Review: Using the Future: Contributions to the Field of Foresight

 

“Using the Future: Contributions to the Field of Foresight” is a report produced by CIFS (Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies). It aims to collect and present forward-looking contributions to the field of foresight, highlighting themes such as:

Anticipatory leadership and how leadership styles must evolve to align with emerging future conditions

Participatory foresight as a vehicle for building societal resilience

Corporate foresight, embedding foresight practices into business

Governance and political foresight, integrating foresight into public decision-making

New conversations about AI-mediated foresight and the role of time in organizational life

In essence, it presents a curated set of essays or contributions driven by CIFS’s perspective, aiming to push boundaries of how foresight is practiced and conceptualized.

Strengths

1. Holistic scope and breadth

The report brings together diverse themes across leadership, governance, business, and technology, showing how foresight is relevant across multiple domains. Its ambition to address AI, resilience, and institutional integration is valuable in making foresight more practice-relevant.

2. Bridging theory and practice

It does not dwell solely on abstract theorizing; it explicitly links foresight contributions to real-world arenas: decision-making, policy, organizational strategy, etc. This helps make it useful to practitioners, not just academics.

3. Forward-looking orientation

By including discussions on AI and temporal dynamics (how time itself shapes organizations), it pushes the field to evolve, rather than rest on established methods. This is particularly timely in an era of rapid technological and social change.

4. Institutional legitimacy and historical grounding

Because it comes from CIFS (a well-known futures institute, founded in 1969), the report carries credibility. Also, the foreword or framing emphasizes how the field has evolved (methodologically, institutionally). 

5. Encouraging pluralism and reflexivity

Implicitly, the report acknowledges that foresight is not a monolithic field — it is plural, contested, evolving — and tries to open space for further contributions, not impose a single canonical path.

Weaknesses / Limitations

1. Lack of rigorous empirical grounding

Many of the contributions are likely essayistic or conceptual, rather than empirical. The report does not seem designed as a peer-reviewed research volume, so the evidential basis of its claims may vary in robustness.

2. Possible institutional bias / perspective lock-in

As a CIFS publication, the themes and framing might reflect CIFS’s priorities, which may under-represent other schools of foresight (e.g. critical futures, speculative design, southern perspectives, etc.).

3. Depth vs. breadth trade-off

Because it covers many themes, each contribution may not be deeply developed. Some arguments may remain suggestive rather than fully worked out.

4. Ambiguity in conceptual definitions

As is common in foresight literature, some key terms (e.g. “anticipatory leadership,” “resilience,” “future mediation”) risk being used loosely. Without strong definitional clarity or theoretical anchoring, readers from different backgrounds may interpret them inconsistently.

5. Evaluation & accountability lacking

The report likely does not offer systematic assessments of how well the proposed contributions work in practice, or how to measure their impact. For foresight to “earn its keep,” the links between foresight interventions and actual decision outcomes need more rigor.

6. Scalability, resourcing, inclusion risks

Some of the proposed foresight practices (AI integration, institutional embedding, participatory futures) require significant resources, capacity, or institutional will. There is risk these contributions remain aspirational, accessible mostly to well-resourced actors or institutions.

Assessment & Implications

Contribution to advancing the field

This report is a useful landmark: it reflects the maturation of foresight as more than just scenarios and forecasting, but as a rich multi-domain practice. By mapping frontier themes (AI-foresight, leadership, governance), it helps set an agenda for future research and practice.

Catalyst rather than endpoint

Its real value lies in stimulating further debate, empirical testing, and critique. The report should be seen as a provocation: “Here are possible directions” — not a definitive blueprint.

Need for stronger integration with empirical research

To move beyond conceptual inspirations, subsequent work should test, validate, refine the contributions in real-world settings, measuring outcomes, detecting trade-offs, and refining frameworks.

Inclusivity and plural futures

The report could do more to surface voices from diverse geographies, marginalized groups, and alternative epistemologies (beyond dominant Western foresight traditions). The future is not uniform; foresight must be attentive to differential power, privilege, and voice.

Operationalization & tool development

For leadership foresight, governance embedding, AI-augmented foresight to gain traction, they need to be translated into actionable tools, methods, capacity-building programs, metrics — so that users (organizations, governments, communities) can adopt them.

Balancing ambition with humility

The future is uncertain; foresight cannot guarantee predictive accuracy. The report would benefit from acknowledging where foresight may mislead, overpromise, or create path dependencies. Reflexivity about the limits of using “the future” is essential.

Conclusion

“Using the Future: Contributions to the Field of Foresight” is a timely and thought-provoking piece that maps ambitious frontiers for foresight practice and thinking. It is strong in vision and integrative scope but less strong in empirical grounding, measurement, and inclusion of alternative voices. Its main value lies in pointing toward future work — scholars and practitioners can use it as a reference, challenge, and source of inspiration. However, the real test will be whether its proposals can be operationalized, validated in practice, and diversified in perspective.

If you like, I can provide a more detailed critique of particular contributions (e.g. the chapter on AI, or on governance) or compare this report with other foresight frameworks in the literature. Do you want me to dig deeper into one of those?