How well do we think about the future? Foresight Evaluation

Foresight is the capacity to think systematically about the future to inform decision-making today. It focuses on investigating the drivers of change and exploring possible futures to inform planning and policymaking (Conway, 2015).

While the use of foresight to guide planning and decision-making is not new (PDF), there's a growing global realization of how complex and interconnected our world's challenges are. This realization has made the integration of foresight into strategic planning and policymaking increasingly important, as it helps anticipate and navigate these complexities for better outcomes.

In this context, the concept of 'future' typically involves a timeframe of longer than five years, which is the timeframe typically used in strategic planning. It is important to note that foresight does not seek to predict the future since none of the futures that come to pass are exactly as imagined. However, it does support better preparation for any future that may arise and spur imagination and collective creativity (Shallowe et al., 2020).

So what’s particular about evaluating foresight activities?

In many respects, the evaluation of foresight programs and activities resembles traditional program evaluation. Foresight evaluation designs will have similar parameters as designs of other types of programs—a time horizon, evaluation questions and methods, a budget and scope of work. Many of the same methods will be applicable, including surveys, case studies, document analysis, and focus groups.

However, there are a number of challenges in foresight evaluation, including dealing with complexity, long-time horizons, and the difficulty of documenting uncertain foresight outcomes. Compared to program and policy evaluations, which assess initiatives in their early and late stages, foresight evaluation often focuses on emergent phenomena that may not occur until well into the future, such as topical forecasts set in 2030. Another difference is the focus on attributes of foresight such as 'futures consciousness' and ability to think about and anticipate the future (Ahvenharju, 2018).

To date, there has been only limited evaluation of foresight work. A combination of factors—limited foresight practitioner evaluation capacity, low recognition of the value evaluation brings to foresight, and challenges in evaluating foresight have slowed the widespread adoption of evaluation, and until recently, no clear guidelines or measures existed.  

However, increased interest in accountability and in understanding whether foresight outputs are valuable, as well as a desire to improve the implementation of foresight activities, has resulted in greater interest in applying formal evaluation concepts and tools to foresight activities. As a result, a number of foresight organizations, such as Sitra, the Finish Futures think tank, as well as individual researchers, and evaluators have made significant progress in using and adapting evaluation constructs and designs to evaluate foresight projects and processes.  

What does foresight evaluation look like?

Foresight evaluation is context-dependent and can take many forms. For example, in government, there is a desire to assess whether foresight activities have influenced decision-making, as well as public and policymaker awareness. In foresight education, the focus is on assessing student learning outcomes and competency with new measurement tools that assess changes in areas such as students’ futures literacy, readiness, and consciousness. Also, corporations and nonprofits are often interested in the quality of the foresight process and whether it achieved its desired impacts, including informing strategy and future-proofing actions.  

Launching a new thematic area on foresight evaluation

We’re pleased to announce a new page on BetterEvaluation that is focused on foresight evaluation. This page has been developed by Annette L Gardner, PhD, Laurent Bontoux, PhD, and Eric Barela, PhD, former members of the Association of Professional Futurists Foresight Evaluation Task Force (2021-2023). It is aimed at both evaluators and foresight practitioners and commissioners.

Click here to check out the new Foresight Evaluation page

Evaluators, who most likely will have a range of evaluation and/or foresight skills, will hopefully benefit from the content to give them a grounding in ‘foresight’ and assistance in identifying appropriate evaluation constructs and methods to inform evaluation design. They will also be exposed to foresight methods that can support evaluation more broadly, such as the use of alternative scenarios to assess the resiliency of evaluation recommendations. In a rapidly changing world, evaluators need to develop the capacity to think creatively and strategically about the future and develop nimble, forward-thinking evaluation plans for interventions that can navigate change. This requires a shift in orientation away from “rear view mirror” thinking and assessing a program or policy ex-post with limited thought to how to increase a program’s resilience in the face of great change (Carden, 2023).

Foresight practitioners who have some experience in evaluation will find information on addressing challenges using emerging evaluation constructs, such as contribution analysis. Practitioners with limited evaluation experience will hopefully be able to use the page content to gain an overview of foresight evaluation, allowing them to better select and partner with an evaluation contractor.  

Last, we hope the page will help commissioners of foresight evaluation deepen their understanding of ‘foresight’ and ‘foresight evaluation,’ and the value these bring to their work and how these can support the success of their initiatives.