The dynamics and complexity of the time that we are living, particularly in economic, computer, cultural and environmental terms, demands that we acquire new elements and conceptual tools that allow us to address this reality successfully.
It is in this order of ideas that the Prospective allows to build hypotheses about the future, as well as to identify the interacting forces that will generate with a high probability of occurrence; the future - whether it is desirable or not - and it will also give the possibility of analyzing them to direct them in the sense that the organization requires, that is, to participate decisively in the construction of the strategy.
History of Prospective Planning
In Mexico, the “Javier Barros Sierra AC” foundation began prospective studies since the mid-eighties, however the cradle of prospective dates back to France in the 1950s with Gaston Berger who created the International Center for Prospective in Paris (1957), a term that denotes a particular attitude of the mind towards the problems of the future.
Berger says that "taking a forward-looking attitude is in a way preparing for action." Thus the prospective accompanies the French repopulation, which was proposed to guide industrial development, considering social and economic needs and trends.
The prospective, a young science.
Like any young activity, foresight is still in an expansive phase, developing theoretically and professionally, which causes a great diversity of ways of understanding and practicing it to coexist within it.
In fact, a careful reading of the various contributions allows us to proceed to a first classification of the various contributions:
- There are those who have made the future their professional field of action, those who come from the academic field, and those who have channeled their activity into the world of NGOs.
The prospective; Science or knowledge?
Is foresight a science? There is no consensus on this. How can there be a science that has no object? For many, the answer is simple: it cannot, the future does not exist, and by definition it cannot exist, since the moment it is realized it ceases to be.
The future is a mental concept, a social construction, therefore, prospective can aspire to be a humanistic discipline, like philosophy, but can it be a science?
This criticism of the prospect can be extended to most of the social sciences. Economics, with all its tradition and academic and professional weight, would have trouble passing a strict examination of its object. After all, what is economics? Does economics really exist beyond theory?
Conclusion; What is prospective?
More than a method or a discipline, prospective is an attitude, that is, the adjective must precede the noun. "Foresight is a quality of the human being, capable of being developed or learned"
The meaning of the term "prospective" is obvious and is formed in the same way as that of "retrospective"; both are opposed to the extent that the first expresses that we look forward and not backward. A retrospective study is directed towards the past and a prospective one towards the future.
THE FORECAST AS A TOOL TO VISUALIZE THE FUTURE
According to the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academic, prospective can be defined as: "A set of analyzes and studies carried out in order to explore or predict the future, in a given subject". Hence, it can be said that prospective studies the future to understand it and be able to influence it.
The prospective tries to answer using a methodology the following questions: What can happen? What can I do? What am I going to do? How am I going to do it?
SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES
Presenting Prospective as a means to improve decision-making processes in the organization, thanks to the intelligent analysis of information and having a well-defined vision of the future.
Initiate participants in prospective reflection, showing the benefits of discipline and the applicability of its main methods.
Promote comprehensive organizational development based on Prospective.
What is Planning?
The choice and definition of options for the future.
Decision making in advance.
It is a process that is directed towards the production of one or more objectives to occur.
Therefore… Foresight must be an element of Planning.
What happens to a company without forward planning?
"When you don't know where to go… Any path leads you there." Fragment of the Koran.
The traditional company is very often faced with the situation of the parable of the "Boiled Frog"
What are prospective studies?
Prospective studies are located in the context of institutions and the future; they start from the real and are projected into the field of the virtual. When planning actions are undertaken within the institutions, an analysis of the professional groups that constitute them, as well as the type of relationships that energize them, must necessarily be carried out. Even if it is the case, it is important to carry out the conflict analysis.
In summary …
In summary, it can be pointed out that foresight is a research approach that is used to design future scenarios for organizations. It is not a projection of the past into the future but the design of the future, starting from the future itself and its projection towards the present through strategies and research projects for decision-making and execution of tasks in the present. In such a way that strategic decisions in prospective planning are located in the driving ideas or founding concepts of the projects (virtual realities).
What does the prospective aim for?
The prospective is more concerned with providing future alternatives than with answering the question:
What will happen?
How has the future been studied?
"The future is not simply what comes after the present, it is also something that is different from it and that is open to being designed and built"
Prospective studies start from the assumption that the future is not discovered, but it is designed, and that the future of the human being depends on an amalgam of present decisions, prior to the events.
What is the motivation for prospective studies?
The idea and belief that the future is not predetermined and that human beings can build it by influencing their decisions and maintaining an interactive attitude.
Forecast and Prospective (See PDF)
The ABCD of forward planning
Appropriation of the information about the problem for its preliminary analysis and its possibility of application.
It is the projective base of the information to elaborate proposals in the context of application.
Communication of the proposals, for the definition of the Components of the action and for the establishment of basic commitments of the collaboration.
And finally, the main prospective Decisions, the Design of the strategies and the projective Decisions are taken.
Next figure.
What is required for appropriation?
A sufficiently broad and committed study is required that allows us to know and understand at least in a general way how the "whole" is integrated.
In Mexico, per capita reading is 1.5 books.
In Spain and the United States it is 6.
In France the same level reaches 8 books.
Towards a conceptualization of the prospective.
The prospective, in addition to allowing and promoting the design of the future, contributes very important elements to the planning process and decision-making, since it identifies dangers and opportunities in certain future situations.
Towards where prospective planning is oriented.
It is oriented to obtain or to prevent a future state of things, This is how the future is directed by contributing present decisions.
Looking ahead or imagining the desired future can become a simple reflection or an interesting mental exercise, however, to be effectively prospective, it must necessarily be inserted into a process of decision-making and actions.
Traditional vs. Prospective Planning. (See PDF)
Prospective and Methodology
Specifically, the logic of foresight exists from the exploration of the future, "not from a deduced future but from a plurality of possible forecasts".
The prospective invites us to reflect on the future in order, at first, to better understand our present.
Basic elements of prospective.
Holistic view. (systemic thinking)
Creativity
Participation and Cohesion
Preminence of the process over the product
Convergence - Divergence
Construction Purpose
In prospective, when designing and building the future, both the way in which things interact and the things themselves are emphasized, in order to approach the understanding of the whole.
Any study generates a large amount of information, so it must be remembered that it is intended to obtain a holistic vision and not an exhaustive knowledge of all the components of the system. Therefore, prospectively, as in certain types of planning, it will be necessary to pay more attention to criteria of relevance and scope than to pretend those of 2 depth.
What is systems thinking?
It is a different way of observing the reality that surrounds us, this discipline aims to see the whole, patterns instead of instantaneous moments, to observe the system instead of the parts.
It is a method in which analysis and synthesis are combined
From the moment that the prospective maintains as purposes both the design of tomorrow and the selection of instruments that allow to build and achieve it, it necessarily requires creation and innovation, that is, creativity.
Creativity understood as the “ability to give rise to new and valuable things and to find new and better ways of doing them”.
Where and who should encourage creativity?
Will it be the exclusive creativity of the great powers and great Universities?
What is the reason for not being creative?
Probably part of the explanation is that traditionally:
We learn knowledge, but we do not learn to think.
Let's change the paradigm that we go to Universities to "obtain knowledge" for this other: "We go to University to learn to think and obtain knowledge."
Elements of the Prospective - Areas of creativity scope.
Participation and Cohesion.
With these elements, prospectively an attempt is made to reach a consensus, or at least a compromise between the social actors. With participation, the exchange of ideas is promoted, creating the opportunity to solve conflicts and correct erroneous interpretations between the parties involved.
Sharing a common goal, an agreement on the problem studied, the analysis of capacities and potentialities for action, as well as the key role of the action and decision of each participant, necessarily promotes cohesion.
Some concepts to achieve authentic participation and cohesion:
Nobody changes what they don't know.
"Leaders who are interested in changing the culture need to understand the existing culture first." (Stolp & Smith, 1994)
To hold meaningful dialogues, we start from our mental models and…
We are faced with other different concepts, to reflect and better understand reality, to generate knowledge that allows us to undertake the best practices to promote learning for all. (The fifth discipline. Senge (1995))
To achieve authentic group cohesion…
Let's dialogue openly, without being defensive or offensive, with a genuine interest in understanding. The fifth discipline. Senge (1995)
Preminence of the process over the product.
When it comes to studies of the future, implicit ideas of the accuracy of the images that are designed or the forecasts that are carried out remain. And from these suggestions the results are classified as successful or poor.
In a prospective study, one of its products is the series of possible scenarios that can be located within the optimism / pessimism range…
Even if the impact of the designed scenarios had not been as expected, the process itself is of enormous value. In this sense, prospective also includes a pedagogical dimension.
At this stage, can't we talk about the development of new possibilities? Of an integral process, where the participants listen, learn, understand and exercise their creative role within a whole?
Convergence - Divergence
The design of the future provides the opportunity for those who hold different values to discuss their respective points of view. (divergence).
Once a certain normative scenario has been chosen, agreement is required at the strategic level of ideals (convergence).
Convergence - Divergence constitute a repeated prospective process.
Construction Purpose
As has been insisted, the prospect does not lie exclusively in imagining desirable and possible futures. It goes much further, it goes beyond studies of a projective nature to become a construction path of the future.
The Prospective comes from the future, it is linked to normative aspects and a conception and awareness of change to constantly face.
Phases of the Prospective.
Normative.
Definitive.
Of strategic confrontation and feasibility.
Of strategic determination and feasibility.
Within this, two great moments can be pointed out: the Design of the desirable future and the Image of the logical future. These will allow answering the questions:
What is the future we want?
How could our future be if we continued in a direction similar to the current one?
Definitive Phase
In this phase we try to answer the questions:
How is the present?
What are its main characteristics?
What and how are their interactions?
In other words, this phase consists of the perception of current reality.
Confrontation Phase
Having selected the desirable future (normative image) and identified the properties
relevant, the trajectory and the direction of the present, we proceed to contrast both poles, in order to know and analyze the distance between them.
This phase will then answer the following questions: What is the distance between the future and reality? How can they converge? What should be the profile for there to be convergence between the prospective pole (the ideal) and the situation (the real)? What will have to be the global orientation for the future to be achieved?
Strategic determination and feasibility phase.
Given the constructive purpose of the prospective, it must transcend the exclusive intermediate framework of future orientation outlined in the previous phase, to get to outline global strategies or ways of approaching the future.
In a strict sense, this stage emphasizes: How to make the future possible? How to build that future? And what are the main ways of approaching it?
Formulation for the future.
Acuña and Konow (1990, 6).
F = aT + bE + cP
Where:
T = Trend or Historical Inertia
E = Event or unexpected event
P = Individual and / or collective purposes or objectives.
a, b, c: positive parameters or coefficients, where a + b + c = 1
Description of the formula:
A part of the future is determined by what has historically been occurring and this is the predictable part with different degrees of probability, according to the development that can be foreseen from the prevailing conditions in the present. The more important it is, the greater the value of parameter a.
A part of the future is simply not predictable but rather surprising, so it is not possible to anticipate it since we do not really expect it or because, being possible to anticipate, its probability and when it will occur is not known. The greater its weight, the greater the value of parameter b.
The desire for something to happen influences it to be so and the images or desires of the people influence the future. That part is eligible, since it depends on the will of the people and is also designer. In this way we are creating a future thanks to our imagination. The greater its importance, the greater the value of the coefficient c.
