Post-AFI Foresight
I spent much of 2002-2004 in an MSc program on Strategic Foresight, which with a university-wide faculty restructure has moved from the Australian Foresight Institute (AFI) structure and integrated into Swinburne's Australian Graduate School of Entrepreneurship. The program is a transdisciplinary mix of subjects on futures studies, strategic thinking, sustainability, philosophy and global macro issues. I describe it to people as the kind of MBA program that Buckminster Fuller, Bruce Mau or 24's Agent Jack Bauer may have created.
In the past few weeks I've had several opportunities to catch up with former classmates and colleagues, from Steve McGrail's birthday to discussing the causal layered method with Andrew Wynberg. One of the best conversations I've had this year was an hour-long phone conversation on the evening of 15 March with Josh Floyd about how action learning, embodied knowledge and the guild system model of practitioners (novice to journeyman to master) related to foresight. The conversation expanded on an earlier exchange I had with Floyd and friend Jose M. Ramos, who has recently returned from the World Social Forum in Venezuela. The phone dialogue moved from a discussion of Ken Wilber's Integral model, which several AFI lecturers really like, to Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, and the debt we all have to Francisco Varela (Wikipedia entry).
A couple of interesting trends are emerging in the post-AFI phase. Whatever the status of the university teaching program, a community of practice is evolving that will hopefully endure. Individual practitioners in this community are reflecting on their AFI experience, and the organisational and institutional realities they encounter. There's some re-evaluation of what to use and what each foresight practitioner lets go. Beyond this, the transition is a creative response to the early Seldon Crises in Isaac Asimov's original Foundation trilogy: friends are well into PhD dissertations and adapting methods; commercially-aware graduates are founding start-ups and practices in professional service firms; and others are involved in the non-profit sector and philanthropy.
I have no experience of Swinburne's current foresight program, yet these trends are a positive outcome to-date for a program only several years old.