Prospective sense-making: A realistic approach to ‘foresight for prevention’ in an age of complex threats

Abstract

Both governmental and academic experts increasingly recognise the necessity for systematic efforts to ‘look ahead’ in order to better address - and hopefully to head off - potential security crises in what is almost universally seen as an increasingly fast-changing, complex and danger-filled world. For instance, the 2008 report of the US Project on National Security Reform, probably the most authoritative recent review of security issues from a US perspective, argued that the ‘current environment virtually puts a premium on foresight - the ability to anticipate unwelcome contingencies’ (Project on National Security Reform, 2008: vii). Leading Canadian environmental-security expert Thomas Homer-Dixon has called for the development of ‘prospective mind’, and former national-security advisor to Vice President Al Gore, Leon Fuerth (2009), has advocated ‘forward engagement’: both are roughly comparable calls for systematic, sustained and highly proactive consideration of potential future challenges in a wide range of connected-issue domains (see also Homer-Dixon, 2006). And, in terms of concrete actions, numerous governments, multinational groupings and private sector organisations have in recent years established programs to more effectively anticipate challenges in security and other issue areas: among the most prominent are Singapore’s Risk Assessment and Horizon Scanning program (RAHS), the UK’s Horizon Scanning Unit, OECD’s Futures Program, and the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Program (see, e.g., Habegger, 2008).