The psychological aspects of corporate foresight

Abstract

The article considers the psychological mechanisms of collective foresight activities. Corporate foresight is considered a collective relection, an open strategic dialogue about group objectives and joint actions that helps group members construct a collective image of the future and adapt to future challenges. The results of expert panel revealed several organizational and psychological barriers that hinder corporate foresight effectiveness in Russia: distrust toward long-term forecasting, the avoidance of responsibility for one’s own future, a poor focus on the future, and low levels of social cooperation. Special attention is paid to overcoming the cognitive biases and socio-psychological effects during foresight sessions that hinder group reflection, including: the effects of overconfidence, the desirability effect, framing, future anxiety, neglect of the scope of risk, future stereotyping, uncertainty of outcome, availability heuristic, the generalization of fictional evidence, the visualization effect, hindsight bias, future discounting, cognitive dissonance, regression to the mean, planning fallacy, explanation effect, common knowledge and polarization effects, technophile’s bias, and self-fulfilling prophecies. Directions of future psychological research in the field of foresight studies are proposed.