Stephen Murgatroyd

How to Rethink the Future: Making Use of Strategic Foresight Stephen Murgatroyd

We are not, as a species, very good at prediction. This you will quickly realize as you read the first chapter of this book. Yet we need prediction to live our daily lives-insurance, weather forecasting, shipping, flight and other decisions depend on them. We make predictions all the time and sometimes we get it right. Strategic foresight is not about prediction. It is about understanding and anticipating different futures. The future is rarely a straight line from the past-it is subject to change and uncertainty. What strategic foresight as a process does is seek to understand why the future will be different from the past and what the implication of these differences are. In this book, I provide insights from forty years of consulting practice with organizations from large (Oracle, TESCO, Heinz, Barclays, Conoco-Phillips), medium (Debenhams, West Yorkshire Police, Millennium Copthorne) and small (Elk Island Public Schools, Alberta Assessment Consortium, Contact North/Contact Nord); for-profit and non-profit.