Seminar on "Recent Developments in Futures Thinking: Connecting Foresight to Decision Making"

Foresight

• © Riel Miller

Under the auspices of the Intersectoral Platform for Anticipation and Foresight, the Bureau of Strategic Planning will organize a seminar on “Recent Developments in Futures Thinking: Connecting Foresight to Decision Making”. It will take place on 1 July 2009 from 9.30 am to 1 pm at the UNESCO Headquarters.

This half-day seminar will be conducted by a specialist in long-run strategic thinking, Mr Riel Miller, who kindly accepted the invitation to introduce participants to some of the recent developments in the field of future studies.

For over two decades Mr Miller’s work has concentrated on how to assess and direct the potential for socio-economic transformation in the private and public sectors. He is one of the world’s leading practitioners of scenario methods and has developed “hybrid strategic scenarios” for clients around the world. Mr Miller works closely with clients to design and implement scenario processes that reveal the assumptions underlying current policies and the potential, often hidden, in the world around us today. Former Principal Administrator of the Advisory Unit to the Secretary-General (1995-2003) and to the Centre for Educational Research and Innovation (2003-2004) of OECD, he is now founder of xperiodox: futures consulting.

Mr Miller will start the seminar with a brief historical overview of the development of foresight as a decision making tool. This serves as background for a short introduction to the “anticipatory systems” view and the concept of Futures Literacy. The seminar will close with an illustration of how an extended Futures Literacy process can challenge the anticipatory assumptions that shape conventional policy. This will provide an example of how to link foresight to decision making.