About

If you’d like brief weekly ideas for improving personal and team foresight and action, updates on our crowd-edited public foresight platform, Futurepedia (see below) and info on our annual conference (Good Futures), this newsletter is for you.

We are a small nonprofit, Foresight University, run by academically-trained foresight practitioners. Our main public service is stewarding and growing Futurepedia, a free, crowd-edited online platform that describes lay and professional foresight methods, models, practices, and practitioners, and questions, issues, trends, and stories of 21st century futures.

As we think about the future, we believe we should strive to use evidence-based and well-critiqued models, methods, and practices (“Good Foresight”), and the best set of values, visions, strategies, and plans that seem likely to increase our general adaptiveness (“Good Futures”).

We are especially interested in foresight and action that increases adaptiveness (innovation, ability, sustainability), for our sustaining networks (planetary, biological, social, technological) as a whole, in any future environment. We must not only grow our intelligence and ability, but our personal and network wisdom.

As we think about networks, one of our mottos is “Empathy First!” If we strive first to understand and respect other minds, in all their uniqueness and difference from us*, we are in the best position to find ethics, visions, and actions that will benefit our networks as a whole.

Another motto we like is that “Good Networks Always Win.” Consider how both individuals and groups (teams, firms, societies) are often either winning or losing in the game of adaptiveness under selection. But life itself, viewed as a single interdependent network, has continually improved its diversity, complexity and general adaptiveness. Life as a network has been immortal for 3.5 billion years, it has experienced five major extinction events (each of which has actually accelerated its adaptive complexity, under selection) and it has much to teach our human network about such important but hard to define concepts like values, progress, and goodness.

When we ask what actions might best improve the general adaptiveness of the whole network of sentient life, over the long term, even if that action might involve some personal or group sacrifices today, we would argue that we are focused on the Greater Good.** That is the kind of long-term, network-oriented thinking that our community hopes to advance, working together. If this is also an interest of yours, you’ll find several others here who share your values and visions. Welcome!

*The late, great Stephen Covey also describes this motto as his first habit (“Seek First to Understand, then Be Understood”) in his self-management bestseller, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, 1990/2020. A highly recommended read!

**Both Greek (Plato and Aristotle) and Hindu (Bhagavad Gita) philosophers discussed three great values: Beauty, Truth, and Goodness. These three values are the simplest and strongest foundation we know for doing normative (values-centered, successful, progressive) futures thinking. It is empowering to seek to improve each of them in our as we generate our personal and shared visions and strategies.

In evo-devo philosophy, Beauty is an evolutionary (creative, divergent) value. Think of all the breathtakingly unique and beautiful species on Earth. Truth (predictive capacity) is a developmental (conservative, convergent) value. Developmental knowledge, written into our genes, keeps every species on a predictable and convergent life cycle. Our convergent developmental processes are a counterforce to evolutionary divergence. We need both.

Goodness is an evo-devo (adaptive) value. Goodness emerges as a special mix of things that are beautiful, true, and adaptive. Goodness includes such hard-to-define values as happiness, fairness, justice, progress, ability, wisdom, and in biological and complexity theory, increasing general adaptiveness of the network, in any future environment, due to the increasing innovation capacity, ability, and sustainability in that network. We humans and our machines are at the leading edge of that network on Earth, and we have the greatest ability to grow or harm its general adaptiveness.

We believe that by debating and editing together, in a cognitively- and experience-diverse network, we can help everyone see farther, work harder, and thrive better than we can alone. Again, Welcome to Our Foresight Community!

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