Territorial Foresight Monitoring: The Analysis of Weak Signals

Since its creation in the 1960s, the Futuribles International association offers its members various different services and activities aimed at supporting and equipping them in their practice of foresight. As a cross-disciplinary organization, it operates in many different economic, social and scientific fields and with all kinds of actors, its recurrent concern being to pool knowledge, skills and best practices, enabling us to better understand future issues and to prepare to cope with them. Since 2016, in order to meet the specific needs expressed by various local actors (at the regional, département and municipal levels), the association has established a Territorial Foresight Forum which brings together the insights acquired from foresight study and collaborative work on the future of territories.Territorial Foresight Forum which brings together the insights acquired from foresight study and collaborative work on the future of territories. The idea is to enable its members to share their knowledge and practices in territorial foresight, in order to help them to anticipate changes underway at their level and to cope with them when they occur. Among the various workshops and study sessions offered, the Territorial Foresight Forum has launched a shared work tool developing a ‘permanent table of weak signals’ that combines monitoring (for detecting signs of change on the ground) with analysis (to put these signals into perspective and decipher them). Frédéric Weill, who coordinates the work of this Forum gives us a brief insight into these weak signals here.