Qu’est ce que la prospective ?
What is Foresight?
Foresight — in French, Prospective — is an approach to thinking about the future and exploring possible futures that aims to inform collective action and decision-making by taking long-term considerations into account.
By extension, the term foresight is applied to those professional practices that have developed around this approach (methods, tools, actors etc.).
Historically, the French adjective prospectif/ve describes something or someone that looks forward, towards the future. This adjective is used, for example, to describe a way of looking at things, a state of mind (Gaston Berger), an approach to issues. In the sense of an ‘ability to forecast’, the term goes back at least to Renaissance times.
The birth and development of prospective (foresight infra) as a discipline are linked to a need on the part of decision-makers to anticipate the future. Foresight — known also as futurology and futures studies (and, at various times, by a host of other names) — developed from the 1930s onwards, when it became obvious to some of them that decisions with significant long-term consequences needed to be based on a set of robust predictions.
The objective of foresight is to know, understand and anticipate, before deciding and acting.
Today, foresight is more commonly seen as a process or an exercise. This corresponds to the development of its practices, which combine the work of anticipation (or forecasting) with bringing together the various stakeholders (citizens, actors, experts etc.) and preparing for action (public policy, strategy, innovation etc.).
Foresight includes an element of research, reflection or study of the future, but it goes beyond that to embrace also the orienting of those studies by their end-goal, that goal being to assist decision-making in situations of uncertainty.
This notion of ‘assisting decision-making’ has to be understood in a broad sense. Foresight exercises may, classically, enable possible strategic options to be prepared for a clearly-defined decision-maker (CEO, government etc.), but they may also, in a much looser way, promote changes in the way a group of actors dealing with a single problem views that issue, in such a way as to foster the emergence of appropriate responses.
In Jacques Lesourne’s view, foresight aims to ‘create shared views (on present and future issues) in order to prepare strategy.’ The foresight approach produces meaning and it also gives a sense of direction. In other words, it produces content — meaning, shared understanding and knowledge — and also a purpose and a vision for collective action.
What they have said about Foresight
‘There is no favourable wind for the person who doesn’t know where he is heading’
Seneca, 633-64 AD
‘Chance favours only prepared minds’
Louis Pasteur, speech at the University of Lille, 1854
‘The future isn’t foreseen, it is prepared’
Maurice Blondel, 1941
‘Where the future is concerned, the point is not to foresee it but to make it possible’
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Citadelle, 1948
‘Before it is a method or a discipline, foresight is an attitude’ for ‘seeing long, seeing broad, analysing deep, taking risks and thinking of humanity’
Gaston Berger, Phénoménologie du temps et prospective, 1964
‘The foresighter’s gaze oscillates intentionally between the possible and the desirable’
Gérald Antoine and Jean-Claude Passeron, La Réforme de l’Université, 1966
‘Seeing so many foresighters and reformers straining to prepare the future, we may wonder whether they are not striving at it so furiously in order to disguise the fact that they are powerless to make even the slightest changes to the present’
Georges Elgozy, Le Désordinateur, 1972
‘To elucidate present action by the light of possible and desirable futures’
Michel Godet, La Prospective stratégique, 1997
‘As neither prophecy nor prediction, la prospective (foresight) does not aim to predict the future — to unveil it as if it were prefabricated — but to help us build it’
Hugues de Jouvenel, An Invitation to Foresight, 2004.
‘The future is a realm of freedom, of power and of will. It is at once a land to be explored […], and a land to be built on’
Hugues de Jouvenel, An Invitation to Foresight, 2004.