Fred Kaplan's regular column "War Stories" for Slate Magazine became a weekly read for me during postgraduate studies at Monash University's School of Political & Social Inquiry. From his doctoral dissertation The Wizards of Armageddon (1983) to his analysis of the Bush Administration's defence policies Kaplan understood the human dimension of policymakers and the cycles of strategic thinking in US governments and think-tanks.
Kaplan's dissection of the Bush Administration's defence budget in February 2007 ends with the following observation:
This is all a game of funny money to begin with. We could hardly afford any of these things, vital or not, if the Chinese stopped underwriting our debt. It's a bit much, under the circumstances, to spend tens of billions of dollars on threats that some analysts foresee 20 years beyond the horizon and that are, at most, hypothetical even then.
Kaplan's critique raises an important problem for the new generation of Strategic Foresight practitoners.
These practitioners have had to overcome multiple problems in order to establish their organisational credibility. This includes dealing with the "crystal ball" image of early Futures Studies; the diffusion of new frameworks and methodologies such as wild cards (low-probability high-impact events) and McKinsey's 3 horizons; the variations of quality management for Foresight consultancy and projects; and the challenge to shift traditional strategic planning to an anticipatory management paradigm. Its exponents contend that Strategic Foresight provides competitive advantage via greater maneuverability in an industry, the identification of high-growth markets, risk management and operational insights. Consequently, in the past decade the field has migrated from academia into innovation laboratories and strategy boutiques.
Yet despite the million-dollar consulting firms and bestseller books Kaplan notes a serious problem with "over the horizon" estimates: they still remain "hypothetical". Futures Studies philosophers have long recognised that its epistemology does not fit a functionalist framework: Bertrand de Jouvenel in The Art of Conjecture (1964) argued for rigorous methodologies whilst Wendell Bell's two-volume Foundations of Futures Studies (1997) argues for "conjectural" knowledge. Kaplan's "War Stories" series also illustrates the solutions that the Strategic Studies community has developed to deal with "hypotheticals" and the now-infamous "unknown unknowns". These solutions include a network of journals, policy institutes and think-tanks; "contestation" and "minority report" methods used in the US National Intelligence Estimates process; post-mortem strategies such as budget analyses and 'lessons learnt' databases; and agencies such as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the Office of National Assessments.
Post-mortem approaches in Strategic Foresight currently exist in 'latent' form: epistemologies, methods, processes and some institutionalisation in certain sectors. A cross-pollination with Strategic Intelligence and Strategic Studies methods can only lead to greater rigour in the practitioner use of "estimates" and "hypotheticals". In the mid-term this should overcome some current objections about Strategic Foresight in corporations and counter-balance the "art" tradition with the "science" approach of evidence-based management. In 10 years these approaches may become just as accepted by Strategic Foresight practitioners as post-mortems are in project management.