From Spring 2022 to Spring 2023, Aspen Digital, with support from Autodesk, assembled our first Foresight Group. The Group is a diverse assembly of experts with a mandate to look 20 years into the future, exploring major shifts and trends that will re-shape our world. Although Aspen Digital has employed foresight techniques in work that spans from cybersecurity to disinformation, to help leaders imagine and prepare for possible futures, the Foresight Group was an opportunity to engage in this practice with a longer time horizon: 20 years. This timescale offered an incredible opportunity to delve into topics in an entirely different light, pushing beyond what might seem like obvious causes and effects to explore second- and third-order effects and interactions among multiple changes.
Aspen Digital brings together thinkers and doers to uncover new ideas and spark policies, processes, and procedures that empower communities and strengthen democracy through ethical technology and quality information. We inspire collaboration among diverse voices from industry, government, and civil society to ensure our interconnected world is accessible, safe, and inclusive – both online and off. These are complex and multilayered topics, with competing or even contradictory goals. In order to facilitate these conversations with nuance and to drive toward actionable insights, we employ a range of strategies.
Foresight is an established field of inquiry that employs critical analysis, structured prompts, and discussion to develop and explore possible future scenarios and to inform present-day decision-making. Strategic foresight,the practice of foresight for informing policy and business decision-making, has gained popularity in many institutions including national governments and Fortune 500 companies. The Foresight Group drew on similar strategies to explore possible, probable, and preferable visions of what the future might hold.