Quantitative Foresighting as a Means of Improving Anticipatory Scientific Capacity and Strategic Planning

Abstract

In a rapidly changing world, scientists and their research institutions need to plan for the infrastructure, skills, and policy engagement that will be demanded to help society navigate current and emergent social-ecological challenges. Foresighting draws on approaches used in strategic and long-range (>10 year) planning, and participatory futures studies. It is outcome-oriented and typically involves development of scenario narratives that can inform planning in a qualitative sense. Here we describe a new quantitative approach to develop and rank 14 foresight scenarios of potential futures across a range of general and marine-relevant science domains. Indicators for each foresight were used to assess the time-specific probability of each scenario being realised and assessments by scientists were undertaken in two consecutive years to test for foresight scoring consistency and outliers (surprises). Despite high variation among scientists in scoring the year that each indicator would occur, there was overall consistency across the foresights between years. Our approach shows that foresighting can be quantitative, by using time specific evaluation of indicators which is an improvement over traditional descriptive approaches, as individual performance and changes in likelihood can be evaluated. This approach can motivate and guide strategic planning and investment decisions by scientific institutions in response to different anticipated futures and build the skills of staff in futures thinking.