The Future Laboratory’s co-founder Martin Raymond discusses how to embed strategic foresight as a core discipline of credible and successful government with Scott Perugini Kelly and Sally Washington in our latest Back to the F**kture podcast episode.
According to Scott Perugini Kelly, director of strategic foresight at the New South Wales Department of Premier and Cabinet, and Sally Washington, executive director of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government (ANZSOG), politicians need to embed strategic foresight as a core discipline of credible and successful government more than ever.
It’s November 2019, and an associate of Kelly suggests that he adds a World Health Organization pandemic preparedness paper to a brief he’s currently readying for the head of the department. But Kelly isn’t at all convinced, as he tells Martin Raymond on the latest Back to the Fu**ture podcast. At the time, he muses, the subject seemed too fantastical, too far removed from the politics of the everyday. The irony!
For Sally Washington, who has advised New Zealand ministers and spent seven years at the OECD working with Heads of Prime Ministers/Presidents Offices, in order to be radical in the way we need to be radical, we need to be curious and imaginative. Foresight, as she wrote in a recent Hindsight, Foresight, Insight paper, isn’t about crystal ball-gazing – the unfortunate view of many ministers and CEOs. It’s about a systematic, intelligence-gathering process that allows us to map uncertainty by developing alternative plausible, probable, and in some cases, unpalatable, scenarios. This allows us to better map, manage and shape the future. And while ‘hard’ data play a part in this process, this is only one part of the puzzle.
You can hear the full Back to the F**kture podcast with Scott and Sally here.
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