Academic CentrePlanning the Obscure: How to Engage with the Evermore Ambiguous Future
Miķelis Grīviņš, Anda Ādamsone-Fiskoviča
The shifts changing the reality we are living in are becoming ever faster, the global and local challenges we deal with are increasingly more complex, and this is happening while we are becoming more aware of the limitations of the assumptions we have been using to explain the social world around us. These developments affect the claims we can make about the present. Yet, even more so, they illuminate the shortcomings of the claims we make about the future – the observable processes are widening the gap between the forecasts we make and our ability to assess the probability of these forecasts. The changes brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic serve as an excellent illustration of the challenges future-oriented thinking is currently facing. It took just a couple of months for the pandemic to confront us with a completely new global reality introducing new priorities and challenges, creating a world that substantially deviates from the pre-pandemic forecasts. This fact inevitably leaves us with a question whether the world could have prepared for the accompanying challenges?
In the current context, looking for systematic engagement with the future and the unknown, we can no longer use the methods that we believe to be able to generate the most reliable forecasts. Instead, we need to focus on the methods providing the most applicable results, bypassing the issue of credibility. This essay aims to offer methodological tools that could help researchers interact with the unpredictable in a structured way and provides examples of how different methods can help prepare or restrain us from getting ready for the challenges that await us in the future.