Today, there is broad consensus that it must be the task of politics to ensure justice and freedom across generations. Not only courts and social movements worldwide are calling for a strengthening of forward-looking and provident governance. Many political actors within and outside the German government are also demanding a strengthening of capacities for long-term thinking and action in order to better meet the major challenges of the 21st century. How can we succeed in making policy more forward-looking? How can we strengthen our ability to deal with uncertainty and complexity? How would processes and structures have to change to achieve this? What role can strategic foresight (SF) play here?
These questions were addressed in the study conducted by the Fraunhofer ISI Foresight Team together with Prof. Sylvia Veit (administrative scientist at the University of Kassel) on behalf of the Federal Chancellery.
The aim was to examine the status quo in Germany and to develop various options for institutionalising strategic foresight as a process, method and approach in the German government's policy and administration, and to evaluate their advantages and disadvantages. This should create a basis for discussion for the further anchoring of strategic foresight in government action.

4CF The Futures Literacy Company is a consultancy entirely focused on strategic foresight and long-term strategies. For nearly two decades, 4CF has been on the mission to help its clients prepare for an uncertain tomorrow. The Company has executed hundreds of projects for private companies, public institutions and international entities, including the European Commission and its agencies (EUDA, ENISA), FAO, UNFCCC, UNESCO, UNEP and UNDP. 4CF is at the forefront of global innovation, and actively contributes to the development of cutting-edge foresight tools, including 4CF HalnyX (Delphi platform), 4CF Sprawlr, 4CF FLEx.

Decision makers are faced with a world characterised by increasing turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity. These conditions make it more difficult to assess risks when making strategic decisions or planning for the long-term. This project from the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) EU Policy Lab starting 2023 presents a foresight approach to increase preparedness for unexpected developments and the risks they could create.

Foresight methods offer a way to consider and focus on risks that may be beyond the scope of traditional quantitative and qualitative risk assessment approaches. Several snapshots of the future depict different worlds that have undergone substantial changes as a consequence of emerging developments. An analysis of the risks inherent in the possible futures identified ten risk clusters that are relevant for decision makers, and mapped future developments that might lead to them.The same development pathways that could lead to risks can also create opportunities, and the study provides some examples. Decision makers face the challenge of mitigating the adverse effects of risks, while reaping the benefits of potential opportunities. This study also presents the results of a Delphi survey that evaluated the scope and severity of risks. Three of the 40 risks identified in this study were assessed to be potentially existential for humanity: 1) environmental degradation, 2) environmental disasters, and 3) loss of power by humans. The project started in 2023 and will run until 2024. Next in the development is an engagement tool for policymakers to push the boundaries of foresight on risks in their specific policy making domain. Stay tuned for its launch, later in autumn 2024! 

Download the Risks on the horizon report  

Read the blog post from the authors  

The aim of this study was to serve as one of the inputs to the update and to initiate a discussion on the possibilities of updating the Czech republic 2030 strategy. In order to ensure that this strategic document reflects the dynamic developments on the global and domestic scene, mechanisms for regular reviews and updates of the objectives and measures have been proposed. Given the events of the last 3 years (especially the Covid-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine), it is relevant to review the relevance of the assumptions regarding the long-term development of the Czech Republic, which served as the basis for the original wording of the strategic objectives and targeting of the document.
The role of České priority was to provide foresight exercises in order to reach two goals:

• Assess the relevance of existing goals: the problems and challenges facing society are changing and so are the definition of objectives for further development. The task of this section is therefore also to determine whether the original ČR 2030 goals are still relevant in the context of change and respond to the major challenges that society is facing and will continue to face in the coming decades.
• Identify blind spots: there may be issues or opportunities that the document does not cover - i.e. blind spots. The next task of this part of the update is to identify such gaps to increase the comprehensiveness of the document.

The project was implemented in the form of workshops, which were attended by experts and representatives of public institutions and ministries. On the basis of pre-prepared scenarios of development, the participants had to identify the resulting challenges, opportunities and areas that have not yet been covered in the CR 2030. The list of these areas was subsequently consulted with representatives of public institutions. These expert consultations were complemented by input from the general public through a creative competition held in September 2022.

https://www.ceskepriority.cz/foresight#co_je_foresight 

From October 2022 to March 2023, we ran a forecasting tournament with a total of 54 questions. Almost all of our forecasting questions were developed in cooperation with 16 different public institutions and ministerial departments. Each institution or department defined its most useful forecasting topics, participated in a workshop to define specific questions with us, and was later provided with the results. This was intended as a proof of concept of one possible approach to incorporating forecasting in public decision-making.

Once defined, our forecasting questions were then posted on a private Metaculus sub-domain (in Czech), where an average of 72 forecasters had the opportunity to address them as they would any other question on Metaculus (median of 18 predictions per user). Throughout the tournament, we produced 16 reports detailing the rationales and forecasts, to be used by the cooperating institutions.
A handful of our partners have already reported acting on the information/judgment presented in our reports. This has concerned, for example, the national foreclosure issue (some 6% of the total population have debts in arrears) where the debt relief process is being redesigned midst strong lobbying and insufficient personal capacities; or the probabilities of outlier scenarios for European macroeconomic development, which was requested by the Slovak Ministry of Finance to help calibrate their existing judgements.

It also seems useful to explore various approaches to grow the number of policymakers with personal experience and skills in forecasting. In our case, we found curiosity and willingness to try forecasting even in unexpected institutional locations (i.e. the Czech R&I funding body). This makes us more confident that the “external forecasts” approach (as compared to building internal prediction tournaments or focusing on advancing forecasting skills of public servants) is worth investigating further precisely because it allows us to detect and draw on this interest irrespective of institutional and seniority distinctions and resource constraints.
While we hope that any readers with an interest in forecasting may find our experience useful, we expect that both this and any future projects of ours make it easier for other teams to work towards similar goals. To that effect, the write-up also contains an Annex of “Methodological Guidelines,” where we outline in more explicit terms the questions and decisions that we found were important to tackle when running the project, and what they may entail.

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