As a young Foreign Service Officer, I stood in awe of the “old hands”, but soon realized that they represented two kinds of knowledge: deep, but often narrowed into geographic specializations; and broad, but often detached from historical details. I felt instinctively that both forms of knowledge were incomplete guides to policy, unless they could be fused, and I have spent the rest of my adult life trying to learn how to do that, and then, trying to teach others. The materials that follow below represent my continuing efforts to attain that kind of process by way of a series of questions that I asked myself and then attempted to answer over a period of years.
#1: What, exactly, is foresight? How is it generated, and what is its potential relevance to policy? How, as a matter of systems design, can that relevance be realized by way of integration?
#2: Assuming that such an integration was to be achieved, how might it alter the processes by which policy is made and executed?
#3: What does foresight tell you about tsunami-like trends and events, coming at us from the future with sufficient power to disrupt life at levels ranging from the quotidian to existential?
#4. To what extent do these trends threaten the continuity of our democracy, and can foresight be used to strengthen the capacity of democracy to adapt?
#5: Are these ideas teachable, and if so how to test that proposition in the classroom.
#6: Are these ideas communicable to the public beyond the classroom?
#7: How to maintain these techniques, which require both individual and collective work, despite the isolating effects of COVID?