“I think most people will agree today that the development landscape is, well, it’s highly uncertain, it’s increasingly complex,” says Steven Gale, Lead of the Futures/Foresight Team at the U.S Agency for International Development (USAID), in this week’s Friday Podcast. “I think the future is even going to be more complex.”

“Foresight is probably the most common technique in the futures area,” says Gale. The tool has been primarily used by the private sector, the military, and the intelligence community when looking at what a possible future would look like. Foresight helps planners and decision-makers better prepare for the unexpected by not just looking at one future, but by looking at a range of futures. “The tools of foresight are especially helpful,” says Gale, “when the future you want to explore is highly uncertain, ambiguous, increasingly complex.”

Another “futures” technique often used that is similar to foresight, but much more precise, is prediction. “It’s a statement of what will likely occur in the future using existing data and analytic models,” says Gale. Prediction is what you expect to happen when your hypothesis is true, data highly accurate and consistent, variables are known and agreed upon, and the future you want to predict is essentially an extension of the past, he says. “The net result is most of our professionals prefer foresight over prediction because of uncertainty and complexity.”

Foresight isn’t unique to USAID. For example, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) also houses a Strategic Foresight Unit. Gale says that as both entities are focused on foresight for development, the USAID Foresight Unit has a lot in common with the OECD DAC. In March 2021, the U.S. and Switzerland will co-chair the DAC foresight unit’s annual event, Friends of Foresight. A number of the issues addressed will revolve around COVID-19, green and digital COVID-19 recovery, and examining what socioeconomic recovery from the pandemic will look like, says Gale.

In response to why foresight is taking on a higher profile at USAID, Gale says, “the short answer is COVID-19.” Once the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, USAID created a task force to assess and manage the more immediate challenges of COVID-19. As the task force began to look at these challenges, he says, it began to think about the next COVID-19 and established the Over the Horizon Strategic Review to not just look at the immediate impacts of COVID, but to look at a range of other possibilities. 

Gale’s book on over-the-horizon development scenarios, “The Future Can’t Wait,” addresses the future of foresight, scenario planning, and what it means for development. Quoting an excerpt from former USAID Administrator, Andrew Natsios, he says, “Perhaps, the most embarrassing failure of international development agencies has been their excessive focus on programming for the past problems, for the past challenges, instead of anticipating the challenges of the future.” That shortcoming, Gale says, “is precisely what foresight seeks to address.”