From Strategic to Transformative Foresight: Using Space to Transform Time

When did you first come across hardin tibbs work? What was it about the strategic landscape model that caught your attention?

I first saw his work around fifteen years ago or so, I believe. I liked it as at that time, we were still in the “convincing” stage of futures studies. I was running numerous foresight courses and workshops and I saw the landscape as a great way to ask organizational leaders to quickly audit their organization—to spatially locate themselves.

However, having worked at and been part of state-level institutes (the Hawaii Judiciary, for example), numerous Universities (such as Queensland University of Technology), international non-governmental organizations (such as the World Futures Studies Federation)—wonderful as they were—I noticed that the jungle (competition, predators, as well as survival not of the fittest but the most passive-aggressive) could be added on to the landscape.

Most of our lived experience is in institutional jungles. These are not pleasant experiences. While we all hope for AI solutions to reduce red-tape and enhance green-tape, many of our realities are living in uncomfortable organizational structures. And as in all jungles, inhabitants find ways to make it work for them. Some use passive-aggression, some use litigation, some bully, some are individualistic (quick and agile) and others use cooperation.

I also shifted the “mountain top” to mountain tops as I believed this squared better with the notion of scenarios and differing worldviews (i.e., there is no one mountain top we live on—we all live on different mountain tops, having different core views of cosmology and epistemology).

Finally, while Tibbs uses the star as the core purpose, I use it as the vision.

But the main brilliant insight remains—see the future through the lens of a landscape, use spatiality to inform temporality.

When I show the modified landscape, I ask course participants what percent of their time was in the jungle, what on the chessboard, what on the mountain tops and what on the star. Most would immediately understand that their organization was jungle-heavy and that they needed to move up the landscape. A few would comment that they had a star and strategy, but convincing the board to move toward scenarios or the mountain tops was far more difficult.

This conversation would then lead to why and how they could engage in the future, in Futures Studies.

Of course, in 2020, almost every organization I work is far more evenly balanced, or at least they spend some time at the mountain tops. This could be because I seek to work with organizations that wish for more transformative deeper engagement and/or because futures studies now has the influence that founders such as James Dator wished for fifty years back.

How has the star-mountainchessboard-self (strategic landscape) model shaped your thought and practice?

First, it is a great visual reminder always to focus on the vision, to remember the purpose. Second, to ensure as the world changes, we have a set of scenarios to gain a big-picture view of reality, to see the world from the vantage point of mountain tops. Third, that strategy needs to come from the vision and the scenarios.

However, at least, while in the jungle, we need to understand the rules of the jungle, even if we do not wish to live in the jungle. My effort is often to ask what then, in the alternative vision is the jungle we wish for? Can we transform it into an ecological playground? And if changing the jungle is not possible, what is needed to make jungle-life more tolerable?

In terms of actual metaphors, it is less the jungle and more the castle surrounded by hungry wolves that I find resonates with most organizations. They often believe that there is an in-group—brilliant leaders—but the out-group is the problem. External stakeholders are out to get them. Most organizations wish to transform this narrative. When I was working with Erik Øverland for the Norwegian Ministry of Education, they shifted the narrative to a jazz orchestra. The goal was to create individual and personalized excellence in the context of others. Jazz is not rigid, but flexible and emergent. Certainly, it is a far more appropriate metaphor than the castle surrounded by hungry wolves or the jungle with endless predators.

I use my adapted version of the landscape in the first pillar of the Six Pillars model (Inayatullah 2008). It helps map out where the organization is and where it can be. I follow it by the futures triangle which maps where the organization wishes to go, what is helping it get there—Dator’s tsunamis of change (Dator 1997)—and the weight of history, what is holding the organization back.

Are there examples/cases from your work where you found the strategic landscape model to be uniquely effective?

Again, as an auditing function. Where are we too loaded? How do we move from the jungle to strategy and then onwards to the broader picture. How do we keep the star active in our lives? My own teacher, P.R. Sarkar, wrote that we should train our minds to be like the lotus flower (Sarkar 1973; Inayatullah 2001). It lives in the mud, but it keeps its gaze for the moon—its love for the moon—alive.

I have used it with international policing—too much in the jungle—with Australia Biosecurity—again too much time in the jungle or in strategy, seeking to quarantine viruses. This is true for the dozens of city futures projects we have conducted in Australia and Asia. Most organizations are so busy fighting the jungle they have no time for strategy. And then they engage in strategy, it is from the lens of the jungle. I do my best to get them to go to the star and mountain tops. Thus, strategy emerges from the narrative of vision and purpose instead of the reality of the jungle. One strategy emerges from the jungle or the chess-set one can optimize, but when it emerges from the mountain tops or star, transformation of self and other becomes possible.

Jose Ramos has developed an approach—the bridge method—to have these four spaces talk to each other, so the mountain top scenario people have relevant conversations with the chess set strategists and policymakers (Ramos 2017).

Tibbs notes: “In conventional psychological terms, the main kinds of elements we should expect to find in the ‘future space’ will be cognitive (related to thinking and knowing), affective (related to feeling and emotion), and conative (related to will and intentionality).” And, in an endnote, he continues: “If the psychological terms of reference are expanded to include a Jungian interpretation (as in the Myers-Briggs personality typology), intuition (‘inner sensing’) can also be included as a distinct element, and the meaning of ‘feeling’ can be further refined.”

You have also written about “intuiting the future(s),” and there was recently (2015) a symposium on “intuition in futures work” in the Journal of Futures Studies (Markley 2015) featuring a range of critical and creative reflections and analyses from practitioners and researchers.

Given the focus on “self” that is common to your and Tibbs’s strategy-focused work, what can (and, do you think, should) futurists do to enhance this aspect of their practice?

One of the tragedies of the field has been the development of strategic foresight. While certainly at a banal level this is progressive—we survey the changing world and then optimize strategies based on our scan; however, at a deeper level this ensures that the chessboard wins out. The chessboard assumes life is about power and winning with only the rational self active. I remember when we were kids, if one of us was winning then the other would just swipe the chess players off the board and walk away with anger. Chess—the strategy—can create rage: it is about winners and losers. It is zero-sum. Much of strategic foresight work is how to win within the terms of the chess set.

I far prefer transformative foresight. In this space, first it is challenging the chess-set as defining, seeking other narratives. Second, there is a space between the mountain tops and the star—it is the emergent future. Transformative foresight changes me and those with me in the workshop. It is more than being the reflective practitioner—it is opening a space where we all learn and transform with each other. This is less the Hero’s journey than the collective caravan.

Thus, for me, in futures, I always ask which self is active. Is it the pusher self that seeks to optimize gains? Is it the anxious self that uses foresight as risk mitigation, to ensure that others don’t steal the gains we have made? Or are other selves active—the one that wishes to find new possibilities, the dreamer self, for example? There is also the self from the future, her or she can advise the present.

What I learned from Tony Stevenson and Robert Burke is that the future gets created in real time through emergence. Emergence is based on creating trust in each other, in the process. It is, as NBA basketball coach Mike D’Antoni argues, finding the energy, not creating a better plan. This means creating flows that open toward emergence. In traditional basketball, the goal was to find the best player and ensure they have the ball most of the time. They get the last shot: “hero ball.” D’Antoni, in contrast, suggested moving away from the hero to “energy,” to movement, allowing “energy”—the flow of the ball, the flow of the persons playing—to define the next play. Energy for him creates emergence.

One of my favorite experiences was when I had fifty or so rural CEOs in a room. We had developed an amazing vision of the future of healthcare. It was to be personalized, preventive, participatory, and partnership based. However, on the second day, the overseeing director could not see the link between the vision and Monday morning. We went to action learning and created 10 working groups. They consolidated into seven. The seven produced short reports on next steps. When the workshop ended, the director funded all seven projects. However, the vision of 2030 was now in jeopardy. He then gave the 2030 preventive vision 25% of the budget—the star—and the rest went to projects that could move strategy from the present to the emergent future. Everyone left the room energized. We imagined tomorrow, but then did not just create a strategic plan, we created a transformative event and process.

In this sense, Tibb’s landscape can be used like the three horizons, as a way to put space into different time horizons.

What I suggest is that as a futurist I gain clarity on the self that is present in the intervention. I am an outsider giving advice or I am part of the constellation the landscape. If so, how do I reveal my interests, so we can journey as a team. This can be especially challenging when the external wishes us to be the all-knower of the future - the expert. For me, it is important not to be seduced by this claim.

In any case, I need to know which self I enter a room with: how I can be aware of that self and use epistemological assets wisely? Clearly the work of Tibbs helps us in this process.

I would like to explore your invocation of the word “tragedy,” which has strong connotations, if not an explicit intention that highlights issues in the broader field. In “The Birth of Tragedy,” Nietzsche talks about the tension between the Dionysian (communal, emotive) and Apollonian (individual, rational) “sides,” and perhaps “selves” is a useful synonym here. For Nietzsche, the aim of life was to achieve a balance between the two, and, he argues, the Greeks did so prior to the ascension of Socrates, who was the “rational self” taken to its extreme. What factors do you think led to the rise of this tragedy within foresight? Is the “strategic identity” a Socratic self?

Yes, I totally agree—this is the self that is separated from nature, others, and I would say, now even technologies. This self is the user, in the negative connotation of the word. I still remember one futures course, when an executive from a large tech company suggested that she could save time—it was a five day course—if we would just immediately give her the answer. It would be the most efficient use of her time. My colleague Rob Burke smiled and said, “yes, I know what the problem is.” She listened intently waiting for the critical insight. “You,” he said. Of course, he meant the particular self that insisted on the solution to the future. She, of course, was brilliant and immediately understood, staying for the five days and becoming a futures champion.

We moved the discourse from the future as an answer, which immediately privileges the futurist as expert to futures as a learning journey. Our role becomes the guide, on a shared journey to a not yet explored land. Our methods and tools provide the safety, the structure, for this journey. In this journey, while we have much to offer there are also many dangers. When learning becomes difficult, groups insistently try to seduce us with clever questions, for example: what are your views on privacy and the global brain? It is easy to fall for that trap. What they are really saying is: “This journey has become difficult, please do the thinking for me.” We are there not to be seduced into becoming the all-knowing futurist, but to help facilitate the process of creating futures literacy, to come to terms with the fear and anxiety of emergence. Of course, there are times when we need to provide novel insights about the changing world—the futurist qua expert—but my goal is to assist in having individuals and groups question the discourses that create them.

Your framing of “strategic foresight” raises an interesting question about how, or perhaps why, this habitus continues to haunt much, if not most, “futures” work, which is in brackets as I am wondering if you would distinguish here between “strategic foresight” (mountain, chessboard) and futures (star, self). Would that make futures inherently transformative? How does the journeying spatiality of Tibbs’s model (theoretically, one could build a spaceship and go right to the stars) hold up in light of such a distinction?

I remember as a graduate student at the University of Hawaii reading Michael Shapiro’s work on the nature of the self (Shapiro 1992). He argued, using Delillo here, that we do not know if our consciousness is friend or foe, insofar as discourse constitutes reality. Thus we need to distance ourselves from the real. This distancing allows for rethinking. This is not just challenging assumptions, but asking which self is asking the questions. Strategic foresight is still in the framework of the “pusher” self—optimizing achievement without asking why do I wish to achieve in any case. Foresight methods can help us optimize instrumental rationality, to win the chess match. But once we move to the mountain tops we can see reality from an epistemological distance, and to begin to ask ourselves if we are aligned to purpose, to the star. Transformative foresight asks us to be aware of the selves that are implicated in the process of doing futures. It is not that we are using the future, but the future is using us. Once we are aware of how certain discourses create selves—structures that contour agency—we paradoxically have more freedom.

I’ve been focused recently on creating futures based on mapping the client’s (the user of foresight) inner landscape—how they wish to use the future. I’ve noticed that if someone is in pain, disempowered, then discussions on emerging issues analysis do not help. Empowerment does. If they have power and wealth, then strategic foresight is important in that they wish to keep the wealth—risk management. However, this is not enough in that today’s wealth can quickly become a stranded asset, a psychic sunk cost. Thus we use methods to not optimize in today’s world, but to look at the mountain tops, to imagine tomorrow’s wealth. Once there, then the question of purpose reigns. Where is meaning? The star here is crucial—it offers directionality. Where is the star and how do I make the vision become real? are operational questions. The last part for me in this process is who is engaged in the process: the constitutive self, the deep culture of the organization. I may engage in transformative work, but if the self that is doing this, if the organizational culture does not change, then I am back in the jungle, though I may be refreshed from purpose. This is the metaphor-mantra process I now focus on. In this latter process, we meet with our future self, who gives us a message from the future. As we are in a meditative, contemplative space, strategy, the chess set, has disappeared. So have the mountain tops. We are sitting in the star, gaining guidance. We become the purpose we need to be.

This is certainly a process of deconstruction and reconstruction, but not just of the external text, the world as it is, but myself, my selves and our selves, as text. We are present in the futures we create.

You noted earlier: “Most organizations are so busy fighting in the jungle they have no time for strategy. And then they engage in strategy, it is from the lens of the jungle. I do my best to get them to go to the star and mountain tops.” Is transformative futures work more difficult now than it was in decades past? One major shift in Tibbs’s strategic landscape model has been an increased attention toward complexity. Does the “chessboard” metaphor speak to our historical moment?

In my work, transformational foresight is much easier now. There are a number of reasons for this. First, conventional foresight is well known. Many organizations engage in scenario planning, generally identifying external risks. I have numerous organizations that approach me and ask “OK, now what?” We’ve done scenarios work. I suggest Causal Layered Analysis [CLA] to explore deep narratives. I suggest the CLA of the self to bring the self into the picture—the “I” in Tibb’s model. I suggest the Sarkar game to explore power dynamics—that is, we have the vision, but do we have the political will, the necessary power to make the change (Inayatullah 2013). Second, the rise of cultural creatives, generally females in positions of power who seek to challenge the current paradigm, but are still seen as to some extent less by the board or the CEO. Indeed, I would say at least 80% of the leaders I work with are female. They understand the limits to the current paradigm—hierarchy based, used futures, limited imagination—and know they need to innovate. Third, the utter complexity of change—endless variables with different rates of change. These factors make it easier to engage in transformative foresight. Again, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Strategic foresight merely means ensuring you have a better breakfast than others. It still fails since others are not included, and we are more than what we eat.

Certainly COVID-19, while devastating, has made futures work far more easier. There is no need to convince people of the possibility of disruptions. We all now live in the “future.”

Many, including yourself, have called attention to the “monochromatic vision” of foresight, which is monosensory in its framing (Sardar 2010). While Tibbs invokes emotion and the affective “elements” of the “future space,” and in his 2020 reflections on the original article, identifies the “preferred” future as the “affective” future, the body as a locus remains undeveloped in the strategic landscape framework. Do you sense a space for “finding the energy” within Tibbs�s framework? Can this only happen “amidst the stars,” so to speak?

Actually the opposite. One can find the energy wherever one is. If the organization is in the jungle, then we need to start from the jungle and engage in futures there, even as we seek to move out of the jungle. The same with the chessboard. If strategy is the game, then we start there and move onwards. This is the issue of intelligibility. I need to be understandable to whom I am with, not in the sense of more efficient communication but the ability to be part of the(ir) epistemological commons. And as a futurist I need to be outside the commons, suggesting that they look beyond the horizon. I remember a meeting with a national law enforcement agency, which was starting their futures center. Two of their special agents flew up to see me. They proceeded to give details of their strategy and plan. I listened and then asked, within your framework, what is your narrative and your character? This opened up the space from organizing conferences, environmental scanning reports, and workshops, to who they were, who I was, in this process. They said, they are in a jungle and a tsunami of crime, of change, was about to hit. They knew it was coming, but most of the villagers preferred to stay in the safety of their surroundings. So now we had the narrative. I then asked her character in this story. She was clear—she was the machete bearer, clearing a path in the jungle to get to the safety of the new city. Her colleague said that she was the white witch, providing crucial information on new crime types and advising on which villagers needed to be contacted and convinced.

After running through some scenarios we understood, given the conservative nature of law enforcement, that going to the new city was too much of a challenge. We thus shifted the story to first moving to higher ground. From there, over the next few years we could design the new city. So the focus, the project design, needs to be where the energy is. This means as futurists, we need to listen to not just what the client or student or partner feels they need to say, must communicate—the official institutional discourse—to where they wish to authentically go. The landscape is certainly a powerful tool in mapping and creating this possibility.