or even break, with a crash in these housing markets setting off a chain reaction of mortgage defaults that could trigger a recession in the vein of the subprime crisis that began in 2007.

Could foresight have paved our way to . . . not paving?

Back when the automobile was first introduced, it would have been hard to imagine today’s car-reliant culture with its massive network of highways and suburban sprawl. Encouraged by the auto industry, we tore up public transit and rebuilt our world to accommodate our cars. Only later did the downsides become apparent, and some cities are suffering public well-being crises as what remains of the chronically underfunded, archaic transit breaks down. Our hope is that by gaining foresight, we can identify the “horseless carriages” of our current era, and make choices up front that may not seem obvious from where we stand now, but will serve us best in the long run.

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